"SCO has filed a Memorandum in Opposition to Novell's Evidentiary Objections with exhibits. It's all under seal, but it will help us understand a couple of things."

Helping patent trolls with their QA is like going through bandits' ammunition and throwing out the dud rounds for them before they try to rob you.

Massachusetts' open formats policy is off to a slow start with only 250 of the government's 50,000 PCs outfitted with the necessary technology. Since the policy was publicly introduced last year, the plan has seen resistance from state employees and Microsoft, lobbying heavily against the format change.

Over the last few days, a lot of controversy has erupted over my blog posting about a possible patent deal between Red Hat and Microsoft. The original intent of this post was to help rally support behind Red Hat and show them that they had the backing of the F/OSS community. Unfortunately, many people thought this post was meant to generate fear about a possible deal....

The first patent applications we are invited to try to disqualify by looking for prior art have been posted on the Peer to Patent Project website. This is the project working to provide the USPTO with information about prior art during the application process. It's an experiment, and it's historic. It's never been tried before, to let the public provide input into the application process.

On the Mandriva Cooker mailinglist there was the following request based on my earlier article that made the case that Mandriva and TurboLinux might be next to partner with Microsoft.

It is a speculation, but I think that it would be good to get a clear statement from the management on where Mandriva stands, especially regarding the alleged Microsoft patents.

In [a] letter released Friday, Microsoft execs Tom Robertson and Jean Paoli stress that customers worldwide deserve choice and flexibility in standard file formats. They also paint Microsoft as taking pains to avoid confrontation over standards.

One thing I should state immediately is that I think that Ogg Vorbis is great: it's cool technology doing all the right things in the right way. So my doubts about this campaign have nothing to do with any weaknesses in Ogg. It's just that I wonder whether this is really something the free software world should be expending much energy on when there are other more pressing problems.