Twenty-two organizations across 60 countries are taking part in DocumentFreedomDay (DFD) to raise awareness about what happens when formats are no longer supported by proprietary software.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), provider of pro bono legal services to protect and advance free and open source software (FOSS), today announced the formation of Moglen Ravicher LLC, a law firm which will represent select for-profit clients that support FOSS but are not eligible to receive SFLC's pro bono services.

The Czech Standards Institute (CSI) has voted to make Microsoft's Open Office XML format a standard, the organization said Tuesday.

If you don't approve OOXML, Microsoft will walk away, and you'll never hear from them again. Forget the fact that OOXML is already an Ecma standard (Ecma-376), and cannot be taken away. Forget the fact that Microsoft has other formats lined up for ISO approval in the near future, like XPS or HD Photo.

We have received some mail recently from developers who are concerned about issues that are covered here, including OOXML and Mono. One person, for example, was concerned about pressure on KDE to implement support for OOXML (a big no-no). Coming from Debian, a concerned developer spoke about the problems surrounding Mono. Together, we ought to at least try to inform.

Our database now contains over 2000 projects that are using the GPL v3. This is a large milestone for the license, and seems to still be the beginning of wider adoption. Nine months have passed since the release of the controversial license and it has already gained 2k projects.

[...]approving a standard normally is a positive process, ie the initiator of the standard has to come out with arguments of why their product is worthy of being a standard. I fail to find any such official Microsoft documents regarding why is OOXML good. Let us demand such documents from Microsoft.