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Today I would like to react to the vague of criticism and skepticism that crushed on the announcement that the European Commission would give way to the filing of an anti-trust complaint by the Norwegian software vendor Opera.

Critics were essentially insisting that this whole new legal action was a (bad?) remake of the trial that more or less ended up by the unbundling of Windows Media Player from Windows not such a long time ago. As everyone knows, the practical outcome of this hardly left a dent in Microsoft’s monopoly on the desktop. Other critics were keen on pointing out that the true answer Microsoft’s domination on the desktop should be brought by the market. Here again, that point was applied in the context of the Opera complaint.

I usually tend to give credit to the latter kind of critics. After all, trials will have a limited action if real competition does not exist on the market. Yet, most legal actions and trial bear -even in a purely economical context- a symbolic force that “the market” will never be able to have. A trial against Microsoft on any particular point of its monopoly (and for that matter, on any corporation perverting the market because of its illegitimate monopolistic position) essentially conveys the message that regardless of the possible sanction against the company, its wrongdoings are not morally tolerable anymore. Were it only because of this last point, I still do find that that legal actions are sometimes justified.

The Opera “case”, if it is apt to qualify it by this name, is actually a bit different. Certainly the bundling of Internet Explorer is problematic. While it might be argued that Firefox won 30 % of market share by its sole merit, it might also be argued that Internet Explorer won up to 94% thanks to the sole merit of its birth (inside Microsoft’s Corp) and its bundling with the Windows operating system. The Opera story however, conveys two new concerns.

The first one is, as Hakon Lie coined it himself, is about the future of the Web. Several issues plague Internet Explorer: safety, lack of support for certain standards, an oddly degraded mode precisely when it is set to run in its unforgettable “Standards Mode”… Someone at Mozilla recently wrote that most Americans spend more time on their browser surfing the Internet than driving their car. That last one should make us think a bit about the importance of web browsers and open standards in general.

The second concern is the one of the freedom and the integrity of the Internet. But this issue is perhaps best embodied by the name of one Microsoft’s technology: Silverlight. I should rather call it Silverlight and open standards. Just like with OOXML, Microsoft sometimes seems to have issues with open standards on the web. And instead of focusing on how to build and keep the Internet open, it tries every trick in the book to have people deploy and use its Flash-like technology, Silverlight. Silverlight is actually much more than Adobe’s Flash, and while Flash is also problematic to the Internet itself, Silverlight benefits from Microsoft’s own platform’s ubiquity to spread quickly. The rest of the strategy seems to include the heavy pressure or payment for well-known web sites and media services to migrate to Silverlight.

The problem with this of course, is that no matter what the extravagant Mr De Icaza will say or do, Silverlight is not multi-platform (running it on Linux is a pain at best) and that it truly locks users away while transforming the Internet into a multimedia delivery service where Microsoft is the sole technology provider and the content comes from major media industry players. At this point I will have people objecting that it’s not that bad, but it is important then to counter this argument by reminding that the Internet has never been a multimedia delivery service for major commercial content owners. Television has been, and the architecture of the major news and TV networks in general is orthogonally different from the architecture of the Internet. But Microsoft does not seem to care: they broke the ISO and some national standards bodies to have OOXML standardized, they may well be willing to break the Internet in order to satisfy their goals.

In the end, what the European Commission might go against is not the bundling of an application and a platform, it is the actual openness and -would dare to say this without touching too much to not so different issues?- neutrality of the Internet. Remember: the Internet is our common good, our common wealth. Don’t let it go private.

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Some unfortunate news have been spreading around the web recently concerning « OpenOffice.org dying » and has sparkled some interesting articles. I got interviewed here, some very good answer to those extravagant claims was posted on the Sun OpenOffice.org’s blog, and I am pretty sure that we will read more and more about it soon.

I would just like to mention three additional points before describing my view of a “ post-Novell” OpenOffice.org.

• The claims made by Michael Meeks, especially the ones related to the kind of data he shows do not take into account the extensions repository. I agree that extensions are by definition not part of the code base, but given the rate of upload of new extensions we’re having at the moment (50 extensions during December 2008) this starts to become non-trivial. Hence the data does not take into account the contributions made almost exclusively by non-Sun staff.

