There’s a movement afoot in the web development community that says it’s time to move beyond standards and take the web to a new levels. Unhappy with the pace of innovation at the W3C, many developers are calling on browser manufacturers to go beyond supporting official W3C specifications and develop tools to support new features.

Observation of the trends in many HIT OSS projects leads me to believe that our niche in the OSS world prefers the Cathedral model (Eric S. Raymond's definition) rather than the Baazar model.

Adobe Acrobat is expensive, but that doesn’t mean you have to live a life without portable documents. What many people don’t realize is that PDF is a Federal Information Processing Standard, which means the specifications behind the format are widely published.

" 'Microsoft should be required openly, fully and faithfully to implement free and open industry standards,' is the message of a letter by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. To help achieve this goal, FSFE offered its support for a possible antitrust investigation based on the complaint of Opera Software against Microsoft. The complaint was based on anti-competitive behaviour in the web browser market..."

"At the end of day two of FOSS camp in Cambridge, I was able to grab some time with Benjamin Mako Hill. I had blogged about Mako's appointment to the board of the Free Software Foundation back in July but this was the first time that I really got to meet him. He's quite an amiable guy and very enthusiastic about what he's involved with (it definitely comes through in the interview). Check it out..."

Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?

In the recent accusations that the GNOME Foundation has been supporting Microsoft's OOXML format at the expense of ODF, KDE has been presented as a counter-example. Based on a KDE News article, Richard Stallman suggested that "major KDE developers" had announced "their rejection of OOXML" and urged GNOME to do the same.