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 ?

In his last column, The Definition of Sanity, Jeremy noted that Cuba voted "yes" to the fast-tracking of OOXML, "even though Microsoft is prohibited by the US Government from selling any software on the island that might even be able to read and write the new format." As if by way of an apology, Fidel Castro has responded by quoting one of Jeremy's columns in his own column, which appeared 5 days later, in Juventu Rebelde, the Newspaper of Cuban Youth.

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.

Until recently I didn't think much about International Standards Organization (ISO) standards. I guess most people are the same. ISO standards cover a range of different things such as pipe threads (ISO standard number 7) to shoe sizes (ISO 9407) to photographic film speeds (ISO 5800). Although they're invisible to the lay person, much of modern life is made easier by their international adoption; think how difficult it would be to buy shoes from China without standard sizes, for example.

Late, and over a year in development, the GNU General Public License version three (GPLv3) is finally here. The GPL is important as it's the most widely used Free Software license, with around seventy percent of Free Software released under its terms. It is unofficially regarded as the constitution for the Free Software movement. Already criticisms are being aimed at the new work, mainly from people and companies who didn't take part in the drafting of it. The amazing thing is how many large corporations actually did take part in the drafting process for the GPLv3.

Announcement from the Samba Team July 9, 2007

After internal consideration in the Samba Team we have decided to adopt the GPLv3 and LGPLv3 licences for all future releases of Samba.

The GPLv3 is the updated version of the GPLv2 license under which Samba is currently distributed. It has been updated to improve compatibility with other licenses and to make it easier to adopt internationally, and is an improved version of the license to better suit the needs of Free Software in the 21st Century.