Listening to user feedback hardly makes up a democracy. It’s user feedback. In some cases it might be a case of “nice customer service”. But it does not help that much. I’ll explain myself.

Let me describe to you what I called limited democracy here and how “power” and influence are distributed in FOSS projects.

A FOSS project mainly produces code. Its sole reason, in fact, is to produce code; whether someone pays for it or manages to be a guru at product strategy and marketing so well he can even entrance hackers in its “Reality Distortion Field” is another question. FOSS projects produce code. Then, around that rough code you have another categories of contributors: the QA testers, the localizers, the documentation writers, the marketers (no particular order here); sometimes you have the extension developers as well. All these people do something very specific: they contribute to the project. Granted it might not only be code, but that’s beside the point. They contribute and they make the project. The reason they contribute might be completely unknown to you, or there might be as many reasons as there are contributors. It’s good sometimes to question or to know what’s the “general reason” to contribute from one or two active contributors, but it’s not always necessary. Back to our contributors; they form the active people who push the project forward, heck, they are the project themselves. But because each of them might contribute for various and sometimes opposite reasons, any of them, sometimes even all of them or a good majority of them, will stop contributing; conversely, they might even increase their contribution. If you stick to the original line from Eric Raymond (the Cathedral and the Bazaar, a must read), the reason any developer would contribute is because he/she’d like to “scratch an itch”. Granted that scratch might be for hire or is already funded, but that’s besides the point.

In the end, it’s the people who make the software (and distribute it, promote it) who call the shots. They call the shots because they get to “make” the software at various levels. So it’s a meritocracy because it’s a “do-ocracy” in a sense. The good news here is that it makes up for quite a lot of people. The not so good news in a sense, is that “mere” users, by which I mean “passive” users, who do not contribute anything in terms of code, tests, localization, documentation, dictionaries, pamphlets, designs, etc. are only left with one choice: to use the software if they like it, or to stop using it. The only reason is not that it’s not a democracy, it’s just that they don’t have the power to act on the software project unless they adopt or reject it.

There is also a more subtle good part in this: no user is barred to join the contributors’ ranks; and when this user actually does, he’ll have a say as long as he remains a contributor.

There are projects who do not formally formalize too much who specifically are their contributors. Some others do. The Document Foundation does formalize it to the extent that it is our contributors who “own the foundation” and nobody else does. It’s not just in our social contract or an unwritten assumption, it’s legal . There are rather broad criteria to define what a contributor is and does (our bylaws and statutes define them) and anyone who qualifies become thus a member of the foundation with rather large ” political” rights. In this sense we have democracy. But FOSS projects do not run on open and democratic structure; they run on transparent and agreed processes, with a free and open source code at their core.

Picture by Eliane Domingos of the Document Foundation

If you wish to read our official wishes, we have them here, and they come from all of us. My thanks go to everyone who is making the LibreOffice project possible and what it is today. We have grown quite a lot in 15 months, probably more than we would have thought. 2012 is going to be the opportunity for the Document Foundation to solidify its successes and turn them into a powerful entity and structure. It will also be the year where several strategic project, such as LibreOffice OnLine, will see their development hopefully take off. Adoption-wise things are already well on their way. Deployments are ongoing on a worldwide basis, large and small, and what we  need at this stage is to push our brand name in a more consistent way. It will also be the year where our friends at the Apache Foundation release their first Apache OpenOffice; what will be interesting will be not their first release(s) but the one that will see most of the Lotus stack be injected into it. This will actually be a good opportunity to clearly differentiate Apache OpenOffice, and that in turns will improve the Apache OpenOffice project’s health and its relation with the outside world (LibreOffice being one example).

But 2012 will be the year where you will be able to experiment the benefits of the LibreOffice development’s effort as we will bring the 3.5 and the 3.6 lines to life. I think it will illustrate that a community-based development model does effectively work and brings real and regular improvements and changes to an aging codebase.

On a more personal note, 2012 will be an important year: I’m getting married in June (expect full delays in blog posting) and this is something I was not expecting even a few years ago. But there are a few people in this world (in this case, only one) who can change everything for the best, and for this I’m truly blessed and very, very happy.

Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to my family and my friends at the Document Foundation and at Ars Aperta for making all this a reality. You truly rock. What else is there to wish? Health, happiness, and love.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year 2012.

LibreOffice has an aging interface. It’s not just that it has many defaults, because, as much of the software packed with features tends to have this problem; it’s that LibreOffice looks a bit like it’s living in 2003. That reason alone is enough to want to change the whole UI. However the LibreOffice codebase is, despite constant clean-ups somewhat too complex to have its UI change overnight. Therefore we will be able to do so in an incremental fashion. What is needed is specifications developers can work with that target one specific user interface feature. With that, developers are able to “swallow” the specification and possibly implement it in a specific time frame. Will Citrus be the next LibreOffice UI? I don’t know. But if the design team is good at writing specifications (something some of its active members are in the process of learning) we might get to something that will have much in common with Citrus. The fineprint on this, however is that we need motivated volunteers able to work on UI improvements in an effective fashion, and developers’ resource to implement them.  If you are interested and would like to help, please join!

