A complicated third-party arrangement means that the open-source Samba project will be able to make use of proprietary documents describing Microsoft file-sharing software.

Samba, governed by the General Public License (GPL), lets Unix or Linux servers behave like Windows machines used to share files over a network and control networked printers. But the effort has been difficult: Microsoft doesn't go out of its way to share the details of the protocols; patent infringement concerns also have appeared more than once.

HTML5 spec is expected to introduce new audio and video capabilities into the HTML language. However, it seems that Nokia and Apple have succeeded in removing Ogg Vorbis and Theora support from the current draft which decision has caused lots of heated political discussion. Some critics claim that the decision is mostly based on reluctance to back a standard that has no provision for including DRM, while others have mentioned potential patent uncertainties as the main reason not to back Ogg Vorbis and Theora.

If you haven’t been living under a rock the past decade (I suppose Stonehenge qualifies) you may have walked in on some incarnation of the famous GPL vs BSD flamewar. It’s up there with the most famous flamewars (now *there’s* a research question for a brimming sociology student!) of our beloved Internet society.

"...The complaint describes how Microsoft is abusing its dominant position by tying its browser, Internet Explorer, to the Windows operating system and by hindering interoperability by not following accepted Web standards..."

Nokia has joined Apple in calling for a change in the video code requirements for HTML 5. Specifically they want the W3C Working Group to drop the requirement that browsers and devices support the Ogg video and audio codecs.

The word this afternoon is that Industry Minister Jim Prentice will not introduce the Canadian DMCA tomorrow. The thousands of letters and phone calls over the past week have urged the government to adopt balanced copyright reforms that meets everyone's needs and does not unduly harm education, consumer rights, privacy, and free speech.

I’m surprised there hasn’t been more attention in the press today on the comments made by Martin Bryan, outgoing convenor of the ISO JTC1/SC34 WG1 (the working group overseeing the progress of ECMA 376 - Microsoft Office Open XML - through the ISO standardization process).

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.