In response to a request from the European Union concerning DRM and interoperability, Sun has submitted a lengthy written response.

You may recall that a team from Sun devoted a great deal of time to the process of drafting the GPLv3. Our engagement was not just the monitoring exercise that I suspect it was for many of the corporate participants.

In our last blog posted on February 21, I proposed three test pitches for Microsoft to help judge the meaningfulness of its latest efforts to turn over a new leaf on interoperability. The first of these was to embrace the extant, multi-vendor ISO standard, ODF (Open Document Format) in lieu of its single vendor dominated efforts to create a new standard, OOXML (Office Open XML).

Increasing number of software applications are going the free/open-source way these days. Looks like more and more software companies and developers have seen the barriers of closed-source programs and have now fully realized the significance of freedom.

The OSI adopted a mandate of working on Open Standards two years ago. We put forward a statement on requirements for an Open Standard which boiled down to a simple proposition: if the standard could not be implemented fully and faithfully in Open Source, the standard should never be declared nor considered open.

"... 'There's one little jewel tucked away in Microsoft's press release, that helps to shed some light on why this massive change of heart may have come about: «While we do not believe there are currently any legal requirements that would dictate which rendering mode must be chosen as the default for a given browser, this step clearly removes this question as a POTENTIAL LEGAL AND REGULATORY ISSUE,» said Brad Smith, Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel.' Ah ha! It all becomes clear, now..." -- (emphasis mine)

Andy Updegrove has the results in detail here, including a breakdown of the votes. Basically, there were too many proposed changes to be able to cover them in the BRM, so they tried a workaround, but the upshot is ... it's a mess.