The Russian IT-community has been surprised at Russia to approve of using Office OpenXML, developed by Microsoft in cooperation with other companies, as an international standard. However, the most striking was the fact that the Russian representatives proposed no remarks and supplements to the standard.

standards don't rule the computing world. Today, ninety-two percent of desktops and now seventy percent of servers run the completely proprietary and non-standardized Microsoft Windows operating system. Even though POSIX was an ISO standard the weight of the market got behind the de-facto standard of Windows. Network effects matter.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds and is administered by the Linux Mark Institute (www.linuxmark.org). The LMI will grant sub-licenses of the Linux trademark to businesses and groups that want to use the word Linux in their product.

The SCO Group a leading provider of UNIX® software technology and mobile services, today announced that it filed a voluntary petition for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code.

Don't be fooled. The August ruling in Novell's favor doesn't mean SCO's claims to Linux are history quite yet.

Today I visited PC World (London, UK) because my 5-month-old laptop has developed a manufacturing fault: the hinge to the display has started to crack the plastic casing. Anyone in the know will know that this is due to the joint inside, and it means that in time the screen will separate from the keyboard.

I think I see a way we could be really helpful to the ISO folks having to sort through all the 10,000 comments the various countries filed with their votes on MS OOXML.

After all I went through trying to figure out if I was allowed to link to some Pavarotti videos the other day, I decided I'd better study a bit more about fair use. I've also since gotten a fair amount of email about the Copyright Alliance's claim that fair use is not a consumer right, but merely an affirmative defense.