Today, activists in 37 cities around the world are raising awareness for Open Standards and open document formats. In workshops, talks and other events, they are explaining why Open Standards and Free Software are crucial to a free and competitive information society. "It's great to see the power of the community behind Document Freedom Day", says campaign coordinator Fernanda Weiden.

The non-technical public will care very little about access to the source, not realising what degree of freedom this guarantees to them, even if they never look at the source themselves. Same with open data standards. Why change or even care if all the world seems to use the same 'standard' of some proprietary software package, right?

Open World Forum and Open Source Think Tank to bring together key players from the world of Free, Libre and Open Source Software in Paris, September 28th-2nd October 2009.

You could say that the software world is divided. There are 10 types of software philosophies. Those that are closed source and those that are open source. One thing I have noticed is that where there are cross platform programs there is a difference between the closed source and open source implementations.

Things have been going pretty well for open source and open standards recently... But elsewhere, other open movements are still in the early stages of the struggle against forces pushing closed, proprietary standards.

Open source has taken the world by storm. Numerous open source applications are being used by satisfied users. The most prominent and widely used open source products are Firefox, Linux Distributions,Sugar CRM, GIMP, Wordpress, emacs etc. The latest to join this ever increasing bandwagon is Google Chrome.

Bob Sutor discusses the effect of open source and open standards on innovation and markets. Specific topics include the effects of open source alternatives on software markets, open standards and interoperability, the new social aspect of software and the open source community.

Members of the Open Source Club, a student group formed in 1999, are exploring the world of technology. Specifically, they are interested in open source software.

The newly elected German government plans to support open standards and open source software. In its four-year coalition contract, the government led by chancellor Angela Merkel, writes it wants to orient its IT systems on open standards and include open source solutions.