The OOXML document format war is over, and the good guys lost. The world will be a worse place because of it, for a long time to come. After being a lobbyist for many months, it was a great relief to get back to being a Samba coder. At least that's something I feel I have some competence in. The jury is still out on my lobbying career.

The high-definition DVD format struggle is over. Toshiba's High-definition DVD (HD-DVD) was slugging it out in the market with Sony's BLU-RAY disk format. BLU-RAY has won, and no one except for the creators of HD-DVD is really sorry. I have an HD-DVD player stuck upstairs in a closet (inherited from the previous owner when we moved into our new house) and even I don't care. I never bought any HD-DVD's you see.

December 20th 2007. Today the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF), a non-profit organization created by the Software Freedom Law Center, signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Free Software projects such as Samba.

It hasn't been a good month for my code. Samba, the project I'm responsible for, has had to announce several security flaws. Unfortunately some of them were in code I wrote. I always do a large amount of soul-searching whenever that happens. There's nothing worse than finding out something you were responsible for is the cause of many thousands of people having to waste their time rolling out patches. It always makes me wonder if the time has come to give up this programming lark and end my days peacefully in management, messing up other peoples code instead of creating my own.

Innovation is a weasel word. It used to earn an honest living, but now it's been hijacked by marketing people for dishonest purposes. It's now in the same category as "rich". Does anyone now hear the words "rich user experience" or "rich client" without thinking of a bloated, Windows-only client that doesn't use open or standard protocols ?

"Unlike the wider network where there is genuine competition, the desktop has not been subject to open standards, and this has had a deleterious effect on competition and innovation. This is the most important outcome of the European Court's recent decision to uphold the European Commission's judgment against Microsoft. While the mainstream press focused on the record fine imposed on Microsoft, the more engaging and decisive part of the judgment was the Commission's insistence that Microsoft publish its proprietary protocols to enable interoperability."

There are Linux users that have little use for productivity suites, and depend instead on a simple text editor, which has all the functions any one man or woman could need, and makes files that everyone can read. This method of communicating with the outside world is all too obvious for those of us who have learned their craft with a keyboard and a command line, and have never depended on the click of a mouse for access to a computer. Once upon a time Linux users prided themselves on lack of bloat and simplicity of use. But times have changed.

Microsoft has submitted two of its "shared source" licences for approval by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The significance of this can be read in different ways. Some see it as a victory for open source, a capitulation on the part of Microsoft, and an admission that open source will be the way of the future. Others see it as a divisive move, designed to emphasise existing splits within the free and open source community. In reality, it is probably a bit of both.

From Groklaw: Right after the Court of First Instance announced its verdict Monday upholding the EU Commission's finding that Microsoft abused its monopoly, our own Sean Daly did an interview with the following: Georg Greve of FSFE, Jeremy Allison and Volker Lendecke of Samba, and Carlo Piana, their lawyer of record in the case. It's a delight.

"Due to the fact that Linux is free software and belongs to no-one, it is often assumed that Linux is "surrounded by legal uncertainties."