Red Hat, Ubuntu and Mandriva have all rejected patent agreements with Microsoft. Microsoft has not been able to publicly identify any infringing patents, leading many observers to compare their strategy to that of SCO who also used unspecified intellectual property infringement claims that later proved to be baseless. Microsoft did however offer incentive to distributors such as Novell in a deal that will see Novell on the receiving end of substantial patent royalties.

The New Zealand Herald has a story today about the open source community meeting at Google to discuss the threats that Microsoft has made against the open source community. Meanwhile Microsoft has signed three patent deals in the last few weeks.

Leading open source organisations are coming together to celebrate the New Zealand open source success story. The initiative, spearheaded by New Zealand's largest independent open source provider Catalyst IT and the New Zealand Open Source Society, will present seven Awards for outstanding contributions and uses of open source in New Zealand.

June 24th will see the NZOSS elect a new President. The AGM will be held across the country with venues in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch connected by Internet Conference. Vik Olliver and Don Christie will be running for President. Both candidates are very well respected in the open source community.

The NZOSS is making the presentation given to the commerce committee on Digital Rights Management in the copyright amendment bill available on YouTube. YouTube is growing despite copyright infringement claims against it. Even our politicians are taking advantage of it. DRM and strong copyright will harm community content.

Dell will now be offering computers preloaded with Ubuntu Linux. It wouldn't be the first time Linux has been offered preloaded in New Zealand. Dick Smith Electronics tried to sell cheap computers loaded with Mandrake Linux a few years ago, but they were not a success. It is yet to be seen whether there will be any publicity to drive sales of the new computers.

This week Novell joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a patent busting project at the same time saying that they would release the entire agreement they made with Microsoft. Mark Shuttleworth has published a article showing the folly of attacking customers, while people have been challenging Microsoft to sue them first.

Today in ComputerWorld there is a story about the Government being wary about Trusted Computing and DRM protections such as those introduced in Microsoft Vista. At the same time the Government is in the process of drafting and passing legislation in the copyright ammendment bill which will legally protect DRM implementations from reverse engineering that would enable evaluation of security threats for everyone else.

Microsofts long expected patent offensive against free software has finally begun with a statement published in CNN Money claiming that Free Software infringes 235 Microsoft patents. Unlike previous articles which were not specific there are actual numbers on the number of patents that Microsoft are claiming are infringed by Open Source Software.

Today ComputerWorld covered our submission to the Commerce Committee regarding the protections for technical protection measures. A substantial part of our document consisted of arguments made previously by the Ministry of Economic Development and by numerous submissions to the discussion documents previously published.