Moved by Freedom - Powered by Standards

• In case you had missed that one, OpenOffice.org 3.2 has been released. It’s fast. Really fast. And it comes with some nice extra features too, such as the import or OOXML files (not the ISO standard, which nobody, not even Microsoft can produce, but the file format of MS Office 2007).
• Times are changing, and changing for good. Sun is suing companies and people infringing the OpenOffice.org trademark name. It’s more than time. Not only does OpenOffice.org get hurt by scammers, actual people lose money, time because of this sort of malpractice.
• lpOD 0.9 has just been released! Open access to the Git repository is also available. You may know that my company, Ars Aperta,  has been contributing to this project and one of its main authors. But what the heck is lpOD about? Find out in this presentation and have a look at our documentation.
• My latest review on a great email client, Claws Mail.

Share This

This week started the wrong way. Some people started to create what is litterally a storm in the teacup, while some other people made announcements that in my view are extremely disappointing and quite concerning for some practitioners of FOSS licensing management and consultancy. Let me explain this point first.

Black Duck was awarded a patent on Open Source licensing conflict resolution. The patent itself seems to cover the “core technology” of the software developed by Black Duck, and not the actual practice of FOSS licensing management and optimization, which is something that Ars Aperta incidently offers both through its traditional services and certification programs. I have to say that I am not really sure what the patent covers or does not cover, but it sure brings a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt for the existing competitors or potential competitors of Black Duck Software, existing consultancies in similar field and last but not least, customers. No wonder Bradley Kuhn got upset about this. I do find these news quite unsettling myself, and I cannot wait to see Black Duck’s patent promise. At least that should remind some not to trust so called Open Source experts who use laptops with Windows, MS Office and Internet Explorer. It’s a small but telling sign they treat FOSS as some sort of disease and not as something to rationally analyze and assist their customers on. And do I need to repeat this again here? Software patents are bad, they stifle competition, customer choice, block innovation and lessen value. You may call them a reality, you don’t have to necessarily add to it.

What really strikes me as a real storm in the tea-cup is the pseudo announcement that Ubuntu will drop Openoffice.org from its upcoming Lucid Lynx release, in its netbook edition. The news came from this website and got quickly picked out by the largest french newspaper, stirring quite an uproar among the French community.

Let me offer some thoughts on why these news are nothing short of non-news, aside the mere fact that there is no official announcement by Canonical or any Ubuntu release team on this matter.

• First, OpenOffice.org is a large application that usually runs well even on netbooks, but may not be the best tailored tool for specific uses envisioned for netbook users. There is nothing surprising in this, and several Linux distributions have actually never included OpenOffice.org by default because of size constraints and simplicity.

• Second, even if Ubuntu were to drop OpenOffice.org from its specific netbook edition it does not mean that the software would be unavailable from the very same Ubuntu repositories. In fact it would be readily available, but it just would not be included in the default installation. How many computers shipped with Windows only include a trial version of Microsoft Word and not a coherent MS Office stack? Almost all of them don’t ship with the full copy of MS Office.

• Third, we recently got hold of the first reliable statistics, aside our own count of downloads, of the actual market share of OpenOffice.org on a worldwide scale. And guess what? With these numbers, we won’t be exactly hampered by whatever decision not to ship OpenOffice.org in the default install set of Ubuntu netbook edition.

What is now needed is some sort of acknowledgment by the broader community of analysts that these stats are reliable. This would cause some real problems to Microsoft, as these statistics usually only count the shipments or the default installation images of MS Windows that come preloaded with one trial version of MS Word. Unless Microsoft patents some new market share analysis method, that is.

Share This

This will be the last post of the year 2009.  2010 will be an interesting year to come, for many reasons, and that’s why I have outlined a few predictions below for the year to come. Feel free to comment or add to this list, and happy new year 2010!

