The money just keeps on rolling into Redmond and Microsoft's partners, almost faster than ever before!

There is now a report from Norway on how Microsoft rallied its partners to try to get a favorable vote on MSOOXML. Norway will tell us the vote results on September 2.

Toward the bottom of the page are a list of sponsors for the event. Microsoft is a gold sponsor along with Intel. Google, though, is a platinum sponsor. What is MS up to?

Microsoft seeks to made money by selling licences to open one's documents

Microsoft is talking to Yahoo! about an alternative transaction that doesn't involve an acquisition, the world's largest software maker said Sunday.

So, I understand this [quote from Microsoft's web site] to mean that Microsoft pays these researchers to think and study and figure out ways to innovate in search so Microsoft can beat Google and Yahoo. Microsoft, I would guess, gets rights to the IP in some fashion. No wonder it has spent a fair amount of effort trying to get the community to drop the GPL and adopt the BSD license instead.

If Microsoft gets this OOXML format "approved", it will be by irregularities in the voting, it seems. Here's more on what happened in Germany and a report on what is being called a scandal in Norway. And another odd process in Croatia.

Mandriva has become the third major Linux distributor to publicly announce it has no intention to join Microsoft in licensing and non-litigation pacts. Red Hat and Ubuntu have made similar statements, while Novell, Xandros and Linspire have partnered with Microsoft in sharing licensed technology and agreeing not to sue each other over possible patent infringements.

In the old days, when Microsoft wanted to kill the Open Source Movement, O'Reilly's Open Source Convention was where you found true software revolutionaries. Great coders, they also were idealists who believed software was something you shared. Then a funny thing happened. Open source went mainstream.