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Yesterday a very small company won a very big victory against a very large software vendor.

If you’re like me, you became fully aware of free and open source software only gradually, rather than suddenly and all at once. Either way, you may sometimes wonder what you still don't know about where FOSS came from, how it happened, and why it matters. That's the way I felt, too, so I decided to fill in the blanks for myself.

There are two ways to play the standards game - as a team player, or winner take all. It looks like Amazon is trying for the latter. It also looks like they'll lose.

According to Reuters, one more thread in the long-running saga of Rambus and the JEDEC SDRAM standards abuse saga appears to be reaching an end.

Over the next ten years, tens, and possibly hundreds of millions, of new platforms are going to be put into place in the United States as part of a new national infrastructure; an equal number will be installed in Europe (many are already being installed). The same may happen in other parts of the world as well.

It's been more than a month since I last wrote about the CodePlex Foundation, the new open source initiative announced by Microsoft in early September. While things were pretty quiet at the Foundation site for some time, that changed on October 21, when the Foundation posted its new Project Acceptance and Operation Guidelines, a key deliverable that gives insight into a variety of aspects of the Foundation's developing purpose and philosophy. 

It's easy to appreciate the wonders of the Web, and all of the riches that the Internet brings into our lives. All of which makes it easy indeed not to notice the things that tend to slip away, as the collateral damage of progress. Recently, we woke up to the fact that if we don't care about document formats, our personal and public documents may disappear into a digital Black Hole of no return. Documents aren't the only thing that may disappear, though, as we place higher and higher priorities on fast loading speeds and easy formatting. If that's all we care about, then the aesthetics of the printed word and its visual presentation will disappear forever as well. That doesn't have to happen. All we have to do is be sure we include the right criteria when we create standards for the digital books and browsers of the future. But who will enter the technical world of bits and bytes to defend the Arts of the Book?

One of the realities that every standards professional must deal with is the sad fact that everyone else in the world thinks that standards are…

[Start over; no one else thinks about standards much at all. - Andy]

Some of the best software available is open source, but non-proprietary software has enemies as well as friends. Not surprisingly, then there's been plenty of fog on Capitol Hill about free and open source software (FOSS) for a decade now.

Last week Microsoft unveiled (perhaps sooner than intended) its new CodePlex Foundation,with the mission of “enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities.” Does it stand a chance of gaining any community participation?

Steve Jobs is a genius of design and marketing, but his track record on calling the right balance between utilizing proprietary arts and public resources (like open source and open standards) is more questionable.

Modern society harbors many bad habits. One is its penchant for enthusiastically embracing the benefits of new technologies before considering their less desirable side effects.

With over 3,000 stories and blog entries to date (according to a Google News search), is there anything left to say about the current XML Patent Wars? Well, yes, there is one thing; they don't really matter.

Cybersecurity is an increasingly frequent topic in the news, and this week brought word of the indictment of some of the most notorious hackers in the world. With so many breaches in the news, you might understandably be wondering how safe your own financial information is, and whether anyone is doing anything to protect you.

Last week, Microsoft and the EU each announced that they had reached a proposed settlement of the various anticompetition law violation claims that had been brought against Microsoft by the EC. Typically, and as an afterthought, most of the stories written so far focus on browser issues, at most adding a brief mention that a settlement has also been provisionally reached relating to "another" dispute, this one relating to interoperability. That's a shame, because it's an important issue, and the answers are murky.

I'm pleased to report this morning on the formation of a new advocacy group for the use of free and open source software in the U.S. Government. I'm also pleased to have been asked to serve on its Board of Advisors, along other proponents of free and open source software, such as Roger Burkhard, Dawn Meyerriecks, Eben Moglen, Tim O'Reilly, Simon Phipps, Mark Shuttleworth, Michael Tiemann, Bill Vass, and Jim Zemlin.

Who offers the most credible competitor to Microsoft Office today? One reviewer's answer will surprise you.

Certainly the most watched standards-related legal conflict of the decade involves the participation of memory technology vendor Rambus, Inc. in a working group hosted by standards developer Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) in the early 1990s. Rambus has been involved in more litigation than SCO, but last week for the first time it settled a case with a regulator. The question is why?

If you haven't heard the words "smart grid" before, that's likely to change soon. That's especially so if you live in the U.S., where billions of dollars in incentive spending is pouring into making the smart grid a reality. As you might expect, since I'm talking about it here, the smart grid will rely on standards to become real. A whole lot of standards, in fact, and that's a problem.

News aggregators like LXer post extracts from news sources, driving traffic back to the source, and to the ads they find there. This generates income for the journalists and publishers that produced the content to begin with. Nice system, right? Some publishers are deciding that its not sweet enough, and they're looking through the wrong end of the telescope.