It’s early Thursday but this week has already had some fascinating stories covering the subject of open source and open standards. As these topics, open source and open standards, are near and dear to my heart, I thought I should share them with you.

The first story regards a new site by the OpenOffice.org people. It’s called Get Legal : Get OpenOffice.org and it echoes a point I’ve made on numerous occasions. If you want proprietary, commercial software, buy it. If you want free software, there are (sometimes better) alternatives and OpenOffice.org happens to be one of those products. Closely tied to the unveiling of the new OpenOffice.org site is the fact that the OASIS OpenDocument format (used by OpenOffice.org) has been approved by the ISO/IEC body. Yes, the OpenDocument format is now a standard. Microsoft’s answer to ODF, their new [ahem] open XML format, is not.

Continuing on open standards, Slate has a great article titled Why you should care about network neutrality. As phone companies and service providers try to stick it to the customer, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a bill “aimed at preventing broadband carriers from discriminating against competing Web content or services”.

Finally, I’ll wrap this up with an article by famous tech curmudgeon, John Dvorak, writing about that poster child for everything that’s wrong about closed source, closed standard, proprietary, monopilistic practices, Microsoft. Dvorak opines that Microsoft is done for. Read his 8 reasons why the feels the monster from Redmon is “dead in the water”.

And now, I must get back to work.