The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday passed a bill to overhaul the nation's patent system, overcoming objections by many Republicans, small inventors and some labor unions.

While many of us have been preoccupied with the OOXML vote, the rest of the world has naturally been continuing to go about its business. One piece of business that took an interesting turn in the last few days is a ruling by a Federal Appellate Court in the United States that breaks new ground in protecting the integrity of the standard setting system.

Sun Microsystems Inc. CEO Jonathan Schwartz on Thursday used his blog to dispute Network Appliance Inc.'s charge that Sun's ZFS file system technology infringes on seven NetApp patents.

This is an explanation from Dave at NetApp as to why they are suing Sun.

The U.S. District Court in Washington will review on Sept. 11 the state of the Microsoft Communications Protocol Program, which is Microsoft’s program for licensing more than 200 proprietary protocols for server, storage and security services.

Jason Matusow claims that "The next 6 months will be where the rubber really meets the road for the work on Open XML." This is nonsense. The work should have been done back in Ecma, before submission to ISO. Fast Track is not a standards development process.

Isn't it the job of those proposing a standard to make their case? If consensus cannot be reached, surely the only responsible decision to to vote against the proposal.

Technical Committee 182 decided on August 30th to accept Microsoft format Office Open XML as an ISO standard. Another committee already voted against OOXML last week, but the KT 182 decision is the final vote of Poland sent to ISO on August 31th.