Elizabeth Woyke
Forbes.com – July 21, 2008: Talk of irate developers, buggy software and delayed phone shipments has dogged Google's Android mobile platform in recent days. But one research firm thinks the Internet king's mobile phones can outsell Apple's hugely successful iPhone next year. The key to Android's future success? China and its 1 billion potential cellphone users. ...Full Story

Tony Smith
Register Hardware – July 20, 2008: The organisation charged with putting in place a standard for networking over mains wiring has once again failed to elect one of the two competing specifications as its choice. Last week, members of the IEEE P1901 Working Group met in Miami to vote on the confirmation of a joint proposal from Panasonic and the HomePlug Alliance (HPA). However, the proposal failed to win the approval of at least 75 per cent of the Group's participants. The exact outcome of the ballot isn't known.... ...Full Story

Heise Online – July 19, 2008: Following the April 2007 initiative on "Enhancing the patent system", the European Commission has now published a communication on a European industrial property rights strategy (PDF). It hopes this will improve access to the patent system and to trademark protection for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)..... The Commission [also] hopes to prevent "patent ambushes" where the owner of intellectual property makes excessive demands following the adoption of an 'open' standard for intellectual property contained within the standard. It believes there should therefore be rules within standardisation organisations that essential patent applications, or patents already granted, should be disclosed in advance and should be licensed on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND)" terms. The Commission is planning to carry out an internal consultation process on standards in the area of information and communications technology until early 2009. ...Full Story

Amanda McPherson
Amanda McPherson's Linux Foundation Blog – July 19, 2008: I'm very pleased to welcome Brian Proffitt to the Linux Foundation. Brian will be serving as the community manager and editor for the Linux Developer Network. We're extremely lucky to lure Brian away from Jupiter Media, where he built a thriving community and reported on Linux for such publications as Linux Today and Linux Planet. Adding a community manager for the Linux Developer Network is an important move for us. The LDN, while not launched yet, we hope will become a central place for the community to collaborate. As Brian mentions in this excellent article in OSstatic, the LDN will be the public-facing manifestation of all things LSB, meaning it will assist developers in writing portable applications for Linux. But that's certainly not all it will be. We want to make it easier for application developers to target Linux in general....Watch this space for the launch of the LDN in the coming months. We expect great things from Brian in his new role. ...Full Story

Heather Clancy
ZDNet – July 18, 2008: Researcher IDC has come up with a new certification and weighting system for IT assess disposal functions that it is calling the Green Recycling and Asset Disposal for the Enterprise (G.R.A.D.E.) certification. The new designation, which only focuses on the United States for now, studies how disposal organizations handles 34 functions that IDC considers key to ensuring a green disposal process. These fall into five areas: remote applications, onsite services, logistics, in-plant processing and post treatment. ...Full Story

Jan Wildeboer
Email – July 18, 2008: [Red Hat's Jan Wildeboer sent me news this morning that, "due to pressure of the dutch ministry of defense, NATO has adopted ODF as document exchange format." His email continues as follows, and the link below will take you to the NATO Interoperability Standards and Profiles page ( search on "26300" for the reference to ODF):
The use of Open Standards is inevitable. With NATO adopting ODF we have again shown how community-driven efforts represent the needs of the users and not of vendors. The fact that OOXML has not been included is significant. The european commission also strengthens Open Standards and open processes including open source software in the new draft of the European Interoperability Framework version 2.0, based on royalty free access to whatever "IPR" exists. Red Hat has been a long standing proponent of fostering open, community-driven efforts that have again proven to be the better way of integrating the needs of users, public procurement and digital sustainibility. ...Full Story

Rick Jelliffe
O'Reilly.net – July 18, 2008: "ODF is about the future, Open XML is about the past" was a comment by IBM's Bob Sutor that I picked up and endorsed in January 2007. This week, Alex Brown (who was asked to organize next week's meeting in London to figure out the best way to maintain —fix, complete, evolve, retire—OOXML at SC34 which is the ISO/IC JTC1 committee charged with looking after OOXML and ODF) issued a press release which takes a similar view: The recently standardised OOXML format will now take second place to Open Document Format (ODF). The reaction from Dr Sutor is typical: I'm guessing there was some commercial reason... Gosh, if that is the reaction when someone agrees with him, what must the reaction be when someone disagrees?...IBM's Rob Wier also has joined in. His blog entry Toy Soldiers is also an attack on the idea of a maintenance process but entirely muddled....ODF Alliance Brasil's Jomar Silva OpenXML: Finally the hidden truth emerges is also on the attack against maintenance at ISO....Which finally brings us the point. Why are these people so scared of openness? ...Full Story

ANSI.org – July 17, 2008: Standards play a major role in many aspects of our daily lives—from decisions consumers make when purchasing products for the home to societal issues such as environmental protection, and from the competitive concerns of business in today's marketplace to the government's role in protecting the public interest. In commemoration of ANSI's 90th Anniversary, the Institute is bringing back its hugely popular 2002 survey to learn which standards are "making a difference" in the ever-changing global arena, and which standards are most important to you! The deadline for submission is September 19, 2008. ...Full Story

