Monthly Archives: October 2009

Running for Lang Representative at the Community Council

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I thought it might help if I’d post here my “official” information page for the OpenOffice.org Community Council Elections. This page can be found on the OpenOffice.org wiki.

A few words on Charles-H. Schulz My name is Charles-H. Schulz and I have been a contributor to the OpenOffice.org project since its 1.0 release. I live in Paris and have been working in several IT-related jobs. Today I run a small consultancy in the fields of Free Software and Open Standards. I’m not really what you will call a technical person, but at least I know how to use a terminal and, among other things, start OpenOffice.org from there. In fact, I even know how to start it as a server in “headless” mode, more accurately. By the way, I’m running a Fedora 11 on a quad core HP computer as my main machine, a two years-old Mac Book Pro you might see me with if you go to Orvieto, and as of very recently a Samsung with Android on it.

My other areas of interest include litterature, History, philosophy and organic food, among other things.

So why am I writing all this? Because we are in the process of electing some of the future members of the OpenOffice.org, and I’m running as a candidate in the Native-Language category. The rules of renewal of Council members are a bit complex, but there are different types of possible candidates that may run, and I’m running in one of them this year. It is the first time I’m running for the Council.

What does Charles do inside OpenOffice.org?I’m doing several things inside OpenOffice.org . I have somewhat of a strange title “Lead of the Native-Language Confederation”. It sounds like it belongs to Battlestar Galactica, but it actually is a very OpenOfficeish thing. What this means is I’m in charge of organizing and helping new and existing communities of OpenOffice.org developers, users, marketers, documentation writers who speak in their own native-language. These communities are called native-language projects. They work with the entire project and are one of the key factors of our success. When I took on that role, they were about 5 of them. Now, they’re around 100. Serving as a volunteer in that position makes one both a player and a witness of how the OpenOffice.org community works. On the one hand I have a social and administrative task, on the other, one should not stop there: you have to look for more volunteers who may start new projects. That’s a fascinating job.

I have also done other things inside our community. I was among the founders of the Business Development project (aka bizdev) and I am also very proud to be a co-lead of the ODF@WWW project. It is an incubator project that fiddles with ODF documents online, and allows them to be edited real time on a wiki and inside OpenOffice.org. In fact, this project is very important for the future of OpenOffice.org, and for our final goal, which is world domination.

What would Charles do in the Community Council?That’s a good question, isn’t it? My first duty, as a “Lang” representative, would be to represent the worldwide communities of OpenOffice.org. I’m not going to make promises like a politician, because this is not a campaign: it’s an information page. So I’m just going to explain what I think I could do there and how I could help. So my first duty would be to express the point of views of these worldwide communities to the Council, which means explaining their issues, their needs and wants. I will also have to work with the other Lang representative (because there’s two of us at the Council) and help the Council run our project. I should also try to get a bigger perspective on things, because OpenOffice.org is not just the addition of all the interests of categories, people and organizations that make up the project. It’s something bigger, more beautiful and more powerful. We are on a mission, and our mission is twofold: make OpenOffice.org one of the best Free Software for the future, and have fun. Because if you don’t have fun, well, you won’t even finish reading what I’m writing. More seriously: The future might be tough. But it’s going to be exciting, and in the end, I think we’re going to have a pretty awesome project, a project with a strong basis and foundation, that will genuinely be a great place for its people and its supporters. At least that’s what I will also try to help with at the Community Council, and I will consider myself satisfied if I remain true to these objectives and to the value of software freedom and true openness.

9 years of magic

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We are now well in the middle of October and this means it’s our usual time of celebration at OpenOffice.org . OpenOffice.org is now 9 years old, which is no small accomplishment for a Free Software project. We will soon all gather to celebrate this event in Orvieto, where the OOoCon will take place between the 3 and 6th of November. (Don’t forget: we have an ODF plugfest at the same place on the 1st and 2nd of November!) Last year has been a good year. Our mirrors saw a significant rise as we released our major release number 3 and its subversions. Our office suite has never been better, never faster, never more versatile than the one we distribute today. Our community has vastly expanded, and is still growing at a healthy rate.

