Law Professor John F. Duffy discovered that thousands of patents in the US might be unconstitutional. The government has no comments at this moment.

Alex Brown has a problem. He can't figure out how to validate ODF documents. Unfortunately, when he couldn't figure it out, he didn't ask the OASIS ODF TC for help, which would have been the normal thing to do.

The story of Novell is a rather complicated one because the company mocks the very same product which it tries to sell. Novell uses GNU/Linux FUD to market itself, especially by boasting Microsoft’s software patent ‘protection’ as its advantage, added value, distinguisher (the classic decoy being “interoperability”).

Standards are supposed to be about a process of creating points of reference that people can rely upon, arrived at through a process of careful honing and consensus. Against this background, the manner in which Microsoft's OOXML has been put through the ISO has been astonishing.

A BAND OF BRITISH Unix beardies has issued a High Court challenge over the national approval of Microsoft's OOXML document standard.

"The GNU Affero General Public License or GNU AGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation. The GNU AGPL is similar to the GNU General Public License, except that it has an additional section to cover use over a computer network. It closes what is commonly known as the Application service provider loophole of the GNU General Public License.

What’s increasingly found these days is diplomacy that leads to reformation of old-age Trust, where companies like Novell are invited to join the Microsoft ecosystem provided that they share the same pool of software patents. It makes these two an “Intellectual Duopoly”.

The controversial Affero general public license could get an unexpected boost from Ubuntu developer Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's chief executive, has said AGPL is "a strong candidate" for the eventual open source release of Launchpad, Canonical's developer collaboration tool.