Google on Monday released the first beta version of its software developer kit (SDK) for Android phones, a significant step in the company's hope for "open" phone technology.

Advocates of open source software have hailed a court ruling protecting its use even though it is given away free. "The Court has held that free licences set conditions on the use of copyrighted work.."

Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela were treated as second-line countries during the BRM, and together with Venezuela, the four were now treated with irrelevance again.

he OOXML appeals brought by Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela have been rejected by the Technical Management Board (TMB) and Standardization Management Board (SMB). The IEC voting results are detailed.

The ISO and IEC technical boards have given the go-ahead to publish ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard after appeals by four national standards bodies failed.

The ISO and IEC have rejected appeals from four countries and given final approval to publish the Office Open XML specification as an international standard.

A federal appeals court has ruled that violating copyleft licenses is copyright infrigement. This strengthens copyleft licenses such as the GPL and Creative Commons licenses.

Open source licenses create a condition on the scope of the license – and thus expose violators to injunctions under copyright law – the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled yesterday.

Researchers discovered the websites run by three OpenID providers - including Sun Microsystems - used SSL certificates with weak crypto keys. Instead of being generated from billions of possibilities, the keys came from a a set of just 32,768 options.

Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards says that industry will regard OOXML as a dead end, and that will force Microsoft to accept ODF. Microsoft recently decided to support ODF in Office which may lead to Microsoft embracing ODF.