GNU Free Call and WebRTC are both building frameworks that stand to make Skype obsolete. Skype has been in the news a lot lately: Microsoft agreed to buy the company, their network has gone down twice recently, and they're threatening to take unspecified action against developers who try to write free software to make calls on their system.

Fresh action in the European Commission's antitrust proceedings against Microsoft: On May 24, the European Court of Justice conducts a hearing on Microsoft's appeal against the fine. FSFE has participated in the case for a decade and will intervene on the Commission's behalf.

Microsoft has lobbied state legislators in the US to introduce a law which would prevent a business selling goods and services if one of its (possibly foreign) suppliers was found to be using pirated Microsoft software.

Microsoft web software is like a computer virus in government computer systems and must be banned, a meeting of the British Computer Society's Open Source Specialist Group heard last week. Called by Home Office lead architect Tariq Rashid, the meeting formed part of an investigation into why government open source policy has floundered.

The sale of free software on Windows Phone Marketplace has been stopped by Microsoft, which has barred applications licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3), Affero GPLv3, and LGPLv3 from its marketplace.

The Australian Government has released a policy that mandates the ECMA-376 version of Microsoft's Office Open XML standard and productivity suites that can 'read and write' the .docx format. If you're not familiar with the OOXML fiasco, take a look at http://noooxml.org/ for the sordid details.

Dan Kegel released winetricks 20101008 today. new verbs icodecs, msnasn1, opensymbol, wmi, xmllite; removed obsolete verbs audioio, dcom98, eadm, urlmon

So, that’s the 5 most popular (give-or-take) Mono applications for Linux. Not a single one of which doesn’t have a significant amount of references to non-ECMA namespaces.