A few days ago we wrote about Microsoft’s defense of RAND (and a bit of its latest slime against Groklaw). Do not be mistaken or deliberately misled to the point of believing that this RAND gotcha only applies to OOXML. It also applies to Mono and — by association — to Moonlight, which Microsoft hopes to infect the World Wide Web with.

"... Here's a computer translation of the email: «The project of RGI presented at the time of the last committee of the reference frames of October 12, 2007 had been put on standby, following the step engaged in the ISO by the ECMA concerning the OpenXML standard.

The undeclared war between the Microsoft and the European Union has been relatively quiet for the past few months; we haven't heard much from either party since the EU fined Microsoft $1.36 billion. The scarcely settled cauldron between the two organizations, however, is about to receive a good stirring, due to the actions of EU Parliment representative and Green Party member, Heide Rühle.

Circumstantial evidence is mounting of one or more private deals having been struck to approve DIS-29500 Office Open XML ("OOXML") as an international standard, a deal that may have played a role in several key national standardization bodies changing their voting position to approve OOXML.

The demonstration was completed about an hour ago - more about that later (with pictures). Here is the speech by Steve Pepper held during the demonstration - and it is a very good summary of the whole OOXML case

The protests against OOXML in Norway were mentioned on a few occasions recently [1, 2, 3]. It appears as though they earned the media attention they had sought.

Belgium and the Netherlands will not yet consider OOXML, Microsoft's format for electronic documents, it appears from comments by the Belgian Federal ICT advisory body Fedict and the Dutch ministry of Economic Affairs.

The last time we wrote about Microsoft’s ‘dumping crusade’ against GNU/Linux was just under a fortnight ago. This collective item included a new incident and references to our previous writeups about Microsoft’s DreamSpark [1, 2] — essentially another attempt to further close the World Wide Web, making it more Microsoft Windows-dependent.