Featured News Archive

"As it currently stands, for the ISO community to adopt OOXML as a standard would be the first step toward our cherished Open Internet and Open Standards becoming an asset on the balance sheet of just one company, Microsoft. Recall that Microsoft was held liable by the US government and the EU as a proven monopolist, which illegally leveraged that monopoly to stifle competition. Here are some of the unresolved questions regarding OOXML that Microsoft cannot or simply will not answer" -- Read more

Whether you believe in Christmas and what it commonly stands for it is there. If you were to live alone on a tropic island you probably wouldn't experience christmas at all and would soon remember it as a fading memory. This is because holidays like this one are all about us, the people, and what we make of it. Just going out to a crowd on 24th December, the Christmas eve, you can easily pick up the feeling, as if it was in the air, the people are different. There is an increased percentage of kind spirit because, well, "it's Christmas eve!". Shoppers greet you with smiled faces and give you kind blessings. People in trams talk about snow that just started falling with excitement. And everywhere you see something is glittering.

"Creative Commons (CC) cares about licensing. It has drafted and shared its own suite of licenses for artistic works catering to a wide range of needs, advocated license awareness, and contributed to projects that make both finding and publishing CC-licensed works simpler. Now it is seeking to make licensing enlightenment an everyday part of desktop computer usage with liblicense."

"CC Community Developer Jon Phillips and liblicense maintainer Asheesh Laroia describe the goal of the project as adding license assignment to the "pre-flight check" users perform when creating any sort of document.

"It appears that the Gnome Foundation is participating in ECMA TC 451 regarding resolving comments and contradictions for DIS 29500. Given the technical shortcomings in the specification and the disregard for process that the backers of DIS 29500 have displayed during the process, Gnome’s participation in this activity is to the detriment of interoperability among office suits."

"Having Gnome team members promoting the agenda of its main opponent, however, is not only counter-productive but also reflects negatively on the project and its credibility" -- Read more

"There are many concurrent ongoing dangers in the world of Free Software. Among them, you will finde software patents, hidden restrictions in obnoxious licences and trademark lawsuits which seem to be absolutely unavoidable unless one has deep pockets filled with money for defence. Recently, expensive interoperability clauses have been added to the mix. Formerly, protection against such issues was achieved by adding condemnations to existing licences. With the GPLv3, such protection comes built-in. (This change is still argued about, but it’s certainly a good idea to not having to draft up the clauses on your own. The GNU project is known to be political in many ways, and in most cases that’s a good thing.)