Columnists’ Corner: Ephraim Schwartz predicts that the pact Sun and Google made could catalyze an open source, on-demand office suite with the potential to thwart Microsoft’s Office. Best of the blogs: Jon Udell revists real-world repositories and UDDI, “the Rodney Dangerfield of Web services standards,” while a post in TechWatch reports that Forrester expects a major slowdown in IT spending, but it won’t last all that long. The news beat: Microsoft settles its antitrust case with RealNetworks and the companies join forces to promote digital music and games; BEA Systems buys RFID vendor ConnecTerra for its data collection software; Nokia releases a new family of development tools; and WebEx rebrands and launches the hosted collaboration suite it acquired from Intranets.com. Standards: OASIS submits OpenDocument, the file format used by OpenOffice, to ISO and proposes that the body deem it an international standard, and the Liberty Alliance releases legal and privacy guidelines for federated identity.Open source: JBoss adds the Drools business engine to its crop, and reveals plans to offer an open source ESB next year. Technology Industry