On Tuesday the primary conference sessions concluded with a selection of talks on how far the UK public sector has come in its adoption of Free Software. Talks by Mark Taylor (President, Open Source Consortium) and Francis Irving (MySociety) were both informative and candid in their appraisal of the UK public sector.

Since the first day of LinuxConf Europe there has been much speculation amongst delegates as to whether or not Linus Torvalds would make an appearance. This had largely been driven by the conference programme where, for the “Advanced GIT BOF”, there was no name provided for the speaker. Come Tuesday morning and a select few delegates were claiming to have spotted to the kernel's founder. As afternoon coffee approached many had begun to wonder if Linus wasn't going to arrive until the start of the developer summit following the conference.

The International Standardization Organization, ISO, has announced that Microsoft's Office-Open-XML format (OOXML) has failed in preliminary voting.

Linuxconf Europe 2007 kicked off this Sunday in Cambridge, UK. Unix user groups from Great Britain and other parts of Europe will be hosting lectures and workshops until September 5.

The FreeBSD Community should leverage GPLv3 to convince Linux users to use FreeBSD. It is a good time to push FreeBSD, says Justin Gibbs, founder and Vice President of the FreeBSD-Foundation.

The KDE project is postponing the release of version 4 of its free desktop environment by two months. According to the latest announcements, KDE 4.0.0 will not be appearing until December 20, 2007.

The Swedish Institute for Standards (SiS) has just released a press statement declaring its vote for Microsoft's OpenXML format invalid.

The Linux Foundation has taken a clear position on the acceptance of Microsoft's OpenXML format as an international ISO standard. The Foundation recommends that standardization committees in the countries involved in the process say "No" to the application.