Monthly Archives: September 2010

Give up spoon-feeding: Use a fork instead.

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Weeell. It’s a heck of a day today. And somewhere along these lines, you are probably going to see why this blog wasn’t so active these past months. I will not go over the announcement again here, you can find it at our new website. But I would like to give more details on and if possible explain what we’re doing and why we are doing it.

But first let’s check the basics. What did we announce today?

  • a new initiative to secure the future for the OpenOffice.org community.
  • this initiative will take the form of a foundation called The Document Foundation.
  • we want to be a better community, populated and sustained by a large diversity of contributors
  • we want to develop better, more hackable, and sustainable software
  • we have binaries available for download starting from today: Download Libre Office (but enjoy consciously: it’s beta-quality)
  • we believe in Free Software: LibreOffice is under the LGPL v3 license .
  • we believe in Open Standards: we will support, promote and contribute the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and will join the OASIS consortium as soon as possible.
  • we believe in meritocracy
  • we do not believe fiduciary copyright agreements are a good thing: In fact, we don’t have any, which means you get to keep your own copyright on your own contributions (lucky you).
  • yes, we have developers. Lots of them. But we need more, and especially, we need you.
  • we invite everyone, yes, everyone, even Oracle, to join us, provided you agree to be a contributor on equal footing with the others.
  • “But you’re working with Novell! Oh my Gosh you’re working with Novell! You’re a traitor!” That might sound surprising but although we use the ooo-build system the similarity with Novell’s Go-OO stops there. We do start with the OpenOffice.org vanilla version, do not include the Go-OO patches (okay, we do include some nice ones, but no weird ones) and add our very own patches to the sauce. Besides, the OSI and the FSF seem to think it’s totally fine, and we will not ship Mono, ever. Feeling better now?

Now let’s dwell a bit deeper on what we announced. So why did we announce the birth of The Document Foundation? Why not? A foundation for OpenOffice.org had always been planned. But after ten years, this promise was never fulfilled, and it would seem that the new owner of Sun Microsystems, Oracle, is not keen on engaging too much with the community about this. So we decided to move on by ourselves, and move this project forward. Let’s be frank: Every FLOSS project has its own set of issues. Inside OpenOffice.org we have many issues, even though it’s one of the friendliest and most welcoming community you’ll ever find. But 10 million lines of code that are not easily hackable, a certain heaviness in our process and governance structure made us feel like we had to change something. In fact, I would go as far as claiming that the Document Foundation is the ultimate victory of the old “StarDivision” and I do feel this is their moment of glory, even more so if they choose to join us.  We feel that what we’re doing is fundamentally right and is a real opportunity to deliver the promise of Free, Libre and Open Source Software.

Of course, some people will observe that we don’t seem to have a lot of resources, and they would be right. Let me be very candid on this: The answer is the Community. Sounds naive? Let’s take a step back for a moment. When the Mozilla Foundation was announced, these guys counted less members and entities supporting us from day one. And what we are focusing on, indeed, is our community. We’re putting our community first, because that is something we somehow forgot to do in the (recent) past. It’s time to change that, and it’s time for The Document Foundation.

Stay tuned!

Radical Innovation is needed for GNU/Linux distributions

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There’s a certain movement these days in the world of GNU/Linux distributions.  I think we are experiencing one of these moments that starts with a question that has been asked and heard many times -should distros differentiate themselves in order to survive? & aren’t there too many distros out there?- and ends with a much more serious question: Innovating in the world of GNU/Linux. Rest assured this is not going to be that sort of rant where we conclude that “Linux is the copycat of other OSes” just like we will not, in fact answer the question of the pretendly too many distributions or their differentiation. That is, I will not really answer these questions; and the reason I won’t is that I think these are all bad questions that either miss the point or show a certain lack of understanding of  FOSS and GNU/Linux in general.
I guess by now all of you have heard of Mageia, the Mandriva fork. But these news overshadowed something else that is a developing situation
elsewhere and matters perhaps even more: OpenSuse.

