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…

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…

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…

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…

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”. You’ve seen that cartoon, right?

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 community, want to make an agreement with the proprietary software vendors, who do we talk to? Do we talk to Larry? Or Steve? Or Jonathan? Or Curley? Or Moe?

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…

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…

One of the high points of my last trip to California was meeting James Burgett. Burgett is an utterly fearless man, a former drug addict who candidly admits he originally began recycling and assembling computers to finance his habit but then got clean and founded one of the most effective and remarkable nonprofits I know of.

On November 2nd, 2006, Microsoft and Novell announced a business agreement that, without adding any prejudice of my own, was characterized as worse than useless by Bradly Kuhn, CTO of the Software Freedom Law Center.