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This report is a summary of Zak Greant’s Open Source Initiative activities for the week of March 9th to 15th, 2008. This Week This was my first week of real activity in 2008 (except for my attendance of the March 2008 OSI face-to-face meeting.)

I wanted to give a quick shout out to our President, who was just listed as one of eWeek’s Top Ten Open-Source Business Influencers. Wish they could’ve gotten a better picture, though…

An Information Week article published last week appears to position Microsoft as trying to do something right when it comes to open source. And it positions the open source community as being not quite ready to make nice after past insults, threats, and abuse. Speaking for myself, I am always ready to see what somebody…

Are you a patent holder, wondering how to write software which implements your patent? Here’s my advice: Patents expire. Towards the end of the patent’s lifetime, you want to be trying to transfer the patent’s franchise over to the relationship between the patent-holder and the licensee. That can be done with closed-source software, but you…

This is the text of a comment I made on a blog posting by Matt Asay: Matt, Thanks for saying what I would have said. I’ll go a few steps futher: The OSI nominates people to the board despite their corporate affiliations, not because of them. The idea that the OSI would elect a "Microsoft"…

OOXML needs to die. It’s clear that OOXML is a faux standard — not because it’s a vendor standard. There are lots of vendor-created standards which are real standards (e.g. PostScript). No, OOXML is a botch because it’s expressed in terms of an undocumented Microsoft graphics library. OOXML is all “and then a miracle occurs”.…

Steve Ballmer asks, in an E*Week interview, who speaks for the Open Source Community, and answers his question by saying that nobody does. True enough! He then goes on to point out that Larry Ellison, he speaks for Oracle, yes. True enough! But who speaks for the proprietary software vendors? When we, the open source…

Simon, I’m beginning to think that you were right and I was wrong. You said a standard’s process is a crucial aspect of the standard’s product, and a process that is not open cannot be trusted to produce a product that can be considered open. I maintained that I had seen and used many wonderful…

The OSI adopted a mandate of working on Open Standards two years ago. We put forward a statement on requirements for an Open Standard which boiled down to a simple proposition: if the standard could not be implemented fully and faithfully in Open Source, the standard should never be declared nor considered open. The OSI’s…