In China the issue about the document format standard is even more complicated, because there's also the national standard UOF. Consequently, Chinese standardization organizations have to think what they need to do to proceed. Should they support a third standard, or not? How about unifying UOF with one or both of these standards?

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Wednesday added Open XML to its list of approved open documents formats.

Massachusetts has been a lightning rod and a leader in the movement for governments to embrace open document formats and neither of those roles change with Wednesday’s announcement that it will adopt Open XML.

What would you say if we told you that there are people out there that want to make sharing your media between devices over a home network illegal?

Those on both sides of the ODF vs. OOXML competition are always accusing each other of spinning and misrepresenting each other's actions and statements. It's fair, and even important, for both sides to call each other out on actual misrepresentations, since the public is rarely, if ever, going to have first-hand knowledge to rely on.

"...As usual, they put severe restrictions on use—most notably you can't use it at all unless you're an academic researcher."

"Just yesterday I was sitting in the relevant meeting of SNV/UK14 (http://www.snv.ch/), that decides how Switzerland will vote. The chairman (Hans-Rudolf Thomann) explained the following rules:"

Late, and over a year in development, the GNU General Public License version three (GPLv3) is finally here. The GPL is important as it's the most widely used Free Software license, with around seventy percent of Free Software released under its terms.