"We will not be in a position to process OOXML unless it is available independently of the platform", said Rolf Theodor Schuster, who heads the IT department of the German Foreign Ministry. "There must exist an Open Source implementation that can be used without any restrictions, regardless of the platform or Linux distribution."

"Richard Stallman will speak about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history of the GNU operating system, which in combination with the kernel Linux is now used by tens of millions of users world-wide. This speech will be accessible to all audiences and the public is encouraged to attend..."

The Berlin-based union of the German police issued a press release two days ago, where they said that their “Poliks” system to handle reports isn’t stable and reliable enough. Taking up a report into that system often would take between 30 and 90 minutes, which would be awkward. Also, the 73 million Euro system would crash far too often.

The first international workshop of Open Document Format (ODF) public sector users took place in Berlin on 29-30 October 2007, hosted by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The never ending story surrounding SCO's litigation over alleged copyright infringements contained in Linux as well as the copyrights to Unix has taken yet another twist: The SCO Group, currently subject to proceedings under Chapter 11, is causing a stir as details in relation to their payment obligations emerge.

DIN e.V., the German standards institute, has now posted the results of the meeting August 21 by the technical committee. It's a "yes" (or "yes, comments") decision on Microsoft's submission of OOXML as a proposed standard. It's in German, naturally.

In response to inquiries regarding a German court's ruling that Skype had breached the GPL, the company told LinuxDevices.com today that it "has not acted improperly." The alleged violation was associated with the method by which Skype "distributed" GPL-licensed source code with a Linux-powered VoIP handset.