• Michael makes all those claims and that’s his right to do so but -and that’s not an ad-hominem attack- one should remember that Michael Meeks has not contributed a single line of code to OpenOffice.org since two years. Both his own blog and the logs of the commits show that Michael is nowhere to be seen. What shall we be doing with this? Pretty simply, I value both code and non-code contributions (contrary to Michael), and I have a hard time understanding where Michael stands anywhere in our community. Calling OpenOffice.org anything similar to a dead horse is a strong statement for someone who does not contribute, but only criticizes a project.

• Some time ago stats about CVS commits surfaced and the results were eloquent: Sun was by far the strongest contributor. Others counted Novell, Red Hat, Debian, etc. But these were not the second largest contributor. The label “ community” was the second one. By this it was meant, people with no “famous” affiliation contributed more than anything Novell was.

So will we survive a fork from Novell? I do believe we will. First, the fork is already made. I haven’ t seen developers leaving in flock to go-give-your-code-and-let-us-make-money-for-ourselves.org

Second, a fork is only really interesting if at some point it sensibly differs from its parent. Concerning the parent, I think a lot of work has to be done but things have improved a lot, the product is great, adoption is exponential and the future looks exciting. The fork itself is a bit of a mystery. Of course, we will likely see some bug hunting and a bunch of cool patches that will end up being implemented inside OpenOffice.org unless those patches are actually ported to the fork. There will also be the much-overstated bazaar-like incremental development (so you don’t need a roadmap in theory) to consider, but above all, my little finger tells me there will be a lot of “contributions” made to ensure the fork will support more and more Microsoft Novell technologies and hence stay the faithful and loyal second of Microsoft Office for ever.

Still excited about go-oo? Be my guest, go ahead and contribute!

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This post is a follow-up of yesterday’s piece, Predictions & Resolutions. Today I will list many things that do not relate to I.T. , some others that do. But in general, I’ll share what I’m mostly uncertain with for the year 2009.Doubts

•  Israël has the right to exist, live in peace. Palestinians do as well. That’s why a terrorist movement like the Hamas has no right to send missiles on Israeli cities. But Israel’s counter-attack will be ineffective against the Hamas, I’m afraid. The reason for this is the very structure of the Hamas. It’s a distributed group, and so is Al-Quaeda and in general, terrorist movements. You cannot fight against those structures with the usual means of warfare. Another thing I was at pain understanding for years was the seemingly anti-Israeli bias public opinions have all around the world. Some are outrightly manipulated for religious reasons. But some are not, and have nothing in the way of antisemitic views. In short the whole perception is the one of a reverse David vs. Goliath fight. There are several reasons for this. But something need to be done to come back to a more balanced view and more balanced ambitions from both sides. I hope, in this doubt section, that the Obama presidency could help.
• I don’t think governments in general are taking the whole measure of the crisis (perhaps except the upcoming Obama administration). This is why 2009 will be painful. In several European countries, the political and generational gap, not to speak of the social inequalities that have been growing in a way this continent was accustomed to will sparkle riots, and lots of instability. It has already started in Greece.
• European governments all buy into the too worn-off free market ideology. As we have come to understand, this is an ideology (and thus is a factor of danger) that has proven to be a failure, in the same way communism was a failure, allowing some happy few to benefit the system and generating lots of noise. Now don’t get me wrong: free market is a beautiful idea, (perhaps, some might argue, just like communism in the book was) but it is merely just this, an idea, and an economist’s traditional cornucopia of sorts. Now these governments seem to be too busy with exerting pressure on their own citizens by trying to control medias and the Internet than actually addressing people’s problems. They might actually be powerless in front of such a crisis, but they’re also unwilling to bring change to our societies, change that would make their own mental horizon change itself. The power of habits and customs….
• On a different level, OOXML will continue to be pushed by Microsoft and marketed to everyone, governments included. That’s a trap many will fall into, but as you know there’s a way out: ODF. Meanwhile, the deception OOXML is should be fully advertised so that all can be warned.
• Will Apple ever include ODF support in iWork? iWork 09 doesn’t seem to support it, but I might be wrong. TextEdit is not enough. 
• Software Patents will be pushed again and again in Europe. Contrary to my friend Trond Arne Undheim, I don’t think that ex-ante disclosure is that of a good thing: it is merely a much welcome, yet minimal, hygienic measure to an insane situation affecting the I.T. market and innovation.

