De Icaza is extremely punctual in announcing these Mono releases. However, there is one release which he hasn't spoken about for more than a year - and which, I think, he would like everyone to forget about.

ECMA has released the final draft of the Fifth Edition of its scripting language, with Adobe, Microsoft and Mozilla coming together to make all browsers work with a more open standard. The JSON object encoding format is now supported.

Thomas Lord: «...The more urgent issue concerns the emerging W3C-based world: what will GNU have to offer there?» --
Miles Bader: «Hopefully, an alternative...» --

The details are out now. Jomar Silva, a delegate from Brazil, which voted No, has now done what he said he would do and has posted what he saw and heard at the BRM.

"...I am aware that I’m making a very long story short here. But I’m doing this on purpose: the conspiracy that Bruce refers could be summarized as Novell engineers hijacking Gnome to serve their own corporate needs, and the problem is, these needs are aligned with the ones of Microsoft. [...] The most important lesson of this is that what matters is the format, not the application. The format creates the network effect and captures users, unless it is open and standard. [...] Apparently some would still like us to believe OOXML is an open standard. Make no mistake, OOXML is not an open standard, just like Christmas is not Easter."

I’m surprised there hasn’t been more attention in the press today on the comments made by Martin Bryan, outgoing convenor of the ISO JTC1/SC34 WG1 (the working group overseeing the progress of ECMA 376 - Microsoft Office Open XML - through the ISO standardization process).

"We've seen now reports from Italy and Portugal of what some are describing as a kind of ballot-stuffing on the part of Microsoft and supporters to get Ecma-376 approved as an ISO standard. Trust me when I tell you that you haven't heard the half of it yet. I feel safe in saying that you will never hear the phrase "fast tracking" again, without remembering what you are about to read."