The council of the Italian region of Puglia is about to approve the law proposed last December that will make the use of open source and open standards mandatory for the region's public administrations, according to news reports.

We need to build communities and software around open protocols. We need to make it so that social networking is a protocol, much like e-mail is a protocol. [...] We need to create critical mass around open standards and protocols.

The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending.

When we get to explain our views in the plenary, we are after all speaking to 200-300 diplomats and specialist policy makers from around the world. You don’t get many opportunities to explain to such a crowd why software patents are a bad idea, or why patents in software standards must be licensed royalty-free and without restrictions on their use.

FSFE has obtained a copy of a letter sent to the Commission by the BSA last week. In the following paragraphs they analyse the BSA's arguments and explain why their claims are false, and why Open Standards are key to interoperability and competition in the European software market.

First some definitions. In this post let’s define an “open standard” as one that is: 1) freely available, 2) developed in an open process and 3) freely implementable, e.g., is royalty free. I freely acknowledge that there are interests out there that attempt to soften these criteria, but that only demonstrates the competitive power presented by truly open standards.

Another Asian country decides to become vendor neutral when it comes to documents which government agencies handle

A major milestone was reached for the OASIS ODF TC last week. The latest Committee Draft of ODF 1.2 (CD 05) was sent out for a 60-day public review.