Obama's inauguration in Microsoft Silverlight; no access to GNU/Linux users

Latest news on standards and Linux being harmed by intellectual monopolies

There are many “open standards” definitions, and this great amount of interpretations or views about the subject, allowed distortions to make possible that almost anything on IT market could be classified as an “Open Standard” by marketing departments.

Following up on the "IPR in ICT Standardisation" Workshop two weeks ago in Brussels, FSFE president Georg Greve analysed the conflicts between patents and standards. The resulting is paper about the most harmful effects of patents on standards, the effectiveness of current remedies, and potential future remedies.

The South American nation of Venezuela is the latest country to adopt the Open Document Format (ODF) as a national standard

Now this is becoming interesting, or perhaps just very unfortunate: The countries appealing against the ISO procedure on the OOXML standardization have signed and sent a letter of protest to the ISO.

During the LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, I met with Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards. We discussed document standards and the implications of ISO's controversial decision to grant fast-track approval to Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format.