Michael Brauer, the OpenOffice.org XML project lead and OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee Chair, has written a blog entry about the progress of native Office Open XML (OOXML) import filter development for OpenOffice.org. Brauer explains the importance of supporting OOXML in OpenOffice.org and also describes some of the challenges associated with supporting an emerging document format.

I have the information for those of you *who live in Australia* and who wish to send comments to Standards Australia. You can find a link to the template you need to use here. Or just download it. You fill it in and send it to Michael Langdon, Project Manager, Commerce at Standards Australia, michael.langdon at standards.org.au by the deadline, which is Tuesday

I still continue to find articles on the internet downplaying the seemingly normal and sweeping adoption and acceptance of the GPLv3 license. This should point out a few things that indicate that GPLv3 is "here to stay".

"The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today released the second discussion draft of the GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AGPL). This new license is based on version 3 of the GNU GPL. It has a new requirement to ensure that users who interact with the software over a network can receive the source for that program..."

This just in from Palamida: roughly 50 percent of active projects licensed under the GPL are now GPLv3. In just one month. That's huge.

The U.S. delegate organization to the powerful ISO standards body is now almost sure to vote against approving Microsoft Corp.'s Office Open XML document format as an open standard this year.

As The New York Times writes: "The ruling could remove the cloud over open-source software like Linux, an operating system loosely modeled on the proprietary Unix."

As I reported on July 23, INCITS, the US balloting body on the OOXML vote, put out a ballot to see whether the US should vote to approve OOXML, with the ballot to close on August 9.