Norway makes open standards a requirement

The Norwegian Minister of Modernization Morten Andreas Meyer made a presentation that will certainly worry Microsoft a great deal:

On presenting his new plan for information technology in Norway - "eNorge 2009 – the digital leap", Norwegian Minister of Modernization Morten Andreas Meyer today at a press conference in Oslo declared "Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government." Taking great care not to mention the name Microsoft directly, but rather referring to "the spreadsheet almost everyone use" or saying this is the last time I will present a plan for information technology being broadcast on the net in Windows Media, the Minister sent strong signals in the direction of Redmond to open up or become irrelevant to the Norwegian Government.

I wish our government would make intelligent decisions like that!

Comparison of OpenOffice and MS Office

NewsForge has published a nice, pretty thorough and balanced comparison of the "soon to be released" OpenOffice 2 Writer and MS Word:

OOo Writer scores most of its victories in features that make the creation and maintenance of highly formatted or long documents easier. This pattern is not accidental. According to Elizabeth Mathias of Sun Microsystems, the documentation of OpenOffice.org has a long history of being written in Writer itself. As a result, the program's developers had the incentive to include the tools they needed. This legacy continues to give Writer advantages over competitors like Word. That is not to say that Writer is a perfect program. Its interface is wildly inconsistent. Some features, notably cross-references, can most kindly be described as lacking. And in version 2.0, the attempt to imitate Microsoft Word hides several useful features. Yet, despite these shortcomings, OOo Writer is not only as fully developed as Microsoft Word, but often superior in terms of features and stability.

OpenOffice.org Writer vs. Microsoft Word.

Fantastic post/letter about the absurd software patent situation

It is in Danish, but if you can read danish, I highly recommend reading this letter. Update: It's been translated to english.

Lawrence Lessig - Free Culture

I've finally gotten this book and have read about 1/3 of it so far. So far I've really enjoyed it - it gives a very refreshing view on how wrong the changes recently made to copyright law is and how important it is that we change the road it is currently taking. I wish everyone involved in copyright law would read this book, especially our politicians!

Every artist should watch this...

It's a conversation between Jeff Tweedy, Lawrence Lessig at the New York Public Library and it's called "Who Owns Culture?". It starts with a short intro and then a short, but great presentation by Lawrence Lessig. Highly recommended!