Yahoo Inc.'s board plans to reject Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited $44.6 billion offer to acquire the Web giant, a person familiar with the situation says.

What happened and why open formats matter! Tucked in with the many security updates (and the restoration of one’s ability to paste text from a web page into a Word document!), a very interesting modification to the Office 2003 software waits quietly for installation with Service Pack 3. These events with Office 2003 should act as a cautionary tale of proprietary product, vendor, and platform lock-in.

Torvalds has been to Linux.conf.au and Torvalds has spoken. During a wide-ranging interview the Linux founder speculated on the future of hardware and the control that open source offers vendors. The ramifications of this are remarkable. Come hear the word of Torvalds.

Articles about Microsoft's bid have probably tired you to death by now, but this article discusses one particular aspect of the potential takeover, namely its effect on GNU/Linux and BSD users. Here's a point-by-point analysis of the impact, covering several of the key issues:

An article published last week quotes Microsoft officials who claim that IBM is solely responsible for ISO's recent decision to deny OOXML fast-track approval. IBM hasn't taken the accusations lightly.
Bob Sutor, vice president of standards and open source for IBM, has told Ars Technica "If 'business as usual' means trying to foist a rushed, technically inferior and product-specific piece of work like OOXML on the IT industry, we're proud to stand with the tens of countries and thousands of individuals who are willing to fight against such bad behavior."

You’ve heard it before, back up your hard drive. And kind of like the adult voices in Peanuts comics strips, you tend to tune out the droning noise and attend to more pressing matters, like getting stuff done and making deadlines. Before you know it, you have a full year of important work, photos, files on your hard drive and it’s still not backed-up. Time creeps along, and suddenly BAM, you’re staring into a blue blank screen and find yourself repeating over and over, “I shoulda, woulda, coulda.” To get life again, you even re-install Windows, but it still won’t reboot.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen... this is Microsoft we’re talking about, and if its proposed acquisition of Yahoo signals anything, it serves as a confirmation that Microsoft’s glory days are in the past.

Microsoft’s proposed $45 billion buy of Yahoo would give the Redmond, Wash company control over a top open source e-mail company, open source projects and an open source infrastructure. On September 17 of 2007, Yahoo bought Zimbra for $350 million. Yahoo’s infrastructure is built on BSD. Yahoo has released a myriad of software to the open source community and even sponsors some open source projects. So this deal would put Microsoft directly into the open source software business.