It has been another busy month for software freedom. Open Standards have continued to dominate discussions in ICT with the MS-OOXML proposal being accepted by ISO as a standard. FSFE and numerous other parties have observed this process from the beginning and have reason to be concerned about the state of international standardisation. You could read more about this in our lead story below.

"Technologically speaking, the state of IS29500 is depressing," says Marko Milenovic of FSFE's Serbian Team and co-chair of the Serbian technical committee on DIS29500. "In large parts it is low quality technical prose that fails to use the normative terminology mandated by ISO/IEC's guidelines. We've been told to wait for the maintenance process for MS-OOXML to become usable. That ISO would knowingly approve a dysfunctional specification is disillusioning."

Today is Document Freedom Day: Roughly 200 teams from more than 60 countries worldwide are organising local activities to raise awareness for Document Freedom and Open Standards. [...] Document Freedom is about giving you control of your information, it is about giving governments control of their public records, and it is about freedom of choice. You can give yourself that freedom today [...]

It has been an exceptional month. The European Commission has fined Microsoft an additional 899 million Euro for continuing to restrict access to interoperability information prior to October 2007 and the ISO Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva failed to address most of the serious issues and ultimately ended up waving through the bulk of ECMA responses without review. Public awareness of issues relating to software freedom have been raised dramatically.

At a time when the EU Commission investigates the anti-competitive behaviour of a market-dominant player, the European Parliament (EP) still imposes that same specific software choice on both the European Union's citizens and its own MEPs. OpenForum Europe, The European Software Market Association, and the Free Software Foundation Europe today launched a petition to call on the EP to use Open Standards so that all citizens can participate in the democratic process.