Rob Weir has documented an incredibly simple, telling and fascinatingly descriptive demonstration of exactly why OOXML is such utter crap and should never become a standard in its current format. He shows how a simple formatting rule looks when saved using OOXML or ODF* based applications.

Microsoft is urging Indian NGOs to support OOXML (i.e. Office Open XML) format - and persuade Indian IT Secretary and the Additional Director General of the Bureau of Indian Standards with letters supporting MS’s OOXML proposal.

For decades, almost no one challenged the General Public License in legal matters. In fact, no one has even dared to try to break it in court. That record remains unsullied as the biggest company to date--Verizon--that had been accused of a GPL violation opted to settle out of court.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) today announced that agreements have been reached to dismiss the GPL enforcement lawsuit filed by SFLC against Verizon Communications Inc. on behalf of two principal developers of BusyBox. Verizon distributes BusyBox to its FiOS customers in devices that are provided to Verizon by Actiontec Electronics, Inc.

I sometimes hear it said that formats like OOXML, or ODF for that matter, are simply XML serializations of a particular application's native data representation. This is said, seemingly, in an attempt to justify quirky or outright infelicitous representations. "We had no choice. Office 95 represents line widths in units of 1/5th of a barleycorn, so OOXML must as well". This technological determinism indicates poor engineering judgment, laziness, or both.

After the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) failed to resolve the differences around Microsoft's proposed OOXML standard, what happens next?

SCO's new position is that UnixWare is just another interchangeable name for UNIX and that SCOsource was about UnixWare, not Unix System V, but here's some more evidence that they are not the same thing and that SCOsource was primarily about UNIX System V. In this article, I'll restrict myself to things SCOfolk used to say about what SCOsource was about. As you will see, before the Honorable Dale Kimball ruled in August that the UNIX copyrights didn't pass from Novell to SCO, SCO said SCOsource was about UNIX System V source code. Now that it's time to pay Novell for those System V licenses, SCO says they were really UnixWare licenses.

Serena Software is licensing its Business Mashups software under Creative Commons licenses. Under the program, Serena will license 13 pre-built Business Mashups and will do so with others that the company builds in the future. Business Mashups serve as graphical representations of simple business processes, such as vacation requests and sales discount approvals. Key quote: "Because they're graphics, you can't use traditional software licensing rules."