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No journalist -- no real journalist -- has covered open standards with better quality than David Berlind for ZDNet. Try his RSS Feed "Between the Lines", for starters.

Among other issues, his coverage of the MassGov declaration for OpenDocument has been informative, his analysis penetrating. Among his insights is how cynically Microsoft has played the situation and how far-reaching its impact will be.

Look for Microsoft's lobbying againsts MassGov's OpenDocument file format decision to reach an absurd, even Kafka-esque, pitch throughout the rest of this year.

Bob Sutor, IBM's Vice President of Standards and Open Source, just release his comment to The Commonwealth of Massachusetts. On behalf of IBM, Mr. Sutor says, "We support the recommended guidelines, especially the technology specifications for the OASIS Open Document Format."

Within the context of Microsoft's spastic, flailing response to desktop-neutralizing events from both Google and The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Dave Rosenberg has posted an interesting (Freudian) analysis of Microsoft's behavior.

The following is Sam Hiser's comment on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' Information Domain -- Enterprise Technical Reference Models draft document, version 3.5. (The Office of the Chief Information Officer requested that public comments be made by Friday, September 9, 2005.)

First Reported on Lxer -ED

The State of Massachusetts -- home of The Boston Tea Party, The Battle of Dorchester Heights and other underdog victories -- today released the draft document (for review & comment up until September 9) which would be the basis of the State's policy on acceptable document file formats.

Among other information standards issues covered in the document, Massachusetts declares the following formats to be the targets of migration policies:

-OASIS OpenDocument for Text, Spreadsheet & Presentation files (.odt, .ods, .odp) Migration Target: January 1, 2005
-Plain Text Format for Text files (.txt)
-Hypertext Document Format for Web Pages (.html)
-Portable Document Format for Other Documents (.pdf)

Among the applications supporting OpenDocument are OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 and 2.0, StarOffice 8, KOffice 1.4, Workplace as well as, to some partial degree, AbiWord, eZ publish, Knomos, Scribus and TextMaker. Others will follow.

The State CIO requests our comments on the document by September 9, 2007.

As a software developer (one who works in C or C++), how would you respond to a move by OpenOffice.org to opensource the OpenOffice code by releasing it under the GNU General Public License (presently the software comes under the SISSL and LGPL)?

Despite neutral-sounding statements about Total Cost of Ownership ("TCO") of Linux v. Windows -- and even some surprisingly insightful comments -- a lady who used to shill for Microsoft is still shilling, arguing that large organizations should not switch. Her sophistry is as transparent as glass.

When human captial leeks systematically away from a leading tech company, you have to see fundamental trouble.

As the EU debates SUSPENDING Microsoft in Europe, the company throws them a bone: a new Office XML File Format

Mainstream media are eating up Firefox's success.

Here's a telling faux fas: A veteran Netscape developer, surveying the floor of LinuxWorld Expo 2004, found vendors running a mix of Windows, Linux and other OSs. She says in her blog review: “Sun was the worst, with only one Linux box I saw, and the rest all Windows: no Solaris that I saw.”

OpenOffice XML, the file format that's native to the leading open source office suite, may become an ISO standard. That leaves MS Office XML with...OOoggaatts!

We introduce, today, the JDS Community Newsletter: Volume 1, Number 1! This is the first of what we expect to be many issues covering activities in the Java Desktop System development, support and user communities. We look forward to providing an important and trustworthy source of information about JDS resources as well as developer and user experiences on a regular basis.