A CBC article by Peter Nowak includes:
Quebec's government broke the law by buying software from Microsoft without considering offers from other vendors, the province's Superior Court has ruled.
June 4, 2010
May 20, 2009
A CBC News article by Emily Chung writes about a motion before Vancouver city council discussing open standards, open data and open source.
February 21, 2009
An article by Nestor E. Arellano for ITWorldCanada.com (NA) discusses the government RFI on "No Charge Licensed Software". The article included some material from a conversation that Nestor and I had. It makes mention of my own submission which I have made publicly available: OpenDocument version, PDF version.
Other submissions made publicly available: Evan Leibowitz of Xunil corporation, Mike Gifford of OpenConcept.
If you know of other published submissions, please let us know (add comment, etc)
August 28, 2008
A submission has been made to the W3C to introduce the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL). This compliments a number of other projects they are involved in to help create standards around Rights Expression (IE: digitally encoded license agreements) which are fundamental to the technical side of what in Copyright is called "Rights Management Information".
See also: RFC4946 - Atom License Extension
July 3, 2008
A press release from the ISO documents that PDF has become a standard.
I couldn't find the fine print that I wanted, which is any licensing on Adobe held software patents. Proprietary vendors have been slipping RAND licenses into "standards" which means that competing proprietary vendors can implement the specification, but FLOSS authors could not.
May 29, 2008
SABS leads appeal against OOXML ratification
28 May 2008
The South African Bureau of Standards is leading an international appeal against the ratification of Microsoft Office Open XML as an ISO standard.
Document formats seem like a technical, unimportant subject until you can't open an important document. The role that standards play in making things work is easily overlooked. But South Africa's standards body is working to ensure that documents are usable, that software does inter-operate, and it is taking a global lead.
