I wanted to share this very interesting video lecture by Yochai Benkler with you.

In this lecture, Yochai talks about the shift in power in the core economic activities to the hands of the population at large - all because of the computer. He talks about how open source is very visible in the software world because it’s easy to see - but that this actually happens throughout the web.

This is just a bit from the beginning of the talk - instead of summarizing it all for you, I’m going to let you listen for yourself

Hmmm. I was pointed to this article from a commenter on this blog. The good news is that Microsoft is adding support to Office 2007 for ODF … the not so surprising news is that they’re not doing it to help support open source users … it’s because their format OOXML is harder to sustain than ODF.

In Microsoft’s announcement, the company said it was adding native support for ODF due to increasing pressure from customers “and because we want to get involved in the maintenance of ODF”. The company now says OOXML support would require substantially more work.

So, good news for the open source world - but not really a giant leap for the people at Microsoft.