Document Freedom Day will be on 25 March 2009. After DFD '08 was a huge success with 205 teams around the world organising various activities to promote Document Freedom, now is the time to start planning for DFD '09.

Recalling the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Declaration of Principles which states that “[i]nternational standards aim to create an environment where consumers can access services worldwide regardless of underlying technology,”

Recognizing that standards are increasingly global concerns, involving goods and services that move in international trade across borders,

A quick walk through people's opinions on Microsoft and 'openness'

Microsoft is claimed to have deleted documents that are crucial for competition to be restored

This post was actually meant to be a response to a journalist who asked what I thought about the February 2008 announcement by Microsoft on their "Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability". To put into context, this was released on Feb 21st, the weekend before the BRM, so it was not particularly on my mind at that time.

There is no substantial news here other than development of discussions, which seem to spread fairly fast from one blog to another blog and soon onto the press. To repeat criticisms from yesterday about Novell’s announcement on China [1, 2], Novell and Microsoft keep spreading software patents to all parts of the world (never mind the legality), using SUSE Linux (Ballnux).

Everybody's talking about Microsoft - the hot topics are interoperability, exclusion, standards, and the doubts of a Red Had and the European Union about their alleged about-turn.