"Palamida is tracking adoption of GPL v3 on a special blog. The last post mentioned an incredible rate of adoption for it. There are already more than 2,000 projects using the license (or a variation of it, like LGPL v3), with a good chance to reach 5,000 by the end of the year. I feel we are about to reach the tipping point, when everyone will move from GPL v2 to v3..."

The quotes above are slightly alarming, but the first one is from 2007, whereas the second is from 2006. For actual information about “the fate of Microsoft”, see this recent roundup. In any event, the purpose of this post is to show you how utterly sick the patent system has become. It doesn’t relate to Microsoft or Novell directly.

"We will not be in a position to process OOXML unless it is available independently of the platform", said Rolf Theodor Schuster, who heads the IT department of the German Foreign Ministry. "There must exist an Open Source implementation that can be used without any restrictions, regardless of the platform or Linux distribution."

The ‘Norway story’ continues. Yesterday we pieced together somewhat of a summary which included a new list of irregularities. Now come the protests.

So ISO rubberstamped Microsoft's OOXML, a lame excuse for an 'open' format. The promise of ODF was that we could free the information inside office documents, making it available to new innovative programs and web services. Sadly, the real aim of OOXML was to maintain Microsoft's Office Monopoly.

RMS: «A professor is suing students for publishing their class notes. The term "intellectual property" used by the professor's lawyers is a term of confusion and intimidation.»

We warned about this just a couple of days ago. Despite the fact that there are antitrust investigations [1, 2, 3] and loads of scrutiny at the highest of levels, Microsoft and ECMA bombarded the press with premature celebrations, leading to the false conclusion that all is said and done. Not so fast though!