In a huge win for open standards, free and open source software and the public, the long-awaited UK government definition of open standards has come down firmly on the side of royalty-free, not FRAND. The UK government list seven principles as defining an open standard.

If you belong to that group, that is, if any of the core principles of free software does not come into play in your decision to use or not use a software, the latest news about Skype should make you think twice about using it.

There is a proposal currently before the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML5 Working Group to build DRM into the next generation of core Web standards. The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME. Its adoption would be a calamitous development, and must be stopped.

Document Freedom Day is a day for celebrating and raising awareness of Open Standards and formats which takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year. On this day people who believe in fair access to communications technology teach, perform, and demonstrate. Document Freedom is about all forms of data, including artwork, sheet and recorded music, emails, and statistics.

Let’s face it: we all have biases. I readily admit that I have a very clear bias in favor of Free Software. There is no human being that is truly objective and neutral. However, in the modern world of technology blogging, these biases are often cleverly hidden. “Studies” are released without revealing the true motivations behind those that conducted the study.

LibreOffice is free for the download, and you can install it on as many different machines as you choose. But a free price and a free license aren’t much good if the software doesn’t have the features you want. Happily, that’s usually not a concern with LibreOffice

In a welcome gesture on October 16, Dr. Richard Stallman made a public note supporting the Swedish Pirate Party’s position regarding trademarks, patent monopolies, and copyright monopolies.

We’ve been going through quite a lot in terms of development over the past month, and with our switch over to a versioning system, stable builds, and a development branch, we would like to take the logical next step in getting Diaspora into the hands of people that want to set up a pod themselves, by helping us make linux distribution packages of Diaspora.