ODF Alliance Newsletter for February 2010. Contains latest news regarding open formats, including adoption by various governments around the world.

If truth be told, few inventions are really worth patenting. Time and again, surveys show that in both America and Europe companies rate superior sales and service, lead time and secrecy as far more important than patents when it comes to profiting from innovation. And, although applying for patents is relatively cheap, the cost of maintaining them can be horrendous.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) draft for a "System Information API" specifies JavaScript functions for accessing the battery, CPU, sensors and other hardware characteristics of a device. For this purpose, the window.navigator object's SystemInfo interface has to implement the get, set and watch methods.

Symbian has annouced that it has completed the migration of its entire platform to open source. The move, which was completed four months ahead of schedule, now makes billions of dollars of code available to developers for free

In an interview with IT Wire, Mark Shuttleworth argues that all copyright assignment systems are equal, saying further that what Intel, Canonical and other for-profit companies ask for in the process are the same things asked for by Free Software non-profit organizations like the Free Software Foundation.

According to a letter seen by heise online, the German Federal Office of Justice last week launched summary proceedings against The SCO Group GmbH for "breaching regulations pertaining to the publication of its accounts." The proceedings were suspended after the imposed fine was paid. No information on the size of the fine is available.

In applying for jobs and contract opportunities, the first hurdle is the request for a CV in a proprietary document format. This article describes the approaches taken and the success stories, one at a time, by which the proprietary document format practices have been successfully changed.

Richard Stallman's willingness to accept the sale of exceptions to the GNU General Public License intrigues me. What intrigues me is not his acceptance of the idea. Rather, what fascinates me is how many people are reacting as if his comments are something new.