Moved by Freedom - Powered by Standards

2009

To all my readers, to my colleagues at Ars Aperta, to my family, to Mel, to OpenOffice.org community, to the Libervis Network and the FOSS community in general, I would like to wish a Happy New Year 2009, good health, personal and professional success, strength, wisdom and beauty.

I would like to thank the readers of this blog for their continued loyalty and interest, and I will of course be happy to write here in 2009. It will be a challenging year, but I think it’s a year that could bring some light to this world, despite the crisis and the turmoil our planet is going through.

Meanwhile, have a great new year’s eve, and don’t drink too much! Or drink a lot, it’s up to you, after all, tomorrow is 2009.

Cheers up!

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Some thoughts on the Microsoft’s implementation of ODF

This post is a bit hard to write. Let me just put it this way: If my predictions below are true, it will mean that Microsoft will offer some crippled and low-level support of ODF 1.1 in its next version of Microsoft Office. It will also mean that OpenOffice.org will have gained a competitive edge on the market.

Now you may wonder why I find it difficult to write down these things. The reason is the recent post of Doug Mahugh in regard of the support of ODF by MS Office. Instead of providing a detailed review on the matter, Doug explains -a bit laboriously- that interoperability does not mean that each implementation has to do things the same way and that some implementations are more extensive than others. We are then being told that Microsoft Office will have limited support in for ODF tables in Word.

Doug’s initial point is true: there are differences in implementation of a standard. When you have a truly open standard, you can expect implementers to be able to deliver some reliable implementation of the standard. Of course, it depends of the implementation’s focus. Suppose for one moment that I’m in the business of developing and selling IT systems for ATMs. I have an OS that sports an user interface for ATM transactions, another one for administration, and among several other features, an editor that prints out your receipts and the records of your past transactions on demand. One might expect that this editor can support ODF natively and will create ODF documents. These documents are not very complex, and to say it all, they’re even very basic. All what is required for me is to implement the bare minimum of ODF to be compliant and adequately call myself compliant. The minimum compliance with ODF is my right, as the vendor of the ATM receipts editor. My business is not print complex spreadsheets, nor fancy presentations, no: my business is to allow cash machines to print customers’ receipts of their cash transactions at the ATM, that’s all.

Now you have Microsoft’s bellydancing and basically declaring that they, who sell the “best office suite on the market” (I don’t make that claim) will offer poor support on ODF because of product limitations. Am I the only one here feeling that Redmond is trying -again-to play games? Any additional information would be welcome at this stage, of course, but the market should pay close attention to this issue.

I have hailed and declared myself positively satisfied the inclusion of Microsoft in the ODF committees at the OASIS consortium. I have read the contributions of its employees and they were useful and constructive. This being said, Doug’s blog leaves me with an odd taste in my mouth.

To be frank, I feel that Doug has been looking for a way to tell us that Microsoft’s support of ODF will be crappy and that it was intended to be that way. I realize I have no substantial evidence of what I’m asserting here, but since when does Microsoft speak of the new features of MS Office with a sorry tone?

That’s why I just don’t know how to properly assess what kind of message Microsoft is sending right now. The way I see it, Microsoft expects customers will stick to Microsoft Office since it also supports an Open Standard, ODF. However, the support of ODF being of poor quality, customers will roll back to Microsoft’s formats, and life will go on back like it was in the good old days.

I realize this is all « prospective » thinking, and that there is nothing solid aside Microsoft’s announcement of poor support of the ODF file format. I am disappointed by these news, though. Once again, Microsoft’s declarations turn out to be “all hat, no cattle”. The way out of it is known: Choose OpenOffice.org, choose ODF, choose any other office suite, but not the one that offers partial support of an open standard that puts the users first.

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Protect Innovation: Don’t use Proprietary Software (and other Advent niceties)

Last week I attended the OpenWorld Forum Conference (to be distinguished from our good friends of OpenForum Europe) and I met several interesting people. The location was very nice and I look forward its second edition; many thanks to our hosts and the conference organisers.

