OStatic

On Friday, Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer sent a letter to Yahoo!ﾒs board of directors informing them that time was running out for the Yahoo! board to accept a buyout offer from Microsoft. The nature and tone of the letter may betray Microsoftﾒs true intentions with regards to Yahoo!ﾒs properties and raises some serious concerns.

On Tuesday Microsoft released over 14,000 pages of documentation concerning Sharepoint Server 2007, Exchange 2007, and MS Outlook 2007 as well as the communications protocols used these products. The documentation was released on the companyﾒs MSDN site as part of the openness pledge it made following the recent EU court judgment against the company.

The good news is that open source developers can use the published protocol information to develop clients that interact with Microsoft servers using the same feature sets available to Microsoft software clients. We may finally see open source email and calendaring applications that can natively integrate with corporate MS Exchange servers. Outlookﾒs stranglehold on the enterprise IT email client market may soon come to an end.

Two federal judges, one in Boston and one in New York each came to different conclusions regarding the legality of using file sharing services on the same day. The judge in Boston was hearing a case brought by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) against a number of Boston University students. In that case, the judge ruled that simply making a file available for download is not a violation of the copyright until someone actually downloads it.

From the recent spate of open source project acquisitions by large software vendors to the increasingly popular model of offering paid ?enterprise? versions of open source software, we?ve all noticed the changes in the open source community. Some consider these trends part of the maturing of the open source software market, while others view these trends as potentially dangerous to fundamental open source concepts.

For those who are worried, things may have just gotten a little worse. Adobe?s announcement of its AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) platform for Linux is the case in point.

Last week the Canadian public media service, the CBC (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) became the first major North American broadcaster to distribute a DRM-free download of a primetime television show via BitTorrent. The download was not only DRM free, it didnﾒt contain any commercials or license based copy restrictions. In fact the CBC website proclaimed ﾓYou are free to download, share and burn this videoﾔ. This is how I like my media served.

Last week Novell released version 1.9 of the Mono open source .NET framework as well as a new IDE called Monodevelop. The newest version of Mono now supports a number of the advanced features found in Microsoftﾒs .NET 3.0 framework.

While Mono and Novell, which sponsors the project, have been much maligned by various factions within the open source community, the overall impact Mono could have on Microsoft and the open source community could in fact be large.

Last week Amazon announced a new web service called FWS (Fulfillment Web Service). FWS is an add-on to Amazonﾒs existing fulfillment system which allows any developer to interface directly with Amazonﾒs inventory management system using open APIs. This service allows you to programmatically print shipping labels for your inventory which you then send to Amazon. They store it until your app issues a shipment request at which point your web service call causes some human (or perhaps a robot) to pick and pack your product and then ship it out to your customer.

Late last month Microsoft received a tentative slap in the face when the ISO\IEC didnﾒt approve Microsoftﾒs OOXML (Open Office XML) format as an ISO standard. This came as a bit of a surprise to industry analysts as Microsoft has been lobbying hard to get its Office file format approved.

Late last year the head of the working group handling Microsoftﾒs application at the ISO accused the company of stacking his group and interfering in ISO business.

Despite continued infighting between the Free Software and Open Source communities, the OSI has blessed the new AGPLv3 license.

Late last week the AGPLv3 license (Affero GNU Public License) formally completed the OSIﾒs (Open Source Initiative) license review process. The AGPL license differs from the ubiquitous GPL license in a number of important ways, the biggest of which closes the so-called ﾓASP loophole.ﾔ