During the LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, I met with Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards. We discussed document standards and the implications of ISO's controversial decision to grant fast-track approval to Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format.

The Agency for the Development of Government Electronic Management and Information and Knowledge Society of Uruguay have now published their recommendation that public documents use either ODF or PDF. The former should be used for documents in the process of being edited and the latter for documents in final form. (To see a discussion of these document uses, see my May, 2006, blog entry.)

a case study done by Prof. Rajanish Dass of IIM A on the
Espousal of ODF by the Dept. of IT, Delhi. It talks about the decision of DoIT to move to OpenOffice from a popular proprietory software and its implications.

The fight against the adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard is continuing in many countries. In the UK the UK Unix & Open Systems User Group (UKUUG) unsuccessfully, sought a judicial review of the British Standards Institute’s decision to vote yes. UKUUG are now seeking to appeal against that rejection of a review and you can help them.

The following has been discussed in the IRC channel for a couple of hours, but it’s still inconclusive. We share with you information that an anonymous reader claims to have found. We can’t confirm any of this to be verifiable, but this need to be considered in light of the fact that the defunct OpenDocument Foundation (not alliance) seemed close to Microsoft. It was odd at the time.

Microsoft returns intimidating error messages to those intending to open ODF; Notepad works where OpenOffice.org fails in Vista

It has just been made easier to keep an eye on whether ODF gets subverted or not

The post highlights some of the latest disinformation you ought to watch out for