One specific conference I was attending was the FOSS strategy track. At some point there was a  panel discussion where the CEO of Red Hat France, two persons from the competitivity clusters Cap Digital and Systematic, the COO of Talend who joined the Open Source work group of the Afdel. The Afdel is an organisation representing French software vendors. By vendors they usually mean proprietary vendors. By French, they usually mean Microsoft and some french software vendors. For some reason  unknown to me, they always side with Microsoft on every issue. They must think Microsoft is French or something of that kind. But I digress.

At some point the pannel discussion touched to the sensitive topic of software patents. I felt compelled to listen even more carefully as I’m concerned with the economic and moral issues of software patents, and the quite undemocratic attempts to include them in the European IPR system. For those interested, I recently gave a speech on this topic at an European Commission workshop.

The Afdel’s point is that it was right to protect innovation. By innovation they mean code, so their point was that it was crucial to properly protect code, even open source code, so software patents were valid. The Afdel was adamant at letting us know about what I can only translate as being software “fraud”, that is, people stealing code from other developers. This argument was obviously justifying software patents.

This got me thinking. Forgive me this simple reasonning, but I think it makes sense to conclude that since there’s only Free and Open Source Software code that is widely available on the Internet, then the Afdel thinks that using, running, modifying and distributing Free and Open Source Software is actually code steal. The issue is of course that there is no such thing when it comes to FOSS. So whoelse might be stealing that code? …  Proprietary software vendors maybe? After all we have no way to really know if they haven’t integrated code that is publicly available in their products and then claim it’s all theirs… I’ll stop there, some will call me disingenuous if I continue my rant.

In other news, Germany has decided to start a nation-wide migration to ODF.  I wonder what the DIN thinks of that announcement. Okay, I got it, I’m stopping this post right here. I promess.

Until then…

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“Mission Accomplished!”… or so they said

 The news have fallen out of the teleprompters. I couldn’t keep that for much longer. I’m giggling on my chair and nibbling sheets of paper. Outside, people are gathering on the sidewalks. You could almost guess the humming of the press and the accelerating trucks of local news networks everywhere in the country. I’ve seen some people throwing up from joy.

That’s it. There it is . Our moment has come….

OOXML final final version has landed and is now available for download!

Rejoice, oh humanity!

Hail your new master, Steve Ballmer!

(praying voices of Ewok tribes in the background)

Tadadii Tadaduum Tadaa!

Nevermind if many had seen it before, I had even announced it on this blog. Now it’s officially availble, for real. I swear. Just visit the ISO web site. And it’s FREE! Free as in beer! Isn’t that a great way to start the Holiday Season?

Ah, OOXML. We spent almost two years with you. And something tells me we’re not about to end such an interesting relationship. What a story, what an adventure it has been! With some hindsight, I am not disappointed to see OOXML reach the ISO status. My work at the Afnor my contributions to NOOOXML and OpenForum Europe have taught me a lot about people, institutions. I’ve gained some real friends, men and women that are bound by a common experience of a common fight, and one that is all the more beautiful because it was an essentially fair and noble one. I have also seen corruption, greed, little and not so little treasons, servility (especially in those so-called reasonable people) fear, fear in my opponents and fear in myself and my friends. I have seen all this.  Now that OOXML is an ISO standard, it is perhaps time to realize that it’s not just a “dirty standard”, but a standard that has shown the complete irrelevance of ISO in the matters of IT. ISO management will continue to clinge to their obsolescent ideology like old soviet leaders who thought communism was at hand’s reach in 1989 or like U.S. President G.W. Bush who still thinks in 2008 that free market has fundamentally no issue at all. But I digress.

To all those I have worked with on OOXML, I would like to express my deepest and most sincere wishes in this beginning Holiday Season. To all those against whom I have fought, I send my respects. “Mission Accomplished”, folks: Don’t sing it too loud, nobody would believe you.