]]> http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2011/12/11/citrus-reality/feed/ 2 http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2011/11/20/a-few-thoughts-on-innovation/ http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2011/11/20/a-few-thoughts-on-innovation/#comments Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:22:01 +0000 Charles http://standardsandfreedom.net/?p=438 Continue reading →]]> I was invited the other day to a conference about innovation in the information technology sector. There was nothing remarkable about that event, except perhaps that it led me to voice an opinion I held for years: I do not understand what people are really talking about when they talk about innovation, at least in software, that is.

It might be odd to write this, but if there’s any concept that’s both fuzzy and dangerously misleading in the software industry, that would be innovation. I have read for many years and listened to people explaining how to “stirr and create innovation” in a company or in a community. Maybe these words have been used for lack of a better term; but I still don’t see how you can create innovation. I think you might be able to stirr it somehow, as it’s already a humbler verb. But frankly, can someone out there tell me what does innovation mean in the software world?

In general terms, I would define innovation as the big and small changes constantly leading to a change of the art in any given field. I think that’s pretty much what one usually understands by that word. So why could this not be applied to software? Precisely because software is rarely -if at all- the result of big changes happening all of a sudden and by accident. Software development usually happens at an incremental pace, whether openly so (think about the agile development practices) or even when there’s a structured corporate environment favoring traditional code reviews and quality assurance processes through stable product development cycles. Software is not produced by accident. Software is the result of process, and in theory accidents do not happen there. In fact, I could also point out that incremental changes or a period of technological incubation might be observed right before the emergence of almost any given technology. Take the medieval rudder for instance: it’s been rumored to have been imported in Europe around the 12th century by Chinese ships, but there are tracks and evidence of previous try-outs by European sailors and shipyards to design wooden rudders and articulate them with a complete mechanism. Similarly, it is hard to say how “innovation” happened in the sixties when the U.S. decided to send manned flights to the moon, but the wave of small and not so small innovation that was the result of this huge project is still visible to everyone (think of the Tefal pans, among many other things).

Thus there are, I think, two points that need to be highlighted: First, innovation does not happen all of a sudden if the field of software field and more generally ICT. It is a set of processes that ultimately lead to new software, or software that’s supposedly not as bad as the former state of the art. Second, what’s unclear is how -to quote several people I listened to- innovation “happens”. It sounds sometimes that innovation is a mystery or the philosophers’ stone that require care and secrecy to happen. Yet in the software industry, it does not work that way, for all the marketing and bells and whistles that come out of software vendors do not brush aside the fact that even inside these corporations software development is a set of very well defined, but non-public, processes.

Innovation is not a mystery and I don’t think that you can track how it works. You can assume that a certain set of circumstances and an environment letting people code start-ups emerge and Free & Open Source Software projects grow will ultimately translate into something that someone, whether a journalist, consultant, politicians or venture capitalists will call innovation. Anything else besides that, innovation sounds more like vapor and magical boxes. This should probably express what I feel about software patents, by the way.

One last thing: Innovation is different than progress. Progress is usually applied to fields that do not necessarily belong to science or technology; it can be more a perception and may concern society as a whole. Yet the interesting thing is that while progress seems to be an even more elusive term than innovation, you can actually tell progress from regression or stagnation: people perceive it almost immediately, however relative it sometimes may be.

Enjoy the beginning of the Holiday season!

I had several colleagues, friends and people asking me whether they should run Arch Linux on their desktops or laptops. I even read someone’s blog today on his impression on Arch Linux and Ubuntu. It’s time for me to jump in and clarify what you should expect with Arch Linux as a desktop on a daily basis.

Arch Linux is a rolling release system. What this means is that you do not get releases at specific intervals in time, like you do with Ubuntu, OpenSuse or Fedora. Instead there is a constant stream of updates that are uploaded on the distribution servers and that you can pull almost everyday. These updates are uploaded after a testing period by the Arch Linux  testing community (you can switch to the testing mirrors if you wish) and it is up to you to choose if you want to install them or not.

Such a rolling release process eliminates the need to accomplish major upgrade and makes you gain time, as you typically end up installing your Arch Linux system once, or twice if you really screwed up something. Also, Arch Linux does not come with very specific tools (aside the pacman package manager) and therefore you do not end up with Unity vs. Gnome Shell or YAST and PUP, or whatever control center. You get the latest KDE version, the latest Gnome 3 version, the latest Unity and the latest Xfce (these are examples). Pretty much everything is configurable as the distribution gets to make choices on core components versions (glibc, python, etc.) and exercises its value and role on testing and QA (what happens after each kernel upgrade, etc.)

Yet all this does not mean the distribution is hard to use. Not at all. The installation process may take a while (several hours.. or less) and I would be tempted to claim that what takes time is to transfer your own content and granular application settings to the new system, such as themes, pictures, etc.

