Links for the 20th of May 2009

• I wrote a bit more about Ars Aperta’s new certification project. The basic idea is to award certifications to organizations that contribute or lead FOSS projects. Several types of certification exist, but in this article I discuss the specifics of what is probably the first comprehensive FOSS certification to date for companies.
• Some people do not seem to be happy with Microsoft Office’s implementation of ODF. Check out the ODF Alliance blog. What I find amusing, besides the fact that the unfortunate side of this situation, is that there seems to be a willingness to explain that OOXML was not so bad after all.
• I could point to other blogs, but this one comes from Jeremy Allison, author of Samba, now working for the great Satan Google. It’s actually quite interesting because what Jeremy is saying is that all this dispute seems to be based on the impression that Microsoft did the minimum to have ODF work inside MS Office. My take on this is we should first stop getting ballistic at each other, especially inside the ODF TC. What is needed in the interest of ODF and the users, is to have a careful examination not on the ODF conformance in MS Office, but on why, based on experience, the interoperability is severely hampered when using ODF with MS Office. Based on this analysis we should be able to go forward. But don’t let this fool you: this has, I’m afraid, nothing to do with the development of ODF 1.2.
• As an interesting reminder, here’s what the European Commission was saying about Microsoft’s announcement on the support of ODF inside MS Office last year.
• Now, Ladies and Gents, something completely different that do not require you getting your hands dirty with Redmondian half-truths: You can test OpenOffice.org’s wiki publisher extension. What does it do? It allows you to write your document directly inside OpenOffice.org, and it then translates it into the Mediawiki syntax; the extension integrates a wizard that is used to directly upload the content to any Mediawiki-style wiki out there provided you have the address, your username and password.

Enjoy the Spring!