does California law allow a court to look at parol evidence in a contract dispute? That's a big part of what the parties argued about in appeals court in SCO v. Novell.

Reports start to appear in the press about the ODF support quality enabled by the Service Pack 2 inside Microsoft Office 2007. I could say that I’m not surprised,
but I somewhat had also expected the contrary. Unfortunately it seems we have here a poor implementation of ODF. If further reports confirm it (and I have no serious doubt they will),

Slashdot pointed me to a post on open source software and trademarks on a PC World blog that concludes “Trademarking is almost totally incompatible with the essential freedom offered by open source.”

Truth can, indeed, be stranger than fiction — as is evidenced by a May 14 letter on software-licensing policies that was signed by both Microsoft and Linux Foundation officials.

Got this news from Ubuntu forum that HMR Group use a logo that looks like Ubuntu's. Here see the screenshot and decide (click the picture for bigger size). So what do you think?

Keir Thomas calls trademarks a menace to open source, but I couldn't disagree more. When used properly, like copyright, trademarks are a handy tool to protect and promote open source projects.

"Today we announced some fantastic news.The proposal to see Wikimedia’s content adopt a new dual license system has been voted on and approved by the Wikimedia community [...] A huge thanks to the committee, to the folks at Creative Commons [...] to Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation ..." -- via

PROFESSOR DONALD KNUTH IS nobody to sneeze at. He is considered one of the world's masters or authorities in algorithms and his letter opposing software patents in the United States is rather famous. A short while ago Knuth was kind enough to worry for Europeans too.