Moved by Freedom – Powered by Standards

As the OOoCON 2007 is now over, some of you may ask what OpenOffice.org has in store for 2007 and 2008?

That’s a good question. I’ll try to answer it. There will be two major milestones for OpenOffice.org in 2008. The first one will be the final agreement on MS OOXML. The outcome of this decision will be crucial for the future of OpenOffice.org, the industry, and our ability to exchange information freely through documents. The second milestone will be the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0. I have already described a bit what there would be inside it, and Louis’ keynote in Barcelona showed the rest.

However, the 3.0 release will not be a clearcut advancement for OpenOffice.org as a software. As our development process is incremental, the 3.0 will be just that, a release that will incude a breadth of new features but that will not fundamentally change from the previous release of OpenOffice.org. So do not expect something completely different, you would be disappointed.

There will be major features included in the 3.0 though, and it might be interesting to see the difference between the 2.0.x releases and the 3.0. As the old chinese saying goes, « sometimes it’s good to turn back and contemplate the way one has gone ».

What you will see in the 3.0 will in essence be the progressive transformation of OpenOffice.org into a suite of software that effectively integrates that age of the participation. I will not speak of the « Web 2.0 » itself, as I think the 2.0 will soon change into a 3.0. And OpenOffice.org will be the first to carry out that number! More seriously though, do expect more communication, modularity, a breadth of extensions, increased performance and much more web-readiness.

As it turns out, I’m already blogging using only OpenOffice.org and the Sun Blog Publisher (a wonder in itself) one of the best-crafted extensions in store When it comes to wiki editing, I’m using OpenOffice.org and two very good extensions allowing me to type and compose a normal document and exporting it under different wiki syntaxes.

The reason why all this works so well is twofold. In some way, this also related to some of our new initiatives in the field of marketing (more on that later). First, we have to stop , and already have, in some cases, thinking in terms of productivity suite or office suite. It just does not work like that any more. Just like it would be quite stupid for a company like, say, Google, to think about Google Docs, Spreadsheets, and now Presentations as one, squared and coherent set of offerings, we have to stop looking at the « product » itself and consider its potential uses in the age of social networks, the long tail, the small head and what have you, the Conversation. Google does not think about its online office suite that way. Each and everyone of its products can potentiall collaborate, mash up with others, and fit the best for an user in many cases.

We thus would like to think of OpenOffice.org as a set of tools for creativity, enabling people and organizations to produce content. By content we may be a bit specialized in the field of documents, but even the document metaphor is changing these days and becoming more the notion of structured , hyperlinked, mashable content accessible and editable through many interfaces. And this is what OpenOffice.org really is about: ODF, XForms, Web services, wiki, blogs, images, etc. You can already create and manipulate all this content directly from within OpenOffice.org. Now what will also be added is the social and collaborative aspects of this evolution: we’re adding Thunderbird and a calendar. Available as separate products, we will be able to gain some real clout inside the entreprise business and be meeting the needs of many of our exisiting users. And IM ability could be on the way through a simple extension.Second, our launching of our new extensions web site allows anybody to contribute to OpenOffice.org much like Firefox extensions and plugins allow hundreds of people and companies to offer solutions and code.

In this way, OpenOffice.org will become much less a coherent product understood in a traditional sense than a platform offering countless opportunities, code, solutions to anybody, anywhere, at anytime. And my vision of this is that perhaps everyting concerning OpenOffice.org lies in this word, « the platform ».

Talking about vision and users, OpenOffice.org is set to start more innovative marketing techniques, such as building a presence inside social networks. We already have one in FaceBook,by the way, and we’re only experimenting for the moment. Of course, many « serious » marketers will find that to belong to the world of hype. So I thought about giving some more reliable data about OpenOffice.org today. Some of my readers may be interested, for instance, in the major deployments of OpenOffice.org registered. Talking about this, Macedonia just announced that OpenOffice.org and Linux would be deployed on 180,000 seats of its schools. Stay tuned for more. Because there IS more to come.