For all this we should be thankful and we should realize we are all contributing to an extraordinary project that helps dozens of million people worldwide, contributes significantly to bridge the digital divide, and is an essential tool of Free Software on potentially any desktop. The future will bring some changes; the nature of these changes is something that is still unknown to us. But regardless of what will happen in the next year (and I believe we should expect the best for OpenOffice.org) we should always remind ourselves the power of the Community.

The power of the Community is not a magical thing, regardless of how I might try to make it sound like it is. The Community itself is quite intangible, but it is only through ourselves and the others with whom we contribute and share that things work, that a project is carried forward and that in some sense, magic happens. Thank you, OpenOffice.org, for these 9 years of magic. I expect to see more next year.

Needles in a haystack (sorting out differences between Free and Open Source Software)

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As announced in my previous post I will try to explain why the differences theoretically existing between Free Software and Open Source are not actual opposites; but why they rather complement each other.

You don’t need to browse the Internet very far to find the two official definitions of Free Software and Open Source Software. The problem, or perhaps the absence of a real problem starts after reading these two pages. The two definitions emphasize the absolute freedom of anyone to run, use, study, modify and redistribute code (the access to the source code being the initial demand) and they pretty much end up at this point.

You have to read the two websites a bit further to realize that the initial “schism” is more a matter of persons and their pursuit of their own goals than any real difference in their perception of technology and software. The paradox is that this schism never really happened, in a sense, although you will find real differences of opinions between, say, Bruce Perens and Richard M. Stallman. What this page, attempting to explain those differences from the official FSF point of view reveals is that there are essentially two groups of theoricians. Some first coined the term Free Software as an ethical movement and emphasized the term “free” as in “freedom”. This left aside another category of people with a not so structured movement, some of whose had been working inside the BSD-licensed software and others who saw value in freedom better expressed as its expression in rights wedged to the very technical object of their attention, the code. These people formalized their views as subtly differing with Free Software and its incarnation(s), the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project. What they were up to was not an ethical, -Simon Phipps might coin the term “holistic”- approach to software, it was rather a pragmatical, no-nonsense and experimental way to develop and distribute software. Open Source was born.

But the only real difference is that Open Source Software and its advocates are about pretty much the same rights and freedoms that Free Software is, only without the “moral” frame the latter comes with. If you take away the difference of intent, one might wonder what you’re left with: Free Software wants freedom for everyone, Open Source wants nothing except a set of licensing terms (98% of these terms being the same than Free Software) and advocates nothing to no one in terms of ethics. A way for Open Source to differentiate its message was to repeatedly explain why development methods first inherited from academic practices and then formalized by Open Source Software developers were the best way to develop good, powerful and reliable software. There again, differences with Free Software are most of the times blurry. Free Software uses the same methods most of the time, but does not advocate them as the best ones. You can have an in-house, closed doors development style and still distribute Free Software as an end result. Whether this is desirable or even compatible with the spirit (the letter notwithstanding) of Free Software licenses is another question. On the other hand, you generally produce Free Software with Open Source development methods, some other times you might end up developing Open Source Software with Open Source methods, but you cannot produce proprietary software with Open Source methods. (Or else, you’re doing marketing à la Microsoft).

This brings another distinction: What is the difference between Open Source Software and Free Software? As we have seen above, the two definitions are very much the same. Sometimes there seems to be differences with certain very specific licenses that can be considered Open Source but not Free Software; in these cases the terms of the license might for instance dictate non essential terms that can be understood -and are understood that way by the FSF- to hamper freedom. One old example I always keep in mind to show how these things can sometimes make everyone lose their time is the old Mozilla Public license. By a strange turn of events, the old steward of the Netscape Code, AOL, had inserted the condition that any legal dispute related to the Mozilla license had to be judged by a specific jurisdiction inside the State of California. This was deemed as a condition limiting the freedom to have the dispute settled by any other court, in and outside America and was therefore declared Open Source, but non Free Software by the FSF. Other, more serious considerations can sometimes weigh in such as the copyleft nature of the license. But we need not to bother with that; what’s important is that both Free Software and Open Source almost completely overlap in practice but may differ in their ideals.