• OpenOffice.org’s market share will ceased to be constantly looked down upon by analysts. I had recently explained why measuring its market share is complex, and why it is constantly underrated. But now it seems that Microsoft (and the press) are taking good notice of the fast-growing adoption of OpenOffice.org by, well, pretty much everyone out there.
• Standardization of the most recent release of OpenDocument, the 1.2, will be painful, and might perhaps never see a happy ending. For one thing, Microsoft controls the ISO through seemingly fortuitous and massive participation in every national standards bodies forming the ISO, and the ISO’s JTC 1 seems to have decided that the world should be content with some sort of ODF 1.1 “plus plus”. Note that this ODF 1.1 is not a bad thing in itself, but it is very much the result of connivings against ODF and everything non-Microsoft. You never should bite the hand that feeds you, after all…
• The lpOD project, already well underway, will be a success and might become one of the main references for the ODF ecosystem.
• Second Life, the largest online virtual world or metaverse will have to innovate again, or will lose its customers progressively to the new show in town, “Blue Mars“.
• It’s almost becoming a cliché, but cloud computing will again be part of the hype in 2010 and gain a strong momentum on the market. Among many challenges, there is the fundamental need for portability and openness of the users’ data, its control by these very users, and more generally the increasingly clear divide between centralized and decentralized data architecture. In the end, this will become political, and as important, if not more, than the freedome to code and its sharing.
• In the aftermath of the Bilski case, there seems to be a consensus that the criteria for “software patentability” will be much more demanding in the U.S. Of course, a few illuminated curmudgeons inside the European sphere of power, influenced by pro-patent lobbieswill fight hard to implement software patents in its whole horror. But in the end, what we need to do is not being satisfied with raising the bar on patentability criteria, we need to get the message straight and clear that software patents are not acceptable anywhere. ACTA anyone?
• Arch Linux will continue its growth among technical and power users (I’m one of them) while Ubuntu will stagnate (unless Canonical opens its online media store), OpenSuse somewhat loses users, Fedora will grow its userbase, Mandriva will make a strong comeback if they manage to secure their business. How do I know all this? I’ve been in the Linux distributions business, punditry and expertise for quite some time (since 2002, actually) and if there’s something you can count on over the long term, it’s… the Distrowatch billboard. This thing has never proved to be really wrong. I’ll cover more of these topics in 2010. Meanwhile, have a great New Year’s Eve and a happy new year to you!

Share This

• So I ended up… installing Arch Linux. And guess what? I love it. Everthing works. The installation process is a bit rough, but everything is logical and if you don’t want to spend time doing it you can even use an impressive live-cd project, Chakra. Package management is also innovative breaks with the rpm and deb tradition of “packaging” for a simple, straightforward way of actually fetching the original versions of the software. The result is that everything works just fine if you take the time to think about what you’re about to install and upgrade. Heck, even Second Life works perfectly, on my 64 bits architecture!
• I’m announcing it with a week late, but lpOD 0.8 has been released. Come on over and test it!
• At the height of his one of kind career as a Microsoft-puppet-pretending-to-be-impartial, Alex Brown wants to take out Brazil out of the ISO. As Berthold Brecht once wrote, if you are not happy with the people, just replace the people.
• Last but not least, you are more and more readers of this blog, so let me thank you for it, and wish you a merry Christmas and happy new year!

Share This

Folks,

The results have arrived yesterday, and it is with some disappointment that I found out that I had not been elected at the Board. I know what it means: I’ll try to understand better what the members of the OASIS consortium feel the issues on the table are the  next time. There is a conversation to be had and I suspect that we will  all gain from it. In the mean time, I would like to congratulate the new board of directors as well as the Technical Advisory Board. I wish them a heartfelt and sincere good luck for this new term: there is a lot of work to be done and I’m confident that they will succeed.  The OASIS Consortium is a great place for digital standards, and it deserves a team of great and experienced people like the one that just got elected.

Last but not least, I would like to thank everyone who voted for me, and all of my supporters, inside and outside the OASIS who were kind enough to dedicate time and effort to this project.  Next time will be better and I look forward working with all you again.

Thank you, and congratulations to the new Board!

Share This