 Correction/Clarification: OOXML is not readily available on the ISO web site. You have to agree to a license that essentially does make it a closed standard subject to obligations to access the documents. Why am I not surprised?

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Numbers, Downloads and Straws

Fedora 10 has been released, got many good reviews, while Mac sales are still up and this is not even the Holiday Season. The other day, this article caught my eyes. What it is essentially saying is that the download numbers for Fedora. It only takes into account the IP addresses and one version of Fedora. It seems, based on these numbers, that Fedora users amount to a solid 9.5 million bunch.

This would make Fedora a Linux distribution with an user base comparable to Mac users. I understand that there are inherent uncertainties and inaccuracies in the method of counting the users. Besides, downloads are a relatively relevant factor in assessing any software’s adoption. However, Fedora’s counting methods does eliminate a great deal of doubles and failed downloads by recording only static IP addresses. It remains nonetheless inaccurate, but does capture a pretty telling picture of the situation.

GNU/Linux distributions have rarely been counted like one counts the licenses of Microsoft licenses of Windows. There is a very simple reason for this oddity: Very few OEM dare to sell computers with any distribution installed. First, GNU/Linux distributions used to be something for nerds, and second, even when the market “took off” for them hardware vendors would not have put their relationship with Microsoft in peril. The history of pressures against OEMs by Redmond is well-known.

So this left the industry, the analysts and the press in a complete ignorance of the true numbers related to operating systems. I am not saying that Fedora numbers are accurate. In fact, something that could tell me they are is that by claiming at least 9.5 million users, they are essentially claiming that their community is larger than the one of Ubuntu, the supposedly most popular distribution out there. How do we know it is? Canonical is making up pretty much a synthesis between the number of CDs it sells and the downloads it serves. And Canonical claims 8 million users. Another, quite empirical tracking of the users of GNU/Linux distributions is the Distrowatch website. On the right side of their pages you will see a ranking of distribution based on how many static IP addresses visit their website once a day. Here again, this has nothing of a scientific measurement, but it has been surprisingly accurate over longer periods of time (1 year or even 6 months) in terms of measuring the trends inside the world of Linux distributions. In short, Distrowatch measures what wasn’t thought possible to be measured: the ZeitGeists and trends inside the FOSS community. Over the last few years, Distrowatch has ranked Ubuntu the most popular distribution ever. Fedora right now is at the fourth rank, one it has been around for the last few years as well.

This piece is not about deciding who among the Fedora project, Ubuntu or Distrowatch is right. It is about an industry that has acknowledged the power of FOSS and GNU/Linux on the server but refuses to see that although the Emperor is not walking naked, it definitely is not dressed that well.

If we take the Fedora numbers, divide them by two and do the same with the numbers of Ubuntu, that would give us an impressive number for “an operating system for hobbyists”. But what we should not forget in that count is the other distributions. Take for granted that today I will not bug you with the ones that are in the southern section of the Distrowatch rankings. But what about OpenSuse, Mint, Mandriva? Let’s put them at one million each and ignore the rest of the candidates. Together with Ubuntu and Fedora, this estimate that I would qualify as conservative (when should I stop cutting and dividing those numbers to sound serious?) makes GNU/Linux not the distant third, but the second most used operating systems behind the Windows family. Remember me when you’ll read the next analyst report stating the immaturity of Linux on the desktop. These numbers make sense, and we should think about them. They mean something is happening, and it does so by flying under the radar. All the more interesting to watch, I guess.

Don’t open up the champagne, folks; this is just the beginning….

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We now use a CMS and so can you…

After some time of long and intensive work, we completed our migration to our new infrastructure. We migrated our corporate website to a new server and we moved from a FreeBSD-powered server running Caudium to a Gentoo platform with Apache running on top of it. You won’t notice much, except for the language selector. However we changed everything under the hood. Our website was minimalistic and Caudium made it fast.

