Circumstantial evidence is mounting of one or more private deals having been struck to approve DIS-29500 Office Open XML ("OOXML") as an international standard, a deal that may have played a role in several key national standardization bodies changing their voting position to approve OOXML.

Just a few hours after Yahoo! rejected Microsoft's $44.6bn purchase offer, the Redmond-based software giant has responded, reiterating that it "reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!'s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal."

At first glance, The VAR Guy was underwhelmed by Dell’s decision to offer Sun Solaris on selected servers. But after an hour of digesting the news — and his lunch — The VAR Guy thinks this deal is a rare triple play for Dell, Sun and customers.

Red Hat has signed on to participate in Sun Microsystems' open-source Java Standard Edition (SE) project, OpenJDK, and to coordinate its own Java development efforts for Linux with the project.

Having watched how Microsoft included patents in its deal with then EU (more on this in the next post), it is worth pointing out that the US won’t extend antitrust sanctions, despite rising opposition and the recent decision in Europe.

Digg have just signed an exclusive ad deal with Microsoft. A pretty solid business move for them, I would imagine. But it brings another player to the table. A player who doesn’t exactly have a squeaky clean trackrecord when it comes to playing clean with contracts.

No, HP hasn’t announced plans to pre-install Ubuntu Linux on selected PCs. But the computing giant has scored a deal to provide up to 5,000 Ubuntu PCs to a major university.

We can read the Linspire-Microsoft patent agreement now, and I thought it would be worthwhile to give it a close, line-by-line reading. I'll explain it as best I can, but ask your lawyer if it matters to you in a real-world sense. For our purposes here, let's just have fun with the worst deal I've seen yet in this category.