What if Linux and Free and Open Source Software became illegal to use due to “national security?” Never mind the fact that the American military uses it. Never mind the fact that Microsoft funded both political parties in the year 2000.

In part 4 of a 5 part series on the new version of the most commonly used free/open source license, today we take a look at one of the reasons it took so long to create–the Microsoft/Novell patent deal.

African Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) may be spoiling for war with the global software giant, Microsoft Corporation, over its bid to have its DIS 29500 'Office Open Extensible Markup Language (OOXML)' endorsed by the International Standard Organisation (ISO).

As you will recall, the Executive Board (EB) of INCITS, the US voting body on OOXML in the ISO/IEC JTC1, posted two simultaneous, seven day written ballots - one to approve, with comments, and one to abstain, again with comments. The votes have now been received back. and are as follows:

China has unanimously voted "no, with comments" on OOXML. As I had noted in an earlier blog entry, China had been signalling some displeasure with Microsoft and OOXML in recent weeks, via Xinhua, the official government news agency, so this is not totally a surprise.

Standards New Zealand will host forums this week that could determine New Zealand’s position on Microsoft’s controversial Open XML file format in a crucial international vote on September 2.

"Iheaded in to town from the desert this afternoon to gas up and get groceries, and to catch up on all things ODF/OOXML. In scanning my Google Alerts, I ran into this posting by Microsoft's Jason Matusow, himself just in from vacation. In that post, Jason writes as follows:"

Linspire is doomed. No, they haven’t signed an unholy alliance with ID Software involving pre-installing DOOM on all Linspire computers. In my opinion, they are doomed to die a painful death in the operating system world. Why? Read on to find out.