Stories by: Ephraim Schwartz

With the non-decision from the ISO standards body last month on whether or not to adopt Microsoft OOXML (Open Office XML) file format as an industry standard and Microsoft's decision to release the OOXML SDK next month, the discussions over whether or not OOXML is worthy of being a standard is expected to become heated once again.

Along with the unveiling of prototype handsets using Google's Android mobile application development platform at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, came the promise -- one more time -- of write once, run anywhere.

Monta Vista, the mobile and embedded Linux company, unveiled version 5.0 of its carrier-grade embedded Linux kernel this week.

What would DEMO '07, or any high tech show for that matter, be without loud music and a light show for the daily opening of the conference? DEMOfall could do no less.

The lights go down, the noise comes up, and Demo 07 is underway.

Red Hat and Linux continued its move up and down the enterprise operating stack with the announcement this week by Dell that it would offer its customers the Red Hat middleware stack on Dell PowerEdge servers.

Following up on its Spring 07 announcement that it will ship Inspiron notebook and desktops with the Linux OS, Dell chose the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco to add the United Kingdom, France, and Germany to its Linux stable of models.

Looking at the slew of new product announcements coming out of the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco this week, some industry analysts are saying we are witnessing the last mile in the commoditization of the operating system.

Back in the day, dot-com marketplaces -- virtual bazaars where buyers and sellers could shop, haggle, and conduct business -- were all the rage. (Remember eCattle.com, the online exchange for livestock?) Most of those environments went down with the bursting of the Internet bubble, but that doesn't mean the idea of online exchanges wasn't a good one --just that it needed time to mature.

At the Web 2.0 Expo at Moscone Center in San Francisco on Wednesday, three thought leaders in the Web 2.0 space, Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, Satish Dharmaraj, CEO of Zimbra and Matthew Glotzbach, business product manager at Google, participated in a panel discussion titled, Web 2.0 for the Enterprise.

After much debate and a lot of contention among the overall IEEE membership, the all-important IEEE 802.11n working group has given its stamp of approval to the next draft version of the specification.