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On 2 September 2008, EDRi-member Association for Technology and Internet - APTI Romania organized an event to announce the availability of the localized Creative Commons (CC) licences.

The event was organized with the help of the Center for Independent Journalism and HI-Q band and gathered users of the CC licences, journalists and bloggers that discussed the way the CC licences would fit the present Romanian copyright-related framework.

Bogdan Manolea, the CC Legal Lead of the Creative Commons Romania project started with a presentation where he explained the CC philosophy and an introduction to the CC licences. The public was interested in other details of the practical implementation of CC licences starting with the way

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The public procurement procedure of 25 billion HUF (approx. 100 million euro) for the supply of "Microsoft or other equivalent solutions" was published in January 2008 in the Tenders Electronic Daily, Supplement to the Official Journal of the EU. After the successful closing of the procedure, three companies distributing open source software challenged the result. They argued that the tender was anti-competitive, because Microsoft products were directly favoured in the procedure.

The Hungarian Public Procurement Authority refused the request to annul the procedure. This latter decision has been challenged by the Hungarian Competition Office (HCO) before the court. HCO claims that the tender

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International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in Geneva have postponed the publication of the revised specification of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, following complaints filed by their member organizations representing these four countries: Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela.

The planned standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500 cannot be published until the complaints are examined by ISO and IEC who will have to give responses and comments by the end of June 2008

The four national standardization organizations have shown concerns that no consensus has been reached on changes that must be made to the 6000-page

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The EU Competition Commissioner, Neelie Kroes, publicly supported the use of open source software in eGovernment, in a public speech at a seminar hosted by OpenForum Europe in Brussels on 10 June 2008.

Kroes encouraged the public institutions to use open standards, underlining the positive example of Munich that have implemented open standards in their local eGovernment projects. She suggested a much more active role of the European Commission in promoting open standards in eGovernment applications, by adopting an internal policy not to buy proprietary software: "The Commission must do its part. It must not rely on one vendor, it must not accept closed standards and it must refuse to become locked into a

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Veni Markovski from EDRi-member ISOC Bulgaria reports on his blog on the first case when the CreativeCommons Licence was upheld in court in Bulgaria.

The Bulgarian blogger Elenko Elenkov filed a lawsuit against the newspaper "24 hours" for having used one of his photos, licenced under the CreativeCommons BY-SA, in one of their edition on 20 September 2007 on the cover page and on page 3. The picture did not mention the author or the licence used, but rather attributed the photo on page 3 to "The Internet".

The correction printed four days later by the newspaper was under the headline and said that "pictures from the Internet forums also have an author", and that the picture was published "in one of the Internet

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While new accusations have been brought to Microsoft, the giant company announced on 9 May 2008 that it has appealed, at the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg, the 899 million euro fine imposed in February 2008 by the European Commission (EC) for having abused its dominant position on the market.

"We are filing this appeal in a constructive effort to seek clarity from the court," was the company's statement. The basic question of the dispute is the way in which patents and interoperability protocols are licensed by Microsoft to competitors. In February, Microsoft announced a series of interoperability initiatives that would provide more interoperability between Microsoft's products and those of competitors, including publishing

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Open Office XML has been approved as an international recognized standard by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), despite the open source community voices that have raised a number of problems with the standard as such and with unfair practices during the process with such as committee stuffing in several countries and political interventions of ministers in the standardization process.

ISO/IEC DIS 29500 - Information technology - Office Open XML file formats is a XML-based file format specification for electronic documents, developed by Microsoft and adopted as ECMA 376 standard in December 2006. After that, it was promoted by Microsoft and ECMA in the ISO fast-track procedure, but has

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The European Commission announced it would increase its own use of open source software for ICT projects: "For all new development, where deployment and usage is foreseen by parties outside of the Commission Infrastructure, Open Source Software will be the preferred development and deployment platform."

Valerie Rampie, spokesperson of Siim Kallas, the European commissioner on administrative affairs, declared for the IDABC open source observatory that the publication of the strategy is made "mainly for information purposes".

The new strategy paper of the Commission, that has been a supporter of open source software since 2000, explains that open-source software should be

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A public petition was initiated by OpenForum Europe, The European Software Market Association, and the Free Software Foundation Europe asking the European Parliament (EP) to change its ICT system in order to allow the adoption of open standards.

The petition specifically points to the fact that the live web streaming from the European Parliament's plenary sessions is currently only available to those using Microsoft's Media Player. Also, it appears that members of the European Parliament are unable to "access documents sent to them in formats adhering to Open Standards, including the ISO standard for electronic office documents, the Open Document Format (ODF) - the primary

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The Gendarmerie, France's largest administrative body, intends to change in the next years the operating system of 70 000 workstations presently running on Windows XP to Ubuntu.

This is a movement that continues the French Government's efforts to promote migration to open source for some years now. The Gendarmerie had already adopted OpenOffice.org and Firefox, the French National Assembly has also recently switched 1100 computers to Linux and the Ministry of Agriculture has started the migration from Windows at the end of 2006.

The French Government's plans to migrate to open source was based on a study by technology services company Atos Origin, that: "showed that open-source