In a nutshell, OpenSuse has been breaking away very slowly from its main sponsor, Novell, for about 2 and a half years. The first visible sign of this -which really was a weak signal nonetheless- was the decision taken by the community to switch back to KDE as their preferred desktop instead of Gnome. Of course, just like Mandriva/Mandrakesoft, Suse had always been more KDE oriented than  Gnome. Yet Gnome is where the business, the stability, and theenterprise applications are supposed to be found, and on Gnome lied Ximian, the Groupwise integration etc. Then the OpenSuse folks started to open a brainstorming plan in order to define a new strategy for OpenSuse, apparently independent of what Novell was planning to do or sell with respect to that. This strategy brainstorming session ultimately reached its conclusion a few days ago:

https://lite.co-ment.com/text/lNPCgzeGHdV/history-version/RE3kSeg3LGI/

As you will see, what OpenSuse intends to be is a general-purpose, desktop oriented distribution; which means at the same time that nothing will change in its actual orientations and that it even departs from its usual enterprise polish it always had had. But what this also means is that we will not see OpenSuse or Suse on handhelds or tablets or any other new markets. This is a significant information, especially if you see that whoever will buy the Suse part of Novell in early 2011 might not be able to have its own way if  it does not take the time to engage with the community: The OpenSuse project seems to be very autonomous and not at all ready to fall into whatever new goals any future sponsor might want to achieve. And if it takes a fork to dot it, there’s the Mandriva case.  But always remember that OpenSuse has a very strong userbase and market share, although it’s been declining ever since 2009. What will be interesting nonetheless will be what the future owner of the Suse brand will want to do and how it plans to innovate. OpenSuse can be a general-purpose distribution; the user base is there, but the value might be hard to create if there’s no real business story to tell behind it.

Back to Mandriva / Mageia now. It’s perhaps to early to say anything about Mageia, except they seem to be made of some pretty skilled  people; and that’s usually not the kind of engineers you find easily on the market. They claim to continue what Mandriva as a distro was good at, only in a better way, and without the perceived historical failures of the past management teams.

Interestingly enough, I think Mageia is bad news for Mandriva, and it means that Mandriva should find an innovative business model and acquire/change to a new focus. Let me explain. Reading the Mageia website and going around the Internet, here’s what I understand:
- Mageia realizes the need to be a linux distro for other kinds of
terminals (tablets, handhelds, etc.)
- Mageia has crafted two strong bulletpoints in its storytelling that DOES hurt Mandriva starting today: Mageia “is” Mandriva, since it is
made of the engineers who have coded Mandriva ever since a few years; second, Mageia is “better” since they understood what “is wrong”: the management of Mandriva. (Nobody ever found anything to complain about Mandriva as a distro, it’s still one of the best on the market).
- Mageia is soon to “take over” the market: everyone on the forums  seem to dig Mageia; and in a sense, it’s what the Mandriva community and the French FOSS community was expecting.

If the last claim sounds bold, think again: what is the value of having a Mandriva desktop outside of a corporate support contract (same goes for a server) now that there’s Mageia? The way to create value for Mandriva is to depart from the traditional all-purposes distribution model (which still does not mean they would have to “cut” the actual distribution) and innovate first at the distribution level, and then, if possible, go up the ladder by growing a very skilled technical team able to innovate as an operating system, either by contributing upstream again, which it hardly does anymore these days, or innovating on the user experience just like Ubuntu does and is now clearly intensifying as a strategy.

In the case of Mandriva and Mageia, what might become interesting to watch is the potential race between the two twin-distributions; one is now almost an empty shell, deprived of its developers, and the other one has developers but no resources. In any case, it’s time these two get a real shot at innovating, for the sake of the entire Free and Open Source Software ecosystem.

Remembering 9/11

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Today I thought I would share with you how I experienced 9/11 2001. Not that I was anywhere near or inside the twin towers, the Pentagon, or in a plane that day: But I landed in Dallas Fort-Worth on a business trip on 9/10 around 7 pm local time. As I was lining up in the queue for immigration and visa control I remember looking around and glancing at a small poster with a portrait of a bearded man who, until the very next morning, would remain relatively unknown from most of the people in the western world: Osama Ben Laden. The portrait bore the mention “Dead or Alive” with a reward written under it. I also remember thinking that it was funny they hadn’t caught him, as I tried to picture this then mysterious figure riding on a donkey over the windy and dry mountains of Afghanistan, an AK-47 on his lap.

