Here is the latest on the State of Massachusets battle with Microsoft over open standards. This could be rectified quickly. All Microsoft has to do is comply with the Open Document standard format.
Yesterday the Free Standards Group announced that the LSB has achieved approval as an official international standard. You can read the press release here. This is a huge achievement for the LSB and the Linux operating system. As the release states:
Eben Moglen, open source legal expert, says standards are very much in the news in this article in eWeek.
Asked how much support there was for open standards in the business community, Moglen said the open standards idea has enormous vigor in it at the moment.
The Free Standards Group is proud to announce the availability of the Linux Standard Base 3.0. The press took quite a bit of notice of both this announcement as well as the joining of Linux software giant CA to the FSG. We’re seeing more and more participation by ISVs in the LSB and FSG. eWeek magazine in particular grasped the import of the announcement in this fine editorial:
Imagine a world five to ten years from now where an ecosystem of profitable entities competes around a global operating standard for Linux. In this world, application vendors target different platforms at significantly lower cost, whether they are selling scientific applications into clustered environments, desktop applications for end users, or multi-lingual applications in emerging markets. In this world, and only this world, a true alternative to the global domination of a proprietary de facto operating system can be found. The result?
