lso in Italy we are discussing if the Office Open XML format (the XML format which replicates the working of MS Office 2007) is to be approved as an ISO standard (ISO/IEC DIS 29500), with a "fast track" procedure. For several reasons this would seem unacceptable. Many are indeed the unanswered questions on the standard.

The campaign herein asks you to do 3 (three) actions :

1. sign the campaign herebelow for open standards by answering the IDABC request for comment before September 15, 2007
2. answer the request for comment of the European Commission request for comments on its websites, on CampaignECwebsites
3. ask your friends to do the same.

If there is any word other than Microsoft which can get an argument going among open source advocates, it is DRM. (The t-shirt is available here.)DRM, Digital Rights Management, is generally found in the form of an encryption wrapper giving control of the content to a rights holder.

"Laws go through all kinds of markups, changes and amendments," said Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute. "The process has evolved from making those changes on parchment to at least using word-processing documents, but it's not that big a step to think of moving to the next generation of tools and crafting a whole piece of legislation on a wiki."

PATENTS are supposed to give inventors an incentive to create things that spur economic growth. For some companies, especially in the pharmaceutical business, patents do just that by allowing them to pull in billions in profits from brand-name, blockbuster drugs. But for most public companies, patents don’t pay off, say a couple of researchers who have crunched the numbers.

On Friday July 13th, INCITS V1 met via teleconference for 3 hours but failed to reach a 2/3 consensus necessary to recommend an "Approval, with comments" position on Microsoft "Office Open XML" (OOXML) document specification.

One week after Palamida reported a rather sluggish start to GPLv3 adoption, we're up 41% and growing quickly. This could represent 10% of all active open source projets.