One of the perennial debates about the GNU/Linux desktop is how much it should resemble Windows. Usually, the debate is framed in terms of whether the desktop should look familiar to new users, or be developed in whatever way seems most logical.

ICI EN FRANCE, there has been a grande victoire for Vole-hunters, as the French consumer association, UFC-Que Choisir, has won a court case entitling consumers to return their pre-installed copies of Windows XP for a decent discount.

A couple of days ago we included a link to this exploration of Douglas Goodyear and that connection to Microsoft. We have also been exploring Microsoft’s use of the United States government to push software patents into the European Union.

European Commissioner McCreevy is pushing for a bilateral patent treaty with the United States. This Tuesday 13 May in Brussels, White House and European representatives will try to adopt a tight roadmap for the signature of a EU-US patent treaty by the end of the year. Parts of the proposed treaty will contain provision on software patents, and could legalise them on both sides of the Atlantic.

The best open source protection for “the cloud,” as Gordon Haff notes today, is the Affero GPL license. (Picture from our Tech Republic’s GeekEnd blog, written by Jay Garmon.)vv

The intellectual insanity resumes. Let’s take a quick look at some highlights from the news.

The problem with Alex Browns validation test is, that he is using a document from OpenOffice.org 2.4 and validates it against the ISO-approved standard. Jesper Lund Stocholm claims that he has created some documents with various versions of OpenOffice.org that doens't validates correctly.

If Creative Commons (CC) has any say in the matter, the Web will soon have a standard machine-readable notation for licenses. Named the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL), the notation has been under development for the last few years, partly with the cooperation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3).