On Friday FSFE sent a letter to the European Commission to support Open Standards and interoperability. In the drawn-out battle to retain at least a weak recommendation for Open Standards in the revised European Interoperability Framework, FSFE has countered a leaked letter by the lobby group Business Software Alliance with its own thorough analysis of the relation between standards and patents.

The European Interoperability Framework is just one battle among many. Besides the topic of interoperability in the public sector, there’s the task of reforming standardisation systems so that they produce Open Standards, and educating policy makers about the importance of the issue.

The European Commission today published its long-awaited revision of the European Interoperability Framework. This document aims at promoting interoperability in the European public sector. The document is the result of a prolonged and hard-fought process.

The Polish Ministry of National Education is advising schools and universities to use Open Source software. The recommendation comes at the end of a volunteer campaign to help schools switch to Open Source.

The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) on Friday approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard. The adoption of ODF by South Africa opens the way for the businesses and government to adopt ODF more widely in their processes. ODF is already an international standard, approved by the International Standards Organisation, or ISO.

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is pressuring the European Commission to remove the last vestiges of support for Open Standards from the latest version of the EU's interoperability recommendations, the European Interoperability Framework. FSFE has obtained a copy of a letter sent to the Commission by the BSA last week.

Microsoft, along with ACT, CompTIA and the BSA, are working to change Europe's policy on standards

Despite a national open source strategy and a well-publicised set of minimum interoperability standards for government, the South African education department has launched a teacher laptop project that excludes free and open source software (FOSS).

Version 2 of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) addressed by Open Forum Europe and IBM's Bob Sutor, along with a European colleague