WS-I.org – July 17, 2008: The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) announced that three of its Profiles -- Basic Profile Version 1.1, Attachments Profile Version 1.0, and Simple SOAP Binding Profile Version 1.0 -- have been published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 29361:2008, ISO/IEC 29362:2008, and ISO/IEC 29363:2008. The Profiles are available now for download from the ISO web site, and (for free) from the WS-I web site....The three Profiles now published as ISO standards were submitted by WS-I to ISO's JTC1, the joint technical committee (with IEC, the International Electrotechnical Commission) that deals with international information technology standards. ...Full Story

Press Release
Shuttleworth Foundation – July 17, 2008: One of the world's largest distance learning institutions, the University of South Africa (UNISA) is now using Freedom Toasters to provide students with course-related resources. The University of South Africa (UNISA) is one of the world's largest distance-learning universities and is now using Freedom Toasters from Breadbin Interactive, rebranded as 'UNISA Toasters', to provide students with content for their courses. The Freedom Toaster is an innovative content delivery kiosk that allows users to choose and burn relevant content onto CDs, DVDs or USB flash drives using an easy touch screen interface. The Freedom Toaster uses a customised open source operating system that allows the kiosks to burn multiple disks at once. Thanks to the open source nature of the Freedom Toaster, UNISA has been able to customise the platform for its own requirements. Students using the UNISA Toasters simply punch their student numbers onto the touch screen interface which then displays their registered course list in digital format. The student chooses the course material he requires and then burns it onto CD, DVD or USB flash drive. ...Full Story

Rob Weir
An Antic Disposition – July 17, 2008: It is interesting to watch the activities of JTC1/SC34 as they go through the motions of processing activities related to OOXML, long after any serious justification for their continuation has ceased....One example is the proposals in SC34 to create a new project to create a Technical Report on translating between ODF 1.0 and OOXML 1.0. This might have made sense at some point in the past. But this proposal seems out of place now. Consider:
1. No one supports ODF 1.0 today. All of the major vendors have moved on to ODF 1.1, and will be moving on to ODF 1.2 soon.
2. No one supports OOXML 1.0 today, not even Microsoft.
3. No one supports interoperability via translation, not Sun in their Plugin, not Novell in their OOXML support, and not Microsoft in their announced ODF support in Office 2007 SP2.
So the proposal essentially will be to create an technical report for a translation task that no vendor is implementing, between versions of the ODF and OOXML standards that no vendor is supporting.... ...Full Story

Press Release
US Patent and Trademark Office – July 17, 2008: Washington, D.C. – The Department of Commerce's United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today announced it will extend the duration, increase the maximum number of applications, and expand the scope of applications eligible to participate in the Peer Review Pilot. The pilot, launched in June 2007, encourages the public to review volunteered published patent applications and submit technical references and comments on what they believe to be the best prior art to consider during the examination. The expansion and extension of the pilot is effective today. The pilot was initially restricted to patent applications in the computer-related arts (those classified in Technology Center 2100). The scope of the program is now expanded to include applications in the automated business data processing technologies, or business methods, class 705. Technical experts in the computer and business methods-related arts registering with the peertopatent.org Web site will review and submit information for up to 400 published patent applications, up from 250 as originally announced. ...The pilot is being conducted in cooperation with the Peer-to-Patent Project, organized by the New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy....So far, the pilot's first 31 applications have been examined. More than half of the examiners who examined an application in the Peer Review Pilot so far thought the prior art submitted by the peers was helpful during examination. More than one-third of the examiners used peer-supplied prior art in the first action on the merits. Nearly 75 percent of the participating examiners said they believed the program would be useful if it were incorporated into regular Office practice.... ...Full Story

What's New
ANSI.org – July 16, 2008: The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) announced today the launch of ANSI iPackages, an online tool that allows organizations to share, annotate, and personalize standards for internal use. The website was launched with six collections from the ISO 14000 series of environmental management system (EMS) standards. ...Full Story

William Jackson
Government Computer News – July 16, 2008: Although digital works are ubiquitous and easily duplicated, they also are ephemeral and are at risk of disappearing unless preservation efforts begin soon after they are created, according to a study by the Library of Congress and three international partners. The library's National Digital Information and Infrastructure Preservation Program, along with organizations in Australia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, called for reform of national and international copyright laws to encourage and enable preservation of these works. "Digital information is ephemeral: it is easily deleted, written over or corrupted," the report said. "Because information technology such as hardware, software and digital object formats evolves so rapidly, it can be difficult to access and use digital materials created only a few years ago. Countless born digital works are created every day, but countless born digital works are also lost every day as they are removed, replaced, superseded or left, forgotten, in obsolete formats and media. Digitized and born digital materials are an important part of the world's cultural heritage, but unless active steps are taken to preserve them, they will be lost." ...Full Story

Jomar Silva
Void life (void) [Blog] – July 16, 2008: Since I participate in the Brazilian group that analyzed the OpenXML, I have the distinct impression that a hidden agenda have guided the decisions of the JTC1 and more recently the SC34 at ISO....we in Brazil, and all other NBs, will have to cast until July 29, our vote regarding a proposal for a "new work item" at SC34, which deals with the translation between ODF and OpenXML documents. If this proposal is approved, it will be generated by SC34, trough an "accelerated process", a technical report on the subject. I think this discussion is really natural, but we need to observe a simple detail: "The approval of OpenXML as an international standard is under appeal !!!" ...Full Story