African Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) may be spoiling for war with the global software giant, Microsoft Corporation, over its bid to have its DIS 29500 'Office Open Extensible Markup Language (OOXML)' endorsed by the International Standard Organisation (ISO).

one could argue that Microsoft – once blessed with the open source label – will only abuse its status. The company could claim to be a huge open source supporter, derailing critics' arguments by displaying nothing more than the OSI logo when needed.

Chris DiBona, Google's open source manager, seems to fall into this cynical camp.

California-based IP gurus Palamida emailed me this week with some intriguing GPLv3 information that I thought I’d share with everyone this morning. Apparently all the GPLv3 haters can go to lunch, because the little license that could is seeing adoption rates of approximately 14% week-over-week.

The OSI License-Discuss mailing list has been ablaze for the past few days since Microsoft submitted its Permissive License (MS-PL) to the OSI [Open Source Initiative] for official open source license approval.

At the heart of many open source debates is the issue of licensing. Is one license better than the other?

"Bill Hilf, Microsoft General Manager of Platform Strategy, announced two things last week at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland."

I've been talking back and forth over email about "the Google/open source conundrum" with a few people that I deeply respect. This will all come out in an upcoming post (tentatively titled "GPL, the new BSD"), but in the course of talking with these people I'm starting to wonder:

"In the fall of 2005, in my home state of Massachusetts, Peter Quinn, the CIO of the Commonwealth, endorsed a plan to require the state government to use the Open Document Format for storing government records."