07.26.14

Groklaw Back in the Wake of ODF in the UK?

Posted in OpenDocument at 11:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Renewed activity in FOSS-leaning legal site Groklaw amid numerous victories for FOSS

IN LIGHT of the good news about ODF, Groklaw has broken its silence and come back to life for the first time in nearly a year. The Document Foundation [1], its members [2], and some FOSS [3] or general news sites [4] have covered this as well because it’s a major breakthrough. There is other good news, such as the USPTO narrowing the scope of software patents, eliminating many of them. The “USPTO’s Scrutiny Of Software Patents Paying Off,” says this one article, which adds: “Though recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings have not provided much help, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s efforts to more closely scrutinize software patents is reducing the incentive for patent applicants to seek vague, broad claims, experts told USPTO officials at a forum Tuesday.”

No wonder Groklaw is eager to say something and perhaps come back for good. It will hopefully return to covering FOSS issues, such as the IRS assault on FOSS, patents against Android (China revealed Microsoft’s patents and Microsoft’s booster Richard Waters reveals that Qualcomm too might be affected [5]), among many other issues that never received an extensive legal coverage. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

The Document Foundation congratulates the UK government for their revolutionary and historical choice of open document standards
What the UK Government’s adoption of ODF really means

On Tuesday the news that the UK Government had decided to use ODF as its official and default file format started to spread. The full announcement with technical details may be found here; the Document Foundation published its press release on Thursday morning there.
Docker acquires Orchard, SAP supports OpenStack, ODF and more
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The UK government has announced the open standards it has chosen for sharing and viewing official documents.

The government has formally adopted the Open Document Format (ODF) as the standard for sharing and collaborating on documents and PDF/A or HTML as the standard for viewing documents. These standards are expected to be used across all government bodies.
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Qualcomm became the latest US technology company to suffer a reversal in China, as it warned on Wednesday that a government investigation there had added to its difficulties in collecting licensing fees on new mobile devices.

[...]

The warning follows a dent to Chinese revenues at other US IT companies such as Cisco and IBM, which have been hit by falling demand amid reports of official Chinese moves to discourage purchases of US technology in the wake of the intelligence revelations by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden.

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