We now use the Ikaaro CMS for our website and will soon use its facilities such as calendar and corporate wiki for everyday operations. Ikaaro is developed by our good friends at Itaapy, a french FOSS company that is located exactly on the other side of the hill of Montmartre, where Ars Aperta is also located. Ikaaro is very easy to use and I encourage everyone to take a look at the tools developed by Itaapy: they’re GPL v3 and some are actually ODF-centric. Last but not least, our community web site wich hosts many things (although it’s not being advertised enough) and used to host one of the Pootle servers for OpenOffice.org will stay the same and does not migrate.

I would like to thank everyone at Itaapy and Ars Aperta for this work; stay tuned for announcements related to both Ars Aperta and Itaapy in the future.

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So you thought OpenOffice.org controlled ODF? Think again…

These news are a week old, but I thought it would be wise to have the dust settle a bit before writing about them.
What was announced last week? The OpenOffice.org project had opened a project called the ODF Toolkit. What this project was all about, really, was to design a toolkit for ODF Documents. It included, obviously, the capacity the create applications producing ODF. But the goal was much broader than that; the ODF Toolkit was and is a piece of the essential “plumbing” for processing ODF documents.

In this regard, Sun (as the main copyright holder and steward of the OOo project) decided to have it hosted elsewhere than on OpenOffice.org and emphasize the open aspect of this project. As such, IBM joined the announcement and the project. This is to show that ODF is not “an OpenOffice-thing” as we heard too much in the past.

All in all, this is a very good move. The license of the toolkit has been changed to the Apache License 2.0, which opens the project to the whole Apache ecosystem (and to IBM as well) but still keeps the compatibility with the OpenOffice.org project (OpenOffice.org 3.0 uses the LGPL v3 license).  On a strategic point of view, the toolkit aims to be the  center for contributions related to ODF applications and ODF platforms. On the OpenOffice.org level, this allows some indirect contributions, as the ODF Toolkit will have obvious influence in the future of OpenOffice.org. Meanwhile, you can learn more and contribute to the future of OpenOffice.org through the ODF @ WWW project, which aims to explore new ways to edit ODF documents and new use cases for OpenOffice.org.

Enjoy!

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Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

I have refrained to express most of my political views in this blog, although I very often pushed the case for a better democracy though the means of real freedom of information and unbiased competition to the benefit of the public good. But today I thought I would write something different; something that will probably not matter as I’m a French citizen and hence cannot vote in the U.S.

Today is the Fourth of November 2008. The whole world is waiting for the results of the U.S. Presidential election as it will not be just an important moment among others, but as a defining moment, both for America and the world.

In many ways, the result of this election will change the world as we know it. Not because nothing else ever happened aside it: The global financial system is in turmoil and will probably not recover for a long time, the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan are anything but solved issues while the rest of the Middle East listens to the growing rumble of marching troops. The global warming affects everyone and especially the weakest, poorest on our planet, while endangering both the human kind and our entire ecosystem.

To these grim perspectives, America, and by extension the Western World at large have two possible options: Going down the pace our civilization has taken since three decades or trying to create something new. By something new I don’t just mean a reform of our financial system; you don’t reform an ideologically-driven and greed-powered system. Any reform will ultimately prove temporary; any reform will be just this, a reform, and what we need is a deep change in the way we work and our way of life. In short what we need is to devise an alternative to ourselves and an irrevocable departure from the ideologies that have been the plague of the past century. By ideologies, I mean of course nazism, fascism and communism; but I also mean what is defined through multiple names, from neo-conservatism to integrist market ideology.

To be sure, I usually hold the basic capitalistic system to be a system that works, and works even better when we achieve something very close to free and unbiased market. But no system defined by humans wether theoretical or practical can be perfect; and that’s why we can use tools such as the scientific method to progress. Unfortunately, the twentieth century that has seen an explosion in our technological endeavors has also seen an explosion in absolute theories. Our sin was not so much to have created them, as hateful as some of them can be: The past century has always looked for absolutes after having perverted its very idea of the Sacred. Our sin, rather, has been to implement them to their most extreme extent. 1945, 1989, 2008. Keep these three years in mind.

