Novell’s recent news about China [1, 2, 3] is pretty significant because this shows what tricks Microsoft and Novell hope to make more widespread and prevalent around the world, not just in Asia. It’s a symbolic start that illustrates just why Novell has become dangerous to GNU/Linux adoption (contrary to common belief).

Microsoft may have won a year-long quest to make its Office Open XML document format an ISO-recognised international standard, but claims of foul play in the voting process may come back to haunt the software giant when the European Commission concludes its latest antitrust investigation of Microsoft's business practices.

Five days ago, three members of the free and open source software community finally heaved a sigh of relief and wiped the sweat from their brows after winning a battle they had waged for years.

" '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..."

"...The complaint describes how Microsoft is abusing its dominant position by tying its browser, Internet Explorer, to the Windows operating system and by hindering interoperability by not following accepted Web standards..."

A number of states including California and New York filed legal briefs Friday supporting their earlier request to extend the government's restrictive antitrust oversight of Microsoft Corp. The states said in a court filing that extended oversight of the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant is necessary for "meaningful marketplace competition."

Updated at 4:00 p.m. PDT: In something of a surprise move, four state attorneys general who previously praised the effectiveness of Microsoft's antitrust settlement with the feds said they're not ready to see five years of oversight wind down just yet.

If one were to believe Microsoft, antitrust law is for sore losers who are too lazy to innovate, and the decision of the European Court of Justice against Microsoft was to the detriment of consumers around the world. One might even believe that any company with large enough market share would now have to fear the wrath of the European Commission and its anti-innovation bloodhounds.