"THE VOLE is submitting its Shared Source licences to the Open Souce Initiative for certification, as announced in a keynote speech by Bill Hilf, Microsoft General Manager of Platform Strategy, on July 26 at the OSCON Open Source Convention held last week in Portland, Oregon."

Despite the recent announcement of "DRM-free" music tracks by Apple and Amazon.com, Digital Rights Management (DRM) is not about to go away. At least, that's the main conclusion of a report, "Digital Rights Management Update," made available this week by the market research firm In-Stat.

Sam Ramji gave an excellent short talk at OSCON 2007 on Linux and Windows Interoperability: On the Metal and on the Wire. Sam described the collaborative work being done inside the Microsoft open source labs to better enable virtualization with the Xen world.

"In a not unanticipated move, Massachusetts announced today that Ecma 376, the name given to the Microsoft Office Open XML formats following their adoption by Ecma, would be acceptable for use by the Executive Agencies of the Commonwealth."

"Even though the JTC1 ballot closes on September 2 on Microsoft’s product description for Microsoft Office, namely OOXML or DIS 29500, this will not become an ISO/IEC standard in 2007."

An investigation by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has determined that OpenHAL -- which facilitates Linux wireless connections for LAN cards using Atheros Communications technology -- does not incorporate any elements that might infringe on copyrights held by Atheros.

Microsoft's alternative to the ubiquitous JPEG image format could soon become a standard, a major step in the company's ambitions to spread the technology and boost its Vista operating system.

"Apparently patents do matter when it comes to open source software adoption."