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OpenOffice.org, Web 2.0

So the conference is now in its last day and slowly drawing to an end.

More interesting conferences to attend. I’m now at a conference showing the famous « Symphony » from IBM. It has a really nice interface is based on OpenOffice.org but works through the Eclipse framework (Eclipse being used as a rich client platform). My only regret so far was that I was not able to attend the ODF Camp as I had too little time for this. The guys there have locked themselves for an entire day and lots of work has been going on (more on that later).

Soon we’ll be heading for the final roundtable on ODF, and it will be a great way to end this conference as the « newcomers » will be able to express themselves on this event.

Anyway, this conference was delicious. We had a great time in Barcelona, and my deepest gratitude goes to Softcatala, the Catalonian NGO behind the Catalonian OpenOffice.org project. They really made the best OpenOffice.org conference possible, and I’d like to salute their achievement; but, and as important as that, my thanks also go to the community in general. Nothing would be possible without you, of course. And it was my pleasure to meet all you this year. You have no idea how much I love you.

Namaste!

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General, OpenOffice.org

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OpenOffice.org, Web 2.0

This year I feel we’re going to have a great OpenOffice.org Conference, and that’s not just because I love Barcelona.

I would like to invite the conference attendants to what has now become a tradition in the OOoCons, the Native-Language Party. Those parties are interesting opportunities to socialize and meet interesting persons. If I remember well, I met with Don Harbison (IBM, chair of the OASIS Adoption TC) in Koper in 2005. We were in a splendid place back then, a garden of the city museums. It was dark and the gardens was full of roman ruins, enlightened by candles and torches. We were enjoying local food (namely wine, cheese and sausages) and talking about everything, being very excited to see the people with whom we’re working all the year but don’t have the opportunity to meet in person.

So this year, the Native-Language Party will be held in the university gardens in the center of Barcelona. Don will be there and I promess him he won’t regret his stay. A beautiful place that I had the occasion to visit in April, the party shall start around 7:00 pm on the 18th of September.

Hope to meet you all there!

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General, OpenOffice.org

One much advertised part of the answer made by the Afnorwas the proposal to merge OOXML and ODF.

I always thought that it was a great idea, because it sounds to me as a realistic way out to settle the dual standards conundrum. This concrete solution is also workable in a transparent and standard way: The OASIS and the Ecma should both initiate the project. This scenario is already planned and explained in the procedure of the JTC-1.

There are however some issues that need to be overcome first: they could be discussed at the BRM but I just don’t think there would be enough time for this. According to the French proposal, OOXML would first be split into two, OOXML-Core and OOXML-Extensions. The Core part would contain the essential elements of the OOXML spec, while the extensions would be taken out of the standardization work, as it would carry all the unnecessary, problematic and the so-called deprecated parts of the specification. The issue however, is to define in a consensual way what could form the Core part, and that is, I think not an easy work at all. There are too much politics involved in this, and the technical work itself is extremely difficult as one would need to have a strong granularity while parsing out the specification. Microsoft’s late attempt to propose that the VML part be taken out is clearly not enough.

Below you will find a schema inspired from the Afnor’s proposal and showing the roadmap of such a merger. I believe that with some good will from the Ecma and Microsoft this could be feasible.

Another interesting “merger”, so to speak, is the announcement that IBM is effectively joining the OpenOffice.org community. I think it’s some great news for OpenOffice.org and IBM. This means more resources, more skills, and more stability for our project. It also means shows clearly that OpenOffice.org is a really open community, where many entities and individuals can contribute. I would thus like to welcome IBM and congratulate them for this excellent choice. We’re looking forward working with you!

NB to the conspiracy theorists: This blog does not reflect the views of the High Command Center of the Anti-Microsoft and Anti-American Conspiracy Group. Since you cunningly located us (we, the conspirators, sometimes referred as the Illuminati) somewhere in Europe, we will be moving soon. We’ll be going somewhere in Africa. No, I won’t tell you where. It’s top secret. Mark Shuttleworth is not involved in this plot. I swear, Ptew, Ptew.

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General, OpenDocument Format