Hopes

• OpenOffice.org will go out of traditional desktop application.  Perhaps not in 2009, but very likely later. I’ll go back on this in another future post, but you can check this out…
• I have been a strong critic of Novell’s agreement of Microsoft, but there is one thing I have never denied and that would be how great OpenSuse is for a distribution. Now what’s both interesting and unfortunate with OpenSuse is that the Novell’s agreement with Microsoft does explicitely not apply to OpenSuse, and that the distribution really opened itself, as a project and as a platform on which to build on. So my legal question here is to check how much legally chaotic OpenSuse got. By welcoming everyone to contribute code, it might have created a situation where neither Novell, nor Microsoft could  exert any kind of pressure or FUD, as their own intellectual property (whatever that means) is now strongly diluted in packaged mess. 
• I love SecondLife, I really do. But sim crossing and avatar limits? Come on, get real, Linden Labs. Despite those shortcomings, I’m spending more and more times there. 
• ODF has already been adopted by 16 governments. My hope is to see that number double by the end of 2009.
• All in all, I expect 2009 to be a year of crisis, but to be a year of positive change in the world. Or perhaps it will be a year of full-blown crisis. But even then, let’s all remember that the hour before dawn is the darkest time of the night…

Happy new year to everyone!

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The time of the year for predictions started in December, the time of resolutions started a few days ago. Let’s tie those together in this post…Predictions:

•  It will be a great year for Free & Open Source Software. I know it’s been written several times that because of dwindling I.T. budgets resulting from the global crisis money would be less spent on expensive licensing, but I do buy into this theory. However it’s certainly not the only explanation: Free Software gets better, Microsoft is losing its grip on the desktop (yet tries hard to come back with Silverlight and other initiatives), and applications go in the cloud.
• Talking about the cloud, we will see this trend going. But there’s a paradox in this pattern: do not believe that people only need a browser and do not pay attention to their actual desktop. They do, and they want a nice user experience, bells and whistles that do not actually annoy them, and fewer glitches.
• It’s been a reality in 2008, and will get even more obvious by 2009: consumers dictate what they want as an user experience, corporate (office) computing follows, just the opposite as what was going on in the eighties. But perhaps a better way of putting it is that those lines defined by mom and pop marketing concepts are blurring. 
• Office computing, the good old days: Microsoft seems to have some trouble implementing ODF. But they claim to have no difficulty with OOXML. That alone should remind all of us of an all too well known pattern: the format wars. It’s made a come-back ever since 2007, it will get sneaker, although less flamboyant in 2009.
• Microsoft is changing. Yes you read that well, on this blog. I sincerely think that there is an old guard and a new guard in Microsoft. I also think that this company is becoming more and more like any other big business: people will be fired by the thousands, and that does not make me happy. But while some of the teams there want to play a normal game, most of the people who call the shots don’t want to do that; hence friction will be in the air. I don’t really expect to see a visible schism inside Microsoft happening before 2011-2012, but it will be interesting to watch what will be going on in 2009 on this issue.

Resolutions

• This year, I promess: I will make money. I swear. Tons of money. Yeah, right. 
•  I’ll get greener. I don’t have a car, happen to eat organic food very frequently, recycle my trash, but there are many other ways I can contribute to save the planet.
• That’s it, you caught me right there: I will come back on GNU/Linux. What this means is that in my craziest deams, I will have a real workstation with Linux, and a nice MacBook(Pro?) running OS X. Aside DRM on iTunes which seems to stand on an EOL support ever since yesterday, Macs are pretty cool, both on hardware and software. But I miss Linux. I really do.
• Using Linux, I will mostly use KDE 4. I tried it, configured it on several desktops and although it’s not fully completed, it rocks and it’s really impressive. You should give it a try.
• Last but not least? Think hard about how not to annoy my readers.

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