Escape to freedom

According to NoOOXML, Microsoft’s OOXML will not become ISO standard. Official statement on this issue is expected tomorrow.

Together with this good unofficial preliminary news, we tried very hard to reach Serbian standardization body (ISS) in goal inform ourselves and public about the Serbian vote. As we found out before, Serbia will vote or voted Yes, but that decision was based on information that Microsoft Serbia provided to ISS, without any further research about alternatives and OOXML’s faults. In that sense I’ve sent couple of emails to ISS (you won’t belive, but their phones are constantly unreachable) with pointers to crucial problems about so-called open format. They also got six questions, but we still have no answer. Anyway, I hope that this unofficial news will become official tomorrow.

I am very glad to announce that Marko Milenovic, active FSN Serbia and Serbian FSFE Team member joined FSFE Team. That means two Team members form Serbia what makes me very happy. Marko, welcome aboard 😉

I’ve been invited this year to participate in MyExit stage program, on the Exit 2007 music festival in Novi Sad. MyExit is Exit’s community network, that had one stage this year for presentations and open communication on various issues.

Part of the program that I’ve been invited to participate in was dedicated to Free Software and free knowledge, called "Free and Open". It was planed like relaxed conversation on the stage, with potential communication with visitors. I’ve shared the stage with Vedran Vucic form Linux Center, Nikola Kotur from LUGoNS, Zoran Puric from Red Hat’s South Eastern Europe regional center and Milan form Serbian Wikipedia.

Since organization was not so well, we had a gap in communication with audience since they didn’t have possibility to reach microphone and start conversation with us. So, we made some conversation and I based my talks on social impact of Free Software, explaining the four freedoms first. We had a little chat about dummy culture approach from Apple and Microsoft lead by question related to GNU/Linux’s simplicity for ordinary computer user.

I felt good to have some freestyle speech since atmosphere was very informal. I hope that the message was sent to more people, and I have signed FSFE on the board 🙂

You can see more images on my Serbian blog post.