BECTA, the UK government’s education technology agency, has today made a complaint to the UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) for alleged anti-competitive practices by Microsoft. BECTA has two bones to pick with Microsoft:

Microsoft offers cut-price software licences for UK schools, but insists that schools must buy Microsoft licences for every PC in the school [...]

Claudio Ferreira Filho’s talk Brazil / A strange success case was my highlight of the 2006 OpenOffice.org conference. So I was delighted to be asked to address their 2nd annual conference this year.
Due to the vast size of Brazil, this is held as a videoconference across a number of sites. It’s actually an incredible piece [...]

I’ve had a number of calls from journalists asking how OpenOffice.org will be affected by the news that Microsoft and the EU have finally settled their differences. New readers start here: in March 2004 the EU had found Microsoft guilty of abusing its its dominant market position. Microsoft was fined 497m euros (small change), [...]

Catching up on my post-holiday emails, I’ve seen a link to To Pay or Not To Pay: The World of Office Suites Opens Up which asks So why aren’t more people switching to OpenOffice from the more expensive Microsoft products? This is a question close to the heart of the OpenOffice.org Marketing Project, and it’s [...]

A visit to any supermarket in the UK will demonstrate how consumers here are reaping the rewards of globalisation. Not only can you pick up the proverbial “electric kettle for under a fiver” (5 UKP) – manufactured in China, but you will probably also be served at the checkout by low cost labour – a [...]

In my last posting, I gave a link to a post in the OpenOffice.org wiki from Michael Meeks defending the JCA. Michael has now removed the post – maybe he’d forgotten about it until I reminded him? – but you can of course still find the original posting here in the wiki history.
Meanwhile, if you [...]

There’s a classic posting on Slashdot Sun Refuses LGPL for OpenOffice; Novell forks suggesting that according to their hacker-in-chief Michael Meeks, Novell have now formally declared UDI and created their own version of OpenOffice.org.
On closer investigation, this formal fork of OpenOffice.org turns out to be our old friend ooo-build, which I have talked about before. [...]