"...It is a failure of the GNU project and of the free software movement that there is so much emphasis on monolithic distributions and binary package distributions. It is a failure of the GNU project and the free software movement that one so often encounters distros that offer to not install source trees and even offer to not install development environments.

The International Organization for Standardization has approved Adobe Systems' widely used PDF (Portable Document Format) as an international standard, and is now in charge of any changes made to the specification.

WIPO will discuss next week a report on the international patent system. A section of it is mentioning open standards.

Four national standards body members of ISO and IEC – Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela – have submitted appeals against the recent approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard.

There is an announcement just posted about OASIS opening a new discussion list for members and nonmembers to discuss a proposal to form a new technical committee to help out with "ODF Implementation, Interoperability and Conformance". Yes, interoperability is the key.

There seems to be a push to rewrite history about Microsoft's aggressive fight against ODF

One reader is suggesting that there might now be 5 (formal appeals against OOXML); Germany's DIN jumps in to the debate also