You may think my labeling of financial capitalism is overrated and extreme in its own terms: I beg to differ. What we call Globalization has started before we had even heard of that name, and the damages our financial system has caused in social, political and environmental terms is dramatically high. But as important as those damages, the methods that were used and that are used today, only succeeded in enrich a few while breaking everyone else’s moral ground, unveiling the unacknowledged intent behind thirty years of subtle lies and half-truths: The end of the State as we know it and the coming of age of a corporate-controlled countries. There is no need to believe in plots, nor to be a conspiracy nut: most of this was actually thought and implemented by some powerful people to gain more power and money. That’s what many of us, if not all, want, although to most of us, more buying power at the supermarket is usually enough.

On an economical point of view, I guess I finally managed to understand the issue through an economical bias that can be explained in the following equation: Capitalism and traditional economics demanded the creation of wealth (through work, mostly) and its redistribution in (hopefully rising) salaries. Modern capitalism was generating wealth through speculation, wild return on investment, and the breaking of salaries while keeping the created wealth to itself. This is how we found ourselves in the situation where as the rich were getting richer, the poor were getting poorer and growing as the middle-class was (and is) disappearing. You will notice that what is troubling here is the trend towards breaking the middle-class. Not only can it be bad for the economy, but it is also the middle-class that has been at the origin of democracies worldwide.

One solution to those ever diminishing salaries and the offshoring of jobs was the seemingly unlimited credit. Few dared to point out that as the credit was stretching, so was the time of paying back the loan, which can be assimilated to a time of servitude. Servitude you say? Isn’t that a bit extreme? Few officially declared free men and citizens went from freedom to slavery, but most of them who did had a progressive slope to it.

Now that the credit has disappeared -at least to the regular consumers and citizens- the only issue is to know what will be the way to a recovering economy. Rising salaries? More credit? Something else? A new energy source? I am too ignorant to know it, but let’s go back to the elections.

What the U.S.A need is a man strong enough to stand in the middle of the storm unabashed by the special interests’ groups and ideologists of all kinds. What this country needs is someone who knows better than sticking to the talking points and being “convinced” by the ideas of a past generation. What this country needs is a man who will bring solutions to take out America and the Western World at large from the moral blunder that eight years of an hypocritical war “ against terror” and neo-conservative ideology has done to what I dare to call our common values. By the way, can someone tell me where Ben Laden is? That’s the last chapter I have sticked to ever since 2001. But as I write myself every so often, things change. V. Klemperer, a german philosopher who was privileged to have studied nazism at its closest, stressed that any ideology always comes with a “barnum side-effect”. It means that the leaders of that ideology or even the system itself keep some room for some contradictions designed to suit the ones who benefit the most of that ideology. In Communist Russia, the political caste was enjoying varied and regular food everyday, the rest of the population running mostly on potatoes and cabbage.

The dominant ideology of our present world has told us the market was not just always right, but that it was the only salvation possible. But the market, albeit a very effective tool if regulated to the benefits of citizens, is neither right, nor the only system possible. By erecting a tool as an idol, the rules of the game got twisted, and neither the generations of the first half of the past century, nor the ones of the “baby-boom” could help it: one was entrenched in doubts and ghosts of the second world-war, the other had inherited the illness of their parents: the inability to think out of an ideologically-defined framework. Yuppies have been communists, socialists, anarchists, or weed-smokers; they ended up being CEOs, shareholders and lawyers, but few understood the merit of a real alternative, let alone the benefits of a truly open and inclusive society.

Sarcasm put aside, I hope that America has this man; but it would be her chance, the chance to push the country in a new, hopefully glorious era and the chance to change the world, because, contrary to what many French will tell you, America still leads the world, in many ways yet.