When I woke up the next morning, the tragedy was happening or was about to happen. I had set my alarm not very early as I was trying to cope with jet-lag. But the next thing I knew, while eating my breakfast and watching the news, was the vision of the first plane crashing into one of the WTC towers. For 5 minutes I wonder what kind of a pilot could have been that bad in order to crash his plane into such a building, but then the news slowly sunk in. In fact they did take longer to imprint. I was still going for casual business meetings around noon when parking next to one of my appointments’ office, I saw him stuffing large bags into his own car. When asking him what he was doing he replied to us (my colleague and I) that he was to leave the city for at least a week with his family, “because what just happened is the beginning of WW3 and we don’t even know if Dallas is a safe place to be in right now”.

I ended up staying over a month in Dallas, the airlines were grounded anyway. I remember the first days after the tragedy when military trucks were parked all over the Dallas-Fort Worth area; when civilians were walking and driving around armed, the mass hysteria and the absolute shock people were in. I remember friends and strangers alike weeping, praying, talking. I wasn’t in Manhattan on 9/11, but I remember how it felt in America during that time, not to mention the calls from family and friends in France who were wondering whether it was even safe to stay in Paris.

Yet what keeps flashing into my mind are the images of the planes hitting the towers looping on TV screens everywhere. For about 8 or 9 years, that memory was hurting me, although I had no relatives there thankfully. Why would I not be equally hurt by other tragedies you might say? I guess I am, but I don’t know anyone who’s not affected in different ways by different tragedies. I guess it was New-York City, I guess it was America. Then last year my girlfriend and I visited New York City for several days. I insisted on going to Ground Zero. I was both disappointed and relieved. Disappointed because there’s no real memorial besides a phony commercial “museum” displaying pictures of the victims and the tragedy, and relieved because today Ground Zero is not exactly that horrible and painful cavity staining the lower side of Manhattan: it’s alive and buzzing with the irritating sounds of construction, concrete moulding and workers yelling at anyone coming to close and “not minding their business”. So there I stood, next to Ground Zero, wondering if all this had been a dream. I was looking at a construction site of a parking and a subway station extension. It’s hardly a memorial for me. But I was relieved, because as more concrete and pillars were erected, life was starting back: Regular people, dubious traders, firemen, families, cops, journalists, fashion victims, tourists would soon be crowding that place. And there we went away, back in a subway train running AC at maximum during that insufferablly warm summer day in Manhattan.

Since 9/11, many things have happened. The world has changed; mistakes have been made, good deeds have been done too. The President of the United States has changed as well, and now a majority of U.S citizens question the war in Afghanistan. Just like 9/11 could have been avoided with better intelligence and swifter reaction ahead of the tragedy (but, as the saying goes, if my aunt had balls she would be my uncle), the war in Afghanistan could yield better results if it had not been overshadowed by the idiotic war in Iraq and if better strategies had been devised. All this calls for a more demanding democracy, in America and elsewhere. More demanding for its citizens, who have to get involved much more than what they do today, more demanding for its government, that has to stop bending to every special interest that comes in with deceptive tactics, elaborate carrots and sticks; more demanding to ourselves in general, who have to constantly remind ourselves to stand up to our values and never forget the victims, the fallen angels, and the suffering people all around the world.

De Profundis.

Back from the OOoCON, on to the next one!

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And we’re back from the OooCON 2010! I have to say it’s always hard, if not delicate to judge each OooCON, not just because it’s a subjective evaluation, but also because it’s quite complex to compare one OooCON to the others. So let me just say that we had a great conference, that we got invited at the Hungarian Parliament, and that we even got fireworks and a huge cake to start the celebration of the 10 years of our project. (See video below).

But more importantly, I would like to thank the organizers of this conference; Szakal Peter, to start with, and the entire Magyar community of OpenOffice.org who made this beautiful and excellent event possible. I think it was important to have it in Budapest this year. Why? Budapest is a city that lies at the heart of the « Mittel Europa » and the capital of Hungary, a country with ancient, and oftentimes terribly troubled History. At the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they have known the debacle of the Empire, the fascism, the communism and its horrible crushing of the students’ revolt in 1956, and the end of the Soviet rule in the nineties. It was important, then, to have the OOo Con taking place in Budapest, to show what Free Software and OpenOffice.org stand for: Freedom, openness, humanism, and dare I mention it? Open Standards. Thank you again, Hungary!

Our next conference will be… in Paris, in 2011. Look forward to see you there!