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It is with an eerie, but rejuvenating, sense of deja vu that I just received word of what may be the first public demonstration in support of open standards. And what could be more of a ratification of the concept of Civil ICT Standards than the news that ordinary citizens are taking to the streets in their defense?

Once upon a time, most standards were set in a largely collegial atmosphere by career professionals who met in face to face meetings over a period of years. As a result, they got to know each other as individuals, and established individual relationships that helped the process move forward and allowed for productive give and take.

Those were the days...

Now that the OOXML vote is over, what can we learn, and what should happen next? It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the credibility and integrity of the formal standards development process has suffered serious damage as a result of what has just transpired. While that process may serve perfectly well under less contentious circumstances, reforms are obviously needed to address those exceptional circumstances in which greater protections are needed.

One of the things that most of us learn at our mother's knee is that you shouldn't rush things. If you do, you'll make silly mistakes. Mothers also tend to tell their children to play by the rules, but some apparently listen better than others to that advice as well. Current events continue to indicate that OOXML is a motherless child.

Like many I'm sure, I'm trying to keep track of the votes on OOXML as they become known. I've set up a spreadsheet where I'm recording votes as they become known.

With fewer than 48 hours to go throughout most of the world, only a small percentage of the 87 countries that voted last summer on OOXML have announced whether they will stand by, or change, the votes that they cast during the original six month voting period. Here's a recap of what's known so far, and a new vote to report

Only rarely is something new written or said that cuts through the fog of war that has come to surround the battle over OOXML. A few days ago in South Africa, someone did just that, and that’s what I’ve written about today.

With the fantastic success of the iPod and iTunes, the successful launch of the tectonically innovative iPhone and the rejuvenation of Mac sales, Steve Jobs seems about to prove himself an exception to the rule that "There are no second acts in American lives." But will he in fact pull it off, leading Apple to dominate the mobile platform of the future after losing the PC to his rivals? Given yesterday's announcements of yesterday, I'm afraid not.

Thanks to all of you that have pointed me to first hand-hand delegate accounts, press releases by advocacy groups, interested parties and National Bodies, and more. As you can see, I've been adding a running index of additions below, and will continue to do so.

Microsoft today made a major announcement relating to its core products and involving the degree and manner in which it will make the details of those products available to developers. At first glance, this appears to be an important decision by Microsoft indicating a greater willingness to be both open and cooperative, but the devil will be in the not yet available details.

If you've always been itching to launch a startup but just couldn't come up with a killer idea, well, your ship is about to come in. No, it won't be quite as good as the Internet Bubble years, when any fool could raise a few million (hell, $30 or $40 million) to sell dog food online - no, really - but not bad, either.

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that EU regulators have announced a third investigation into Microsoft's conduct on the desktop. This time around, the EU is going to investigate the long string of complaints about what happened during last year's attempt by Microsoft to achieve adoption for OOXML.

Alex Brown will be the "Convenor" of the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) that will run from February 25 through 29 in Geneva, Switzerland. In that role, he will have a variety of important powers, including interpreting various vague Directives and other ISO/IEC JTC1 rules and practices that were created for what might be described as kinder, gentler times (not to mention for shorter specifications).

In 1994, National Semiconductor promised the IEEE that it would license two of its patents to anyone implementing the Fast Ethernet standard for a flat $1000. Later, it transferred those patents, and they eventually came to be owned by Negotiated Data Solutions (N-Data) - a troll. That's the same Ethernet standard that's implemented in millions of computers all over the world. You can guess what happened next.

I was pleased to see the formal announcement yesterday of the OpenSAF Foundation, a new open source project that I've been helping form for the past several months. You can find the the launch press release here, and I've also pasted it in at the end of this blog entry for archival purposes. There's more to the picture than can be found in the press release, upon which more below.

Regulators in the EU today announced that they are opening two new investigations against Microsoft, this time focusing not on peripheral functionalities such as media players, but on the core of Microsoft's business: its operating and office suite software. Both investigations focus on the benefits that Microsoft gains by combining features, such as search and Windows Live, into its operating system. But the investigations will also look into whether Microsoft has failed to adequately open OOXML, or to take adequate measures to ensure that Office is "sufficiently interoperable" with competing products

Linus Torvalds rarely gives interviews, but there's a new one just out, available in both podcast and transcript form. Topics covered include his commitment to Linux on the desktop, his views on patent trolls, and his musings on matters as diverse as the Linux development process, including internationalization; cracking the code for Mobile Linux; GPL3; OpenSolaris, the future of Linux, and much more.

One of the two articles of faith that Eric Kriss and Peter Quinn embraced in drafting their evolving Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) was this: products built to "open standards" are more desirable than those that aren't. Superficially, the concept made perfect sense – only buy products that you can mix and match. That way, you can take advantage of both price competition as well as a wide selection of alternative products from multiple vendors, each with its own value-adding features. And if things don't work out, well, you're not locked in, and can swap out the loser and shop for a winner.

It's not often I find myself at a loss for words when I read something, but this is one of those times. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it isn't really necessary for me to add any words to the following news, other than to characterize them with a Latin phrase lawyers use: Res ipse loquitor, which translates as "the thing speaks for itself."

By the end of December 2005, I had been blogging on ODF developments in Massachusetts for about four months, providing interviews, legal analyses and news as it happened. At that time, not many bloggers were covering the story, and email began to come my way from people that I had never met before, from as far away as Australia, and as near as the State House in Boston.