We had hoped to either
1. maintain a dignified silence, or
2. beat the Inq to a witty nickname
about the panorama belatedly opening up for Windows users, but Antony Gelberg prompts us to post about
… the “feature” where the BBC confuses itself with a web forum, and prints selected comments from members of the public […]
Mike Banahan (mikeb@gbdirect.co.uk) writes to UKUUG members:
In response to (amongst other things) this post, Francis Cave, chair of the BSI committee which looks after the Office Open XML proposal amongst other tasks, has had to handle a substantial volume of email messages about the ISO/IEC Fast Track proposal.
He has asked me to ask UKUUG members […]
According to a piece in Desktop Linux
Adobe Systems Inc. on Jan. 29 announced that it has released the full PDF (Portable Document Format) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management. AIIM, in turn, will start working on making PDF an ISO standard.
There are a couple of dozen posts on this story […]
… from Jack Schofield in The Guardian. Predictably perhaps, he sides with Microsoft in describing the opposition as a front for IBM and others.
The message is summed up in the first paragraph of this piece from “A Fistful of Euros”, which we have not come across before now:
Intellectual property rights in technology. Great, aren’t they? Consider Brio, the middle-class fave range of wooden toys, whose manufacturers have neatly locked out competitors who want to make toys that will […]
At least that is what the Daily Telegraph says.
Just in case you have missed the more than 200 stories on the Web, go here, or here, or here or … , to read about the world-wide brouhaha caused when
Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it […]
According to a piece in Forbes
The European Committee for Interoperable Systems said Microsoft’s XAML markup language - which it said was positioned to replace the current Web page language HTML - was designed “from the ground up to be dependent on Windows.”
“The very same practices the European Commission found to be illegal almost three years […]
PC Pro has this piece on the fast tracking at ISO of the Microsoft-inspired Office XML formats mentioned here on several previous occasions (here and here) .
With thanks to Alain Williams, UKUUG Chairman, this is what you need to know and do before Friday in order to register an objection to the fast tracking:
Summary
The document […]
Should we be relieved or alarmed by the news, in a press release here and a pieces in Info World and others, that
The Web site, openLiberty.org, will have tools and open-source libraries that developers need for applications using federation and Web services standards endorsed by the Liberty Alliance and its openLiberty Project.
The project will […]
… for BT (here) and CISCO (here).
The two leading consortia dedicated to the advancement of Linux(R) — the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group (FSG) — today announced that they have signed an agreement to merge and form The Linux Foundation
says a press release from The Linux Foundation - read the rest here.
According to Goggle, there are […]
That is the date by which national standards bodies must submit any objections to fast-track processing of the Microsoft Office Open XML specification by the ISO/IEC international standards body. Only qualified “P” member bodies of the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (”JTC-1″) have legal standing to submit such objections.
This long and detailed […]
Unlike our previous post with a similar heading , this piece from Information Week, and similar stories from other outlets, is serious.
NASA is nervous about its software, and it’s got a right to be. Its James Webb space telescope is scheduled to be launched in 2013 and it is being built by NASA, Canadian […]
The story we reported last week is appearing all round the world, including the BBC, in New Zealand, in the USA courtesy of ZDNet and, not surpringly, Brussels.
… and a lot about open source in this review, from Korea! The writer is a little behind the times in referring to “nineteen Members of Parliament” - 116 MPs have now signed the Early Day Motion.
… with a report on Sourcewire of a
a challenge to the government’s schools ICT quango to turn their promotion of Open Source software into action. Despite overwhelming evidence that Open Source software saves schools money and enhances learning, the Open Source Consortium states that Becta is taking no practical steps to help schools to […]
In what may prove to be the most important FLOSS story we have blogged since starting in May 2005:
The European Commission (Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry) has published a research study prepared by Rishab Gosh and his team at UNU-MERIT.
Study on the: Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of […]
Dusting off our stereotypes, we cannot help connecting this story from Ping Wales with free beer!
… is analysed here; it is markedly more up-beat than our previous post on this topic and ends by quoting a definitely tounge-in-cheek suggestion that
If somebody sues you [for patent infringement], you change the algorithm or you just hire a hit-man to whack the stupid git.
… in a Guardian interview with John Pugh MP. Things have moved on a little since the interview - 112 MPs have now signed Early Day Motion 179. Go here for our previous posts on this topic, which has been on the radar for well over a month now.
Also this week, BECTA published […]