I’m with our friends at the Yale Information Society Project today for a fine conference called the Open Standards International Symposium. Eddan Katz and company have assembled a group from many of the places around the world where this issue is raging, along with representatives of many of the key industry players and stakeholders, like … Read more
Microsoft has just unveiled a new commitment not to assert certain rights against people who develop code based on specifications that Microsoft has developed. It’s called the Open Specification Promise. Warning: the announcement itself, at the top of the page, is written in legalese, though probably pretty readable legalese. The FAQs make things a lot … Read more
Berkman senior geek-in-residence Luis Villa spoke over the weekend at LinuxWorld Boston; Tina Gasperson and Slashdot covered his talk.
Minnesota is considering taking up ODF (via Andy Updegrove). In this case, unlike the process in Massachusetts, it’s a proposed law, accessible online here. So what do they think “open standards” means? Here’s the definition: (f) “Open standards” means specifications for the encoding and transfer of computer 2.4 data that: 2.5 (1) is free for … Read more
Since the firestorm over RSS and copyright in January, I’ve been talking to a lot of people — those who publish blogs and mainstream media, those who aggregate online sources, those who worry over these things in the legal profession — about the strange place we find ourselves as an online community. There’s still a … Read more
David Berlind, exec editor at ZDNet, has a first-class piece of journalism on the fairly dramatic recent doings in Massachusetts on ODF and related issues. Our involvement in these matters is largely through our work with the Open ePolicy Group, through which we developed a Roadmap on adopting open standards.