Microsoft’s position is hardening as the ISO vote on OOXML (DIS 29500) in Geneva approaches at the end of this month. We know more clearly now how Microsoft and its proxy group, ECMA, will position Microsoft’s OOXML specification in advance of the vote. In short, Microsoft is betting that its influence with National Bodies will allow it to push through a specification which elevates its own interests over that of truly competitive, open international standards. In the end, it will be Microsoft’s own inflexibility that will be its undoing, and that undoing means knocking the OOXML out of approval for ISO status.

Window Snyder has the somewhat offbeat title of "chief security something-or-other" at Mozilla, where she is responsible for overseeing efforts to boost the security of the company's open-source offerings, including the Firefox browser.

Wayne Kelly, leader of the open source Ruby.Net development project, announced last week that he intends to discontinue development of Ruby.Net and join up with Microsoft's IronRuby open source efforts. This might sound good on the surface, but it is a bad idea.

Have you ever dreamt about booting Linux in less than one minute? Now this dream can come true: in less than 40 seconds after pressing the power button, you will have a perfect fully-functional operating system, exactly as you left the last session. Even better than you thought, right? Now you could say: "Crazy boy - I don't believe you!" Well then, check it out for yourself.

An open-source version of Windows would mean not only would we publish Windows source code, we would make it free. That's what open source means. We wouldn't be hosting Minority Student Day if we open-source Windows because we wouldn't have enough profit to pay people, let alone invite in people from the community.

I'm not saying open-source is a bad thing, but it doesn't pay the bills in this company, so we can't embrace that way of doing things. ... We give out free soda pop to everybody who works here. We make our stuff free, people gotta give back the soda pop -- it's just inconsistent with what we do around here.

Ignorance, thy name is Ballmer.

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As makers of proprietary software enter the enterprise Linux fray with their own distributions, they are contributing to the fragmentation of Linux, reports Kushal Shah

I've run into a few Apple UI patents a over the years while developing software. Their software patents, like most other software patents, tend to be completely inane. They are the sort of things that are obvious to pretty much anyone doing UI development who isn't stuck thinking "WIMP, WIMP, WIMP".