I hope and think that this man could be Barack Obama. I believe he will bring change to Washington, and good to the world. He will be faced by challenges of all kind, and I hope he will be successful: for of his success our freedom and example will ultimately depend. Barack Obama also seems to be someone who understands that our time is the time for change: His use of the Internet as a political tool shows how much he has learned and understood from our world and from what needs to change. I am praying for tonight, and wish for a new, glorious dawn, rising over the Land of Washington, the Land of Liberty.

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Links for the end of October

I am bit swamped these days, and you must have noticed it by now. These things happen: lots of work items, lots of backlog, and lots of exhaustion as well. Since I don’t want to leave this blog « unattended » for even 2 or three weeks, I am posting today some links I find interesting to visit. Enjoy! I’ll be back soon, by the way…

• Microsoft releases Windows Azure. But what is it really? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. It seems it’s a server platform tailored for cloud computing environment. And what is cloud computing? I’m still figuring it out… Seriously, Cloud Computing is the up and coming state-of-the-art in IT. The idea is to use and benefit from data, applications, and networks that are hosted not on your desktop, and not on a server near you. In fact, data and applications are always available but out there, on the Network, in the cloud. Of course, it sounds simple, but it’s very, very complex. It’s a true shift of paradigm, a copernician revolution asking as many questions that it answers, from data portability and users’ rights to virtualized environment and application frameworks. And that’s where players such as Amazon, Joyent and Google are striving. And of course, Microsoft wants to be the dominant player there. So it released a nifty platform that is both a server for running distributed applications and hosting data, and a Microsoft’s Live set of Services. That’s where it’s not clear. They say everything works on Azure, but it seems you better want to use their stuff first. Just like the others, it will work, but… better.

• Do you remember the nice subway map picturing the trends of web sites and online services? Well, that map was for 2007. But there’s the new one I completely missed. Enjoy…

• There you go. Firefox 3 with the newest javascript engine, and all of a sudden, it actually becomes a fast browser on the Mac! Try Minefield, it’s a surprisingly stable development version of Firefox 3 with a different javascript engine.

• Food for thought: I share with them the conviction that large corporation are dwarfing most governments these days. I am no pessimist though: those very same governments could very well come back if they were willing to. But most of them seem to be ideologically blinded, and that’s a pity. Meanwhile, feel free to adhere. It comes from Europe, and it’s free…

• Pondering Boycott Novell must be a funny thing to do. But what’s the problem? The news web site is accused by some to be a troll machine, while some others worship it. My view on this is simple: I’m a reader of this web site, and whenever I was involved in some specific situations or was having some solid information on them, I was able to read accurate reports on these. That’s the about the most honest answer I can make. Roy is a good guy, he’s actually taking out the meat and lay it on the table. Should he be doing it in a different fashion, with more style and less passion? Perhaps. Meanwhile, I have more fun reading his prose than the one Mr Byfield regales us with along with his paternalistic advices on why we, the community of freetards & beardies, should learn from big businesses.

• People are getting busy preparing the OooCon 2008 in Beijing; for our Asian community, the location makes it an obvious point of focus. But this illustrates how OpenOffice.org has become an international community of choice. Good luck with the conference! And see you next year, OOoCon.

• News without a link: OpenOffice.org 2.4.2, the last maintenance release of the 2.x branch, is about to be uploaded. If you don’t want to use the 3.0 (some organization needs time before fully qualifying new versions of office suite), that one is for you. Stay tuned.

• News without a link continued: the ISO 26300 (aka ODF 1.0) gets an errata, and you’re welcome to comment on it for the next 15 days. No big news, here again, it’s all about maintenance…

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The Speech

Louis Suarez-Potts uploaded the speech he gave on the OOo 3 Launch Party both in English and in French. Mine was given in French for obvious reasons. I thought some of my francophone readers would be interested in it as well. Enjoy!

Bonsoir, et merci à tous d’être là. Je veux tout d’abord adresser mes plus profonds remerciements à la Région Ile de France, à son Président et à son souci apporté à l’innovation technologique durable et responsable. Je veux en particulier remercier Jean-Baptiste Roger dont l’aide et le soutien nous a été précieux. Silicon Sentier, et notamment Paul Richardet, qui a été à nos côtés, ce centre qui bouge, qui fait bouger, qui crée et soutient tous ceux qui entreprennent, découvrent, et font du monde numérique français ce qu’il est.

