The statement is titled the “COMSEGI 2008 Declaration,” named for the South and Latin American government open source conference held in Brasilia, Brazil, at which the Declaration was signed. Those that attended included senior government officials, such as Brazil’s Minister of Science and Technology, as well as representatives of the six nations that signed the declaration: Brazil, Cuba, Paraguay, South Africa and Venezuela.

It has become clear that we are witnessing a watershed event that transcends the significance of the standards war between OOXML and ODF. What we are seeing is an awakening that will reshape the way that governments and citizens think about important standards, and changes in the ways that they will allow such standards to be developed and approved.

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This paves the way for the as-adopted version of OOXML, now called IS0/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology - Office Open XML, to proceed to publication. That version is substantially different than the current implementation of OOXML in Office 2007, and its text has still not been publicly released by ISO/IEC. According to a joint press release, publication “is expected to take place within the next few weeks on completion of final processing of the document.” Intriguingly, the press release goes on to say, “and subject to no further appeals against the decision.

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But as often happens, an insignificant case between small parties can have huge implications. And decisions that may make good strategic sense to the parties can also have disastrous consequences for those that are not in the same situation.

The case in question is called Jacobsen v. Katzer. It’s been going on for awhile, and a lot of people have spent a lot of time behind the scenes helping make sure that it came out the right way. So for those of you who have not been following this case for the last few years, I’ll try to distill briefly why this decision is so important, and why people are so pleased.

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Some things never change, although some things never change in ways that are fresher than others. Linux World was Linux World, or so I heard from all that attended. I tried to scan the agenda, and on a reasonably fast hotel connection it took forever to load, what with all the dynamic content and fancy graphics.

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Since then, although rumors have swirled, Apple has refused to state whether or not Jobs has had a recurrence of his cancer - or disclose any meaningful details at all. Even on calls with securities analysts, Apple’s response has only been that “Steve’s health is a private matter.”

Thus you might think that if you were a journalist, and you got a call from Steve Jobs yourself, giving you, and you only, the private scoop on the status of his health, you might feel like a pretty lucky guy, and take that news to the public within whatever constraints you had agreed to with the Apple CEO. Or would you write a different story entirely, and bury that news in the penultimate paragraph of a long story, and write at length instead about how stockholders were entitled to know the news that you had just buried?

With that lead in, you can guess which way New York Times business page columnist Joe Nocera called the coin toss. So here’s the good news about Steve Jobs (up front), and the bad news about a Journalistic decision.

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Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

Then the project dropped out of sight, while the chosen authors contributed initial content, and while Google decided whether to green light the project for ongoing support and public participation

This Wednesday, Google lifted the password curtain on its infant knol site, and issued a new announcement. In some respects, the description of the knol game plan (and even the words) are identical to what we read in the original blog entry. In others, they are different, apparently reflecting lessons learned and author feedback received during the intervening seven months. And, of course, there is now the nascent site itself to browse and watch evolve as well.

What you’ll see when you visit turns out to be quite different from the Wikipedia - at least for now. Given that until yesterday it was neither available to public feedback nor open to volunteer authors desiring to launch their own knols, what it looks like today will almost certainly be very different from what it looks like a year from now, or perhaps even in month from now. With the door now open to anyone that wants to walk in and the freedom to go in any direction - not to mention ad revenues to be reaped and shared with authors - what we will see will be akin to the Apple App Store for the everyman and woman - not just for developers, but for anyone who can type.

Here’s my take on what to expect, how the knol experiment may evolve, and why I think it matters - a lot.

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How successful could this new entrant be in China? For starters, Evermore Software Co. Ltd., its developer, is reportedly the largest software vendor to the Chinese government. And then there’s price: Evermore’s professional edition is less than a quarter of the price of the comparable version of Office 2007. And finally, it’s clearly no coincidence that on July 11, Evermore Vice President Cao Shen called for Microsoft to be the first target for the China’s new anti-monopoly law, which will take effect in just ten days’ time. Whether Shen is speaking to, or for, the government remains to be seen.

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As I expect just about every reader of this blog knows, Brian has been the Managing Editor of LinuxToday for quite a few years (as well as Managing Editor of various other Jupiter Media properties: LinuxPlanet, Enterprise Linux Today, AllLinuxDevices, LinuxPR, and JustLinux). If you missed it, you can find Brian’s farewell column at LinuxToday here. As he disclosed there, his new role will be to help launch the Linux Foundation’s new Linux Developer Network site and project, which Amanda has been already been working on for some time. When it launches, Brian will be its Community Manager and Editor.

I’m particularly happy that I’ll be able to continue to work with Brian, as he has been a great friend to me here, linking to hundreds of my blog entries over the last several years. It’s fair to say that many of you would never have learned of this blog but for Brian’s deciding that what I was writing here might be of interest to the Linux community. I am quite appropriately grateful for his willingness to pull what I had to say out of the fire hose of information that he had to deal with on a daily basis.

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a) Not to process the appeal further

b) To process one or more of the appeals, which would require setting up of a conciliation panel

If more than one appeal is approved for further consideration, the CEOs recommend that a single panel be formed to address them (I’ve previously described the ongoing process in greater detail here). The TMB’s are asked to vote by August 4.

The recommendation of the CEOs is as follows:

The processing of the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 project has been conducted in conformity with the ISO/IEC JTC 1 Directives, with decisions determined by the votes expressed by the relevant ISO and IEC national bodies under their own responsibility, and consequently, for the reasons mentioned above, the appeals should not be process further.

Those who have been disappointed by how the Fast Track process was conducted will also be disappointed by the reasoning they will find in the document, which can be effectively be summarized as follows:

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In its earlier days, Microsoft was much more likely to mimic the products of other companies rather than buy them, in part reflecting its engineering-driven culture, and in part its hardball approach to competition. When it did add features this way, it invariably added them for free into its existing products to make them more desirable. The result was often to drive the originators of those features out of the marketplace, since who would buy what they could get for free? Sometimes, the motivation was more desperate, as with the crash development, and bundling, of Internet Explorer in Window, when Netscape threatened to open a critical breach in Microsoft’s control personal computing.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, it should, since Google is following the same course, albeit in a kinder, gentler way, as it adds service upon service, all for free, and all in the service of racking up more and more ad revenues. That’s disturbing, because when your goal is ad revenues and not great technology, you may not necessarily produce great technology. But as Google’s dominance continues to grow, who will be able to credibly compete against it in those technologies, to ensure that innovation continues?

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