ODF Alliance reports that 12 countries and six regional governments have adopted 'pro-ODF policies,' and more than 40 applications now support ODF as well.

This is the fifth chapter in a real-time eBook writing project I launched and explained in late November. Constructive comments, corrections and suggestions are welcome. All product names used below are registered trademarks of their vendors.

"The Open Document Foundation, which consisted of three individuals, disbanded," said Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF Alliance. "The Foundation's proposals in OASIS did not receive sufficient votes -- quite common in any standards-setting body. Over the past few years, I have worked with the individuals involved. It's unfortunate that they chose to eventually disband the Foundation, but I wish them well."

One of the topics I'm behind writing on is the state of IPR concerns and standard setting in China in general, and the current status of UOF – China's "Uniform Office Document Format" entry in the document format sweepstakes – in particular. I recently spoke at two conferences in Beijing, and got back up to speed in this regard direct from the source.

"What is the relationship between the GNU Project and the GNOME desktop suite? GNOME itself claims to be a part of the GNU Project. But its relationship with the organisation is not the same as that of other software projects which are part of GNU..."

the Dutch government has recently attracted Microsoft's anger by launching an actionplan to adopt open standards, and concretely OpenDocument Format by April 2008 in the national government. Open Standards will become mandatory and Free Software will be preferred. As the Minister of State, Frank Heemskerk, argued, this plan is not to exclude any company, but to stimulate information exchange, vendor independence and choice for various software products that implement open standards. he Ministry of Economical Affairs has published an English version of the plan on its site today.

Denmark has announced that open standards are going to be a requirement going forward there, starting in January, which is being hailed as a great step forward for openness. However, if you look closely, you will see that it is pretending that MSOOXML has already been approved as an open standard, equivalent to ODF.

How well is ODF and OOXML supported in different languages? I started off by choosing six common languages used by application and Web developers, then I went and looked for what libraries are available for each document format