It’s not often that we get to celebrate a full-blown victory in Free Software policy work. Tuesday was such a day, as India’s government announced its policy on Open Standards. The government’s decision is the end of a three-year battle between Free Software advocates and proprietary software vendors. The document (pdf) is short and sweet. Read more »
A draft Digital Agenda leaks from the new European Commission. There are good things on Open Standards in there, but a power struggle within the Commission is threatening progress.
This week, Dutch journalist Brenno de Winter published a leaked draft for a new version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF). The current version of the EIF, from 2004, has been referenced around the world as a prime example of how public administrations can make use of Open Standards and Free Software in order to Read more »
This incident goes to show that not even the biggest companies with
the largest armies of lawyers can consider themselves safe from the
damage that software patents do.
The BBC is asking the "commercial sector, industry bodies, interests groups and BBC management" and — gasp — even "licence fee payers" (shouldn’t they put them first? After all, it’s where a bunch of their money comes from) for input on how they’d like new BBC services to be implemented. One of those services would Read more »