And there we come back to Matt Asay’s blog and the rant against Free Software. So far what I understood about Matt’s essays is that since freedom is too much of a word to swallow we should leave it to the gates of business and never bother with it again.

There is just a mild disappointment everyone ought to have about this view: Open Source does not advocate Free Software and software freedom are bad things: it just tries to narrow their specifics for practical -and sometimes business-oriented- reasons. It does not mean, however, that Free Software gets in the way of business or stands against software business. It adds another layer of demands, moral demands that anyone can endorse in the hope to make software a better tool for social improvement, and turn this world into a better place for all. No one must take this extra step, no business will die from it. But in the end , everyone benefits from freedom. I am disappointed that anyone would find the simple possibility of this extra step a negative option to investigate.

Open Source is dead, long live Casino Open Source?

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I don’t know if you, dear readers, have gotten this feeling recently; some people around the blogosphere seem to want to bring back the old troll of open source vs. free software. I would not really mind if these people were not prominent bloggers, journalists and professionals. After all , the old rant on “open source is business, free software is freedom” has been around for a long time.

This time however, I am afraid I don’t understand why people like Matt Asay keep on bringing this discussion back on the table. Perhaps Matt Asay wants to look reasonable, business-minded, or simply pettable by the grand corporations of this low world. I am merely conjecturing here. But Matt’s blog is becoming thoroughly disappointing.

First this old discussion is, well, as old as Free Software and Open Source themselves. It disappoints me that Matt would want to recycle old stuff for an obscure reason. Really: Open Source vs. Free Software, let’s write something old, like, “oh those free software zealots”, and these open source darlings. How much easier could this get for anyone now to join the CNet staff?  Next rant: what size do you think Richard Stallman’s beard should be? Who in the FLOSS (note the Free/Libre & Open Source Software acronym) community does still buy into the fiction that open source people do business (and are, therefore, serious) while free software hacktivists (let’s refuse them the simple notion that they could be regular people with jobs or even a company to run) are dangerous extremists whose grand master lives somewhere in Kandahar Boston.

Second, and that’s what I do find really disturbing about this discussion: Since when do people like Matt Asay feel empowered to tell an entire community of people that 1) they don’t know how to work or make money 2) what they should do and think about values such as freedom? I think Matt’s points concerning open source marketing are quite misplaced. He is really telling us that CIOs don’t care about freedom and care about good old fashioned value. He’s probably right, but it also depends on how you define freedom. You can have a fully open source enterprise software, but be the only one to provide support and outsource its development to China. Where’s the freedom in that? Where’s the choice for customers? Where’s the genuine attention to provide something valuable in return for a fair price? It’s nowhere to be seen, and that’s very much what people care about when they buy open source solutions. No one cares about a source code that is undocumented, not understandable, not maintained but that comes with heavy support fees.  That’s Casino Open Source. I’m disappointed Matt seems to have taken that path and frankly enough, I know proprietary software solutions offering better value than that.

What’s more, barriers to freedom exist in ways that we constantly need to discover and take into account. How does Matt handle issues stemming from joint copyright submissions for instance? I hear no word of that. How does Matt advertise the existence of FLOSS to people? Matt rather seems to be ignoring them. It might be said that once you wrote “people”, the word freedom isn’t usually far off the corner. So let’s take Mozilla marketing for instance: I don’t think that telling people about freedom has hurt them a lot. Instead of this, Matt Asay has decided to tell the world that freedom was definitely a dangerous idea to use. We should therefore think about money, value for the money and customers. The rest, according to this interesting doctrine, is non-existant.

I will try not to add anything else to what has struck me as being largely a one-way debate. What I would like to do, however, is to try to offer a -hopefully- more innovative way to look at both Free Software and Open Source in my next post. Full disclosure: I don’t believe Open Source and Free Software can be separated, both organically and historically. These are two sides of the same coins, and you can’t have one without having the other. Until then… always be aware of the people splitting hair in half.