But let’s focus a bit on the installation process: that’s where things tend to get rougher. Arch Linux uses a command line installer. It does not make things very difficult to understand – besides, you can always refer to some very good documentation – but it definitely makes the process more intimidating and any issue or inconvenience tends to be perceived as a bigger annoyance than what it really is. Of course, such a comment has to be put in context of other Linux flavors where you insert a DVD and don’t do much aside choosing your keyboard and entering your name. Not so long away you still had to be careful when partitioning your hard disk even with an user-friendly interface. In any case, the installation process is what will make you reach a working, fully graphical and modern system or a glowing command-line mess. There’s nothing specific to avoid here, only know that your patience and work will be rewarded and that in a sense, such an installation is not that hard to perform.

Once your system is up and running, everything tends to run smoothly and you end up with a nice, fully customizable desktop. You can use  “community contributed packages” from the Arch Linux User Repository to complement your software tools, themes, fonts, games and utilities.

As a conclusion, I would say that while Arch is not as easy to install as, say, Ubuntu, once you’ve gone past it, you will be surprized how easy it is to use it, almost as easy than Ubuntu or any other distribution. Arch Linux is a very fun and stable distribution that successfully blends the bleeding edge, stability and hackability of Linux. Don’t be fooled by the rumours saying it’s for the elite. It is made for you, if you can give it 3 hours maximum of your time to install it, and it is likely you will never switch back.

Fast forward to the LibreOffice Conference in Paris. On the evening of the 14th we thought we would set up some beer and music party in a hacklab and we contacted the LOOP in Paris. While they had to migrate from one location to another we ended up in an alternative cultural space shared by hackers but also completely different people as well. What was really interesting to watch was the general blending of these populations. In the end, it should remind us that even the coming of the Document Foundation was and is at the same time the answer to the decay of a free software project struggling under the iron fist of an irresponsible and greedy corporation (Oracle)  and the perfect example of a community deciding what’s good for itself, having reached a point where “enough is enough”.

The LibreOffice Project is thus more than a free software project developing an office suite. It has started a bit before the events in Tunisia, but roughly at the same time the Iranian revolts were taking place (and they’re still going on by the way). It is about freedom and the individual power to refuse the will and the agenda of a large corporation. It is about realizing that something had been failing in our community and that it was time to fix it.

The Document Foundation was started because of that; and just like the people on the streets of the world, it was prepared  somewhat in a stealth mode at first, otherwise it  would have failed. Now things have become quite different, and we just celebrated our first year as a project and as a free community where everyone can fit in and contribute meaningfully to the greater good. The numbers speak for themselves, and the OpenOffice.org community has chosen to go for LibreOffice, not just as a product but as model, as a set of values and as a refusal to compromise one’s freedom to corporate agendas. Our manifesto highlights the goals and the values of the LibreOffice community and why the Document Foundation has been created and set up.

Yet we are not one fork among others. We are the next chapter of the next decade. We are LibreOffice, we are the Document Foundation. We are the people of OpenOffice.org . We are no puppets and no useful idiots. We bow to no one. We are here to fulfill the destiny of this great project: to create instruments of freedom and tools for knowledge.  We are “OOO”, we “Occupy OpenOffice” we stand for freedom, community, excellence and collaboration.

We are the 99%. Expect us.

I’m a rather outspoken user of Arch Linux after having used and tried many other distributions (MandrakeSoft/Mandriva, Suse, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, SLAX, Chakra and even a few others) and I think I got to like the rolling release concept quite a lot. The rolling release concept essentially takes away the notion of milestone release for a Linux distribution and replaces it by incremental and almost continuous updates. Which means that everyday I can update my system and it’s thus almost always running the most recent stable software versions. Note that the upgrade is my choice only, I could stop doing this for 3 weeks instance and that would be fine. Using Arch Linux does not only mean embracing the rolling release distribution model. It also  means being ready to install your system from the command line (granted, you only do that once in theory) which can be tedious but not reall difficult. Another “side effect” of using Arch Linux is that the distribution’s package management is done entirely through the command line and with the help of the excellent package manager pacman. Pacman is however not a graphical package manager, or rather, it does not come with a default, out of the box graphical front-end. Several of them do exist but it does not seem to be in the culture of Arch Linux to use one on a regular basis. Enter AppSet. AppSet is a very nice graphical package manager written in Qt; it even got me use KDE again on par with Gnome. AppSet does not only run on Arch Linux, it also supports Chakra (a very close fork of Arch Linux) and works in theory with any other packaging system.

In the times of ubiquitous App Stores, even the ones that actually values and promotes Free Software such as the Ubuntu App Store, it’s good to hear you still have innovation happening in this field, with tools being developed that let users be in total control of their system. I’m sure that the AppSet team would welcome more contributors and more distributions!

I would like to tell the “Hamburg team” as we often used to call them that they should have no regrets whatsoever. Perhaps my words will surprise some, after all, I didn’t leave the OpenOffice.org project under Hamburg’s cheers.  It does not matter in the grand scheme of things; what I’m doing for the Document Foundation is what matters now and the shutdown of the operations at Hamburg shows once again that the people behind the Document Foundation were right from the start: Oracle’s stewardship of the OpenOffice.org project would neither be sustainable nor workable. I, for one, wish that in an ideal world, most of the Hamburg team would have transitioned over to the