Plus personnellement, les gens que j’aurais à citer sont nombreux, alors je me cantonnerai à ceux-là: mes parents et Melissa qui sont aussi présents ce soir dans la salle. Ce sont eux qui sont présents dans les bons moments comme dans les moins bons. Il me faut également y rajouter mes collègues d’Ars Aperta, Jerome Dumonteil, Jean-Marie Gouarné et Yvon Rastetter qui sont encore aujourd’hui assez fous pour me supporter.

De façon plus essentielle, je voudrais aujourd’hui remercier toute la communauté OpenOffice.org qui s’investit jour après jour dans notre projet. Louis disait tout à l’heure que nous ne sommes séparés ni par des montagnes, ni par des océans, mais par la seule limite de notre ambition. C’est vrai. Pourtant, notre communauté est présente sur toute la planète, et elle est prête à des sacrifices important pour contribuer au plus grand projet Libre. OpenOffice.org est présent dans le monde entier, et à cette heure-ci, en Birmanie, au Laos, en Chine et dans toute l’Asie, les équipes de localisation et de distribution sont à pied d’oeuvre pour mettre à disposition de tous OpenOffice.org3.0 dans leur langue native; au Brésil, en Afrique, les ingénieurs travaillent déjà pour tenir les meilleurs délais. Et dans la torpeur de la nuit du Gange, notre communauté rêve déjà avec la satisfaction d’avoir contribué à un logiciel libre, instrument de libération, d’émancipation équitable et durable.

Le projet Francophone n’est pas en reste. Je tiens à remercier Sophie Gautier pour sa contribution capitale à OpenOffice.org. Certains le savent, Sophie n’est plus responsable du projet francophone. Mais elle ne nous quitte pas, elle va désormais contribuer au projet différemment, mais de façon tout aussi importante, et je veux le souligner. Merci, Sophie. Je veux d’ailleurs accueillir ici, Jean-Baptiste Faure, l’un des deux nouveaux responsables du projet francophone. Félicitations, Jean-baptiste, et bonne chance.

Cette tribune, ce soir, n’est pas complète. Elle n’est pas complète car il manque une personne qui nous a soutenu depuis le début, nous et bien d’autres projets, et qui se doit de participer à cet événement ce soir. J’aimerais la remercier. J’appelle Eric Mahé à venir nous rejoindre à la tribune.

OpenOffice.org n’est pas juste un projet extraordinaire, porteur d’espoir pour le monde; en inspirant par la puissance de son exemple plutôt que par l’exemple de sa puissance, ce projet a créé la meilleure suite logicielle au monde. Meilleure, parce qu’elle est Libre, c’est à dire libre pour tous, et porteuse de liberté, par sa qualité et par son usage de formats ouverts et standards. Je pense bien sûr au format OpenDocument et au PDF. Bien sûr, certains veulent utiliser ce label de formats ouverts à leurs propres fins. C’est leur droit s’ils le souhaitent, ce sera leur chance s’ils y contribuent avec nous; l’invitation reste toujours d’actualité. Mais me direz-vous, qu’a-t’ on mis dans cette version 3.0 pour en dire autant de bien? La liste des nouveautés serait trop longue: je ne retiendrais que quelques points majeurs.

Une nouvelle architecture améliorant les performances et plaçant les extensions au coeur des usages d’OpenOffice.org, la capacité d’importer des documents PDF, de gérer et d’éditer des pages de wiki et de blogs directement depuis OpenOffice.org, la distribution commune avec le projet Mozilla du client mail Thunderbird et du calendrier Lightning; j’ai gardé le meilleur pour la fin: OpenOffice.org est désormais 100% native sur le Mac. OpenOffice.org 3.0 est disponible au téléchargement. Merci à tous, et bonne soirée!

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