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The Massachusetts Division ITD, the state agency that effectively launched the voyage of ODF around the world in August of 2005, has released a new version of its Enterprise Technical Reference Model. And this new draft includes Microsoft's OOXML formats as an acceptable "open format." The new draft was posted today, and the very brief comment period will end on July 20.

Ecma, the same very cooperative standards body that helped Microsoft submit OOXML to ISO/IEC in record time for global adoption, has just announced that it has chartered a new Technical Committee - this time to produce a standard that would be completely compliant with Microsoft's XML Paper Specification (that's Microsoft's answer to Adobe's PDF).

It was not so long ago that most kids in school experienced a predictable "Oh Wow!" moment when they learned about atomic structure (that's "Oh Wow!" as in, "What if our solar system is, like, you know, just an 'atom' in this, like, really big 'molecule' thing called a galaxy and…"). Today, of course, that Oh Wow! moment is more likely to be sparked by a video game or, more recently, a visit to a virtual world.

Open source summits seem to be all the rage these days, so I'm blogging from another one this week. In this case, it’s the third somewhat similar event staged by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, the largest and oldest technology membership association in the Commonwealth. The dance card includes senior folks from Red Hat, Novell, IBM and Microsoft, as well as local OSS startups and GPL3 Committee Members.

I'm attending the Linux Foundations' first annual Linux Collaboration Summit from the Google campus in Mountainview California today and tomorrow, and will add periodically to this post as the day goes along.

I am overdue in offering a few thoughts on the news that open format legislation has gone down in flames in legislatures throughout the US. Eric Lai and Gregg Keizer compiled the grim data in a story they posted at ComputerWorld last week titled Microsoft trounces pro-ODF forces in state battles over open document formats. What are we to make of this? Several things, I think, and none of them reflect very well on the legislators involved.

Last week you may have read a number of articles quoting Jim Zemlin, the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, responding to a Fortune article appropriately titled Microsoft Takes on the Free World. The big news in that article was to be found in the gnomic statements by Microsoft's General Counsel, Brad Smith, in which he articulated (after a fashion) its current patent intentions in relation to Linux and other important open source software. You can read the Foundation's formal response now in a Viewpoint piece written by Jim and just posted at the Business Week site.

Yesterday, Microsoft voted to approve ODF as an American National Standard. Uh, that's a good thing, right? Yeah, well...

By now you've probably read more than you want to about Microsoft's announcement that it owns 235 patents underlying leading open source software, including many opinions about whether Microsoft's new assertions do, or don't, represent a real threat to Linux, OpenOffice, and other OSS. But you haven't read enough, I expect, about how patent cross licenses work.

Norway has become the latest European country to move closer to mandatory government use of ODF (and PDF). According to a press release provided in translation to me by an authoritative source, Norway now joins Belgium, Finland, and France (among other nations) in moving towards a final decision to require such use.

Robin Cover's XML Daily Newslink yesterday included a note on the formation of the Concordia Working Group by the Liberty Alliance Project (LAP). The story caught my eye for three reasons: it addresses a real problem, it's using an increasingly common approach to do so, and it's advancing the state of the art at the same time in a new and interesting way. I'd like to look at each of those reasons in greater detail.

The recent announcement of a new standard for "slipperiness" reminded me not only of the seemingly infinite, and at times surprising, types of standards we find we cannot live without, but also of the linkage between language and standards.

Last week, the Linux Foundation's announced that it has established a travel fund for open source developers. The idea behind the fund is that while open source software is created globally and virtually, there's just no substitute sometimes for face-to-face collaboration.

Governments are beginning to realize that perhaps the Internet really has changed everything, at least for them, and that standards represent one of the elements they are going to have to deal with as they begin to grapple with what to do about their new responsibilities.

Microsoft's contention that Linux infringes unspecified Microsoft patents has always reminded of Richard Nixon's campaign pledge to end the Viet Nam war: "I have a secret plan, but I can't tell you what it is." If Steve Ballmer can say that Linux violates secret MS patents, why stop there?

Beijing, April 17, 2007 - Sun Microsystem's Chairman Scott McNealy delivered the keynote at a standards conference sponsored by Chinese government ministries, councils and commissions (and Sun) today. In his address, McNealy characterized the Chinese-developed Uniform Document Format (UOF) as "one of the three main document formats in existence today," the other two being Microsoft Office and the OASIS/ISO standard known as Open Document Format (ODF). He also called for the merger of UOF and ODF into a single standard.

One of the leaders in ensuring Web accessibility has long been the W3C, which has launched accessibility projects of many types for much of its existence. Last week the W3C announced the lastest release in these efforts, and a good example of the quiet but important work that is ongoing at the W3C and a small number of other organizations.

Now that news of the merger of the Free Standards Group and OSDL has settled in, folks are entitled to be curious to see what the Linux Foundation – the name adopted by the new organization – will do. As I was elected last month as an At Large board member, I'll take it as part of my job to let people know what happens as it happens – beginning with this blog entry.

In what is beginning to seem like a legislative drumbeat, Oregon has become the fourth US state this year to see an open document format bill introduced in its legislature. Taken together with pioneer Massachusetts, which led the way with an administrative rule adopted in 2005, this means that individual legislators in 10% of all US States have thus far taken steps to require that governments must be responsible stewards of public records.

Just last month, the Free Standards Group and Open Source Development Labs announced that they had merged. That union brought together two of the most important resources supporting the Linux ecosystem, and promoting the growth of Linux operating system in the marketplace. Today, the product of that merger - called the Linux Foundation - announced the members of its first, diverse Board of Directors, fulfilling a promise to give a voice on the Board to all key stakeholders in the Linux ecosystem, including the kernel, legal, user, distro and vendor communities.