Information Society Watch

April 2, 2008, Kevin J. O'Brien, New York Times

In a reversal of its loss in September, Microsoft has won approval by the International Organisation for Standardisation for its Office Open XML (OOXML), a format for interchangeable Web documents. The international standards designation for OOXML will have important effects on software spending by governments and large companies.

February 27, 2008, India e-News

The European Commission (EC) has imposed a record fine on Microsoft Corporation for its non-compliance with anti-trust regulations. Microsoft has been found to deny access to the protocols and communication mechanisms that would allow its rivals to co-exist and function with Microsoft systems.

January 14, 2008, BBC News

The European Commission (EC) has held a long-running investigation into Microsoft's operating procedures, which had led to the EC imposing a huge fine on the company last year after holding it guilty of breaking European Union (EU) antitrust laws.

December 19, 2007, Indiatimes Infotech

The proposed Google-DoubleClick deal, in which Google Inc. intends to take over online adtracker DoubleClick, is now being examined by regulators from two angles. The first is the anti-trust point and the other is related to data privacy.

January 4, 2008, The Economist

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program was conceived to providing computing power to a majority of the world's children in order to bridge the digital divide. Two years on, the article takes a step back and looks at the outcomes of the project as it has its first release.

December 10, 2007, iGovernment Bureau

The Government of Denmark has mandated that all national, regional and local government bodies and associations of Danish regions move to open standards for software from January 1, 2008. Open standards are defined in terms of their capacity to be fully documented, publicly available, and freely implementable without economic, political or legal constraints.

August 16, 2005, Joseph Stiglitz, Daily Times

Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes on the importance of considering the needs of developing countries in the formation of intellectual property regimes, which currently reflect the interests of the advanced industrial countries and big multinational corporations. Giving the open source movement as an example, Stiglitz claims that meaningful innovation can occur without intellectual property protection, but if such regimes are necessary they must be tailored to local contexts and pay attention to the needs of the marginalised economic groups.

September 27, 2006, The Hindu

Yahoo! India has launched a project in `search marketing solutions' for Indian marketers. This uses an advertising model called Sponsored Search, allowing businesses to bid for highly visible placement within the web results that are given for a user's search.

January 27, 2005, Sandeep Krishnamurthy, University of Washington, Bothell

In this paper, the author chronicles how the efforts of 63,000 volunteers for the Mozilla Foundation led to a community successfully marketing their product and competing with a powerful multi-national corporation.

December 2, 2005, Newsweek

Sam Palmisano, the head of IBM, makes a case for Free and Open Software (FOSS) as one of cornerstones for innovation. Innovation itself is required to stimulate growth and economic development.