Open Sauce Software

A Green Party member of the European Parliament has formally requested that Microsoft be excluded from EU public procurements, because it is in breach of EU competition law.

It's been suggested often, but this is a formal application from a Euro-MP, and according to Groklaw, the EU Commission has to respond, within six weeks.

Groklaw predicts that the EU will find a way to wriggle around this, but suggests that this question might prompt some thinking - and perhaps persuade the EU to do something about its dependency on Microsoft software.

It's refreshing to see a big player in the software game make a stand for improving the rules, instead of just playing by them.

We've been watching the controversy over software patents for a long while. They've caused endless trouble in the US (think Microsoft and its efforts to cow the open source community) and we applauded when they were thrown out in Europe. We note that the issue is still there.

So it's good to see Red Hat - the open source company most often accused of selling out - making a stand against software patents in the US.

Like a lot of such cases, this one is blowing up from an apparently obscure starting point. Bernard Bilski, chief executive of Weatherwise, filed a patent for “managing the consumption risk costs of a commodity”, but this was refused by the patent office as being too abstract. The open source community has spotted that if the patent office's original decision is upheld, there are plenty of other existing patents that could be challenged as "too abstract" - possibly even most of the software patents in existence.

In other words, this is a test case on the patentability of software.

Red Hat and others are posting papers explaining the position against software patents, as "friends of the court" - and they are well argued. Groklaw has the text of Red Hat's filing, if you don't want the PDF version.

Keep watching this one - it could make a real difference!

Well - it's as official as we're going to get it before ISO makes its public announcement tomorrow.

According to a Microsoft press release, the standard won support from 75 percent of the P (participating) Members, ahead of the 66.7 percent required, and 14 percent of the O (observing) members objected - less than the 25 percent maximum.

This is slightly hedged: "all publicly available information appears to indicate the proposed Open XML standard received extremely broad support," says the release.

But there's also a press release from ECMA and Andy Updegrove has had confirmation from sources in at least two standards bodies.

And Open Malaysia comes to the same conclusion

"Now the reaction will set in to the manner in which the process was conducted," says Updegrove. "I expect that this chapter will be long and messy, but hopefully ultimately productive. Clearly some changes need to be made in how the process works, so that the next time such an important and commercially strategic standard is processed, the process works better than this."

Anyone who's been to BA Terminal 5 will have shown enough fortitude and courage to earn a priority place on the open source Mars colony, announced today by Virgin and Google.

The Virgle project has some amusing bits - though Richard Branson is exactly as boring as you knew he would be. For him, it's all just an excuse for a po-faced plug for his sub-orbital flight business.

Meanwhile, Google's side speculates on an open source planet - but actually it's talking about a shared-ownership co-operative enterprise.

I'm surprised Apple isn't there too.

Anyway, if any Tux penguins are getting there, they'd better practice their flying.

One surprise spin-off from covering the OOXML/ODF row - I've finally got an alternative to Adobe Acrobat.

Last year, Adobe put PDF up to become an ISO standard, something I've been aware of in the back of my mind throughout all the OOXML palaver. Apparently, it was approved in December, as ISO 32000.

Why, I thought to myself, do I have to use Adobe's Acrobat to read PDFs when PDF is an open standard? Acrobat is a huge download, frequently updated, and continually nags to have its latest version installed, usually with free samples of other software that I don't need.

And every so often it breaks and has to be uninstalled, then reinstalled, in order to read documents.

Ironically, enough, one of those times was last week. When I tried to read a PDF, detailing the lastest ODF and OOXML shenanigans, Acrobat Version 8 had a hissy fit, and fell over so completely that the Uninstall tool couldn't remove it, a reinstall wouldn't work, and any accidental click on a PDF would freeze my Firefox so solid only a reboot could get things moving.

Like many other PDF users, I hate Adobe and its Acrobat. This time, the documents it was failing to deliver to me were about struggles to create an open document format.

The irony was enough to push me into a web search I should have done ages go, leading me to Foxit - a shareware PDF reader which is now on my PC.

It's too early to see if this is going to replace Acrobat completely - there's a list of cons on the download page - but the prospect is enough to cheer me on a not-specially jolly day.

And interestingly, I see from the history, that Foxit has been around since at least 2006, so it's not appeared solely because of PDF's ISO standard status.