Dutch charitative venture capitalist NLnet [1] has requested IT company Microsoft to release its previous file formats into the public domain. According to the not-for-profit investor this will allow businesses, open source-developers and the standards community to better access their own documents in the future, and will help getting Microsoft's products to work with the new open standard ODF.

It's one thing to make a computer easy to use, but if you're going to do so, you must also make it secure. If you're not going to develop a secure OS, then at least give more thought to your emphasis on "Ease of Use".

I think the Free Software community ought to share in celebrating with Microsoft their wondrous success in selling 88 million copies of Windows Vista... albeit from a different perspective.

Just in case you're wondering why Microsoft 'folded'...
Just read it and weep. Grrrr....

One of the biggest gripes the FOSS community has with respect to Microsoft's business tactics is that its longstanding exclusionary agreements with hardware vendors has stifled genuine competition. This is the very issue of one of two claims Novell will be allowed to press against Microsoft in their anti-trust lawsuit.

After reading an InformationWeek article about Steve Ballmer suggesting, yet again, that GNU/Linux users - or at least the Red Hat users - owe Microsoft money for violating patents he, yet again, refuses to disclose. But Ballmer is missing something - or maybe I am.

In the wake of the Windows Update fiasco, LinuxInsider quoted Stephen O'Grady's explanation of why users trust GNU/Linux more than Windows where the auto-update features are concerned. His explanation really hits the nail on the head - it all comes down to trust.

Microsoft proclaimed in 2002 that the "era of 'open computing...'" was "...coming to an end". Just like their proclamations about the Internet 'fad', they could not have been more wrong...

The ISO announced on their website yesterday that the proposal to fastrack the "draft standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML file formats" did not gain enough votes to pass. In fact, it failed on both criteria. Even so, the possibility of two incompatible document standards looms in the not too far distance.