" 'Microsoft should be required openly, fully and faithfully to implement free and open industry standards,' is the message of a letter by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. To help achieve this goal, FSFE offered its support for a possible antitrust investigation based on the complaint of Opera Software against Microsoft. The complaint was based on anti-competitive behaviour in the web browser market..."

The average user probably hasn't even heard of Open Document Format (ODF) or Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML). But to factions in the free software community, these formats for common office files such as text documents and spreadsheets are the poles on which a violent controversy centers.

OpenDocument, that is: The third stage, planned for mid-2008, will be the addition of the OpenDocument format for word processors to the list of export formats. "Imagine that you want to use a set of wiki articles in the classroom. By supporting the OpenDocument format, we will make it easy for educators to customize and remix content before printing and distributing it from any desktop computer," Sue Gardner explained.

Microsoft has hit back at Opera antitrust claims regarding Internet Explorer, denying that it is abusing its dominant market position to lock users into the web browser.

There is momentum developing to litigate open source licensing violations, fueled in large part by the release this summer of GNU GPLv3, which set forth more aggressive enforcement provisions than its predecessor. Now, the SFLC is attempting to address the failure of companies to release source code for software based on GPLv2 licenses, said Black Duck Software CEO Doug Levin.

For months, I've been trying to get Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) to answer a few questions about the Unix technologies in its intellectual property portfolio. Microsoft agreed to an interview, then backed out. So the question remains: How much Unix code does Microsoft have its hands on?

Weeks after Google revealed aspirations of creating a defacto standard operating system for mobile phones, via Android and the Open Handset Alliance, a lesser known, broad-based consortium has published what it hopes can serve as an actual standard for Linux-based phones...
The Linux Phone Standards (LiPS)

International Business Machines Corp is asking the U.S. government to ban imports of some notebook computers made by Taiwan's Asustek Computer Inc, alleging that the products infringe three IBM patents.