It appears as though OOXML might be put on the ice for a while longer amid complaints

A couple of days ago we included a link to this exploration of Douglas Goodyear and that connection to Microsoft. We have also been exploring Microsoft’s use of the United States government to push software patents into the European Union.

The signatories of this petition, representing a Community for Freedom of Choice and Market in the European Union, draw the attention of the Members of the European Parliament to the current situation where the institution’s ICT systems are locked into the products of one vendor, warns about the implications of this for participative democracy and for fair competition, and calls for action to promote Open Standards and Interoperability.

XiTi Monitor has released the latest numbers on browsers utilization in Europe and the rest of the world, announcing it has reached about 29% in March 2008.

A few days ago we wrote about European nations that rejected OOXML. We later showed how Microsoft/CompTIA lobbyist Jan van den Beld made implicit threats against governments that ‘dare’ to refuse and ignore OOXML.

"The European Commission has fined Microsoft 899 million Euro for anti-competitive behaviour by restricting access to interoperability information through unreasonable royalty payments prior to October 2007. This is in addition previous fines of 497 million Euro and 280 million Euro applied in the same investigation, resulting in a total penalty of 1.676 billion Euro.

«Microsoft is the last company that actively promotes the use of software patents to restrict interoperability. This kind of behaviour has no place in an Internet society where all components should connect seamlessly regardless of their origin,» says Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe.

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that EU regulators have announced a third investigation into Microsoft's conduct on the desktop. This latest action demonstrates that while the EU has settled the case against Microsoft that ran for almost a decade, it remains as suspicious as ever regarding the software vendor's conduct, notwithstanding Microsoft's less combative stance in recent years. The news can be found in a story reported by Charles Forelle bylined in Brussells this morning.

"Mozilla Firefox continued its slow but steady march against the worldwide dominance of Microsoft Internet Explorer in 2007. Though the" [Free Software] "web browser continues to sit firmly in second place behind IE, where it's been for years, usage of Firefox is still on the rise. The browser is even threatening to tip the scales in some European countries -- most likely thanks to the rapid internationalization efforts made possible by the open-source development model..."