Short answer: Nothing. And I am sorry if Gene Simmons thinks the contrary. Radiohead’s bassist’s u-turn on these issues is quite surprizing, but some of you know how the saying goes: “Money talks…” More seriously, should we care about the “music industry”? I may be very “French” in this matter, …
I have frequently expressed myself about the patent and business agreement between Novell and Microsoft. One and a half year later, this agreement continues to concern me and many others; last week however, we learned about another patent agreement, or rather a legal settlement on software patents involving Red Hat …
Some random stuff for this week-end. Hope it is sunny for you all. I’m writing -as usual- from Paris but my thoughts are geared towards Le Mans’ s 24 hours car race. Go Corvette! – Are the GPL and mergers compatible? That’s the topic I have recently discussed on FOSSBazaar …
It seems the Skeleton-in-the-closet Season has come. Yesterday, South Africa was leading what became an unprecedented round of appeal against the -dare I say it- Microsoft Office Open XML format. But just when South Africa had filed that appeal, the news came that Brazil and India were voicing similar complaints. …
Yesterday I attended an interesting event in Brussels. This conference was about ICT standards and their role in Europe’s E-Government policies and practices. The conference had a very light attendance but I guess the size of the room also gave that impression. Overall we had a pretty good update on …
The story of OOXML and in general the story of proprietary formats and protocols being used and promoted to control the market and the access of citizens to digital re sources is a long but fascinating one. The three (yes, three) last episodes of the OOXML story are a good …
That’s official and it comes from Alex Brown, the convener of the OOXML ballot at the ISO/IEC’s JTC-1: Tracks of OOXML have been found somewhere around the ITTF. The story we now have is that the ITTF received a draft of OOXML on the 29th of March but refused to …
We are on the 14 th of May and OOXML is an ISO standard. Slight problem: there is no known specification or definitive draft of that ISO standard. To be sure, we know what the first version of Ecma 376 looks like, and we know it pretty well, although it’s …
We’re now on the 9 th of May and the final version of OOXML is still not be published either by the ISO or the Ecma as they had to do so. This ongoing scandal affects the industry as a whole and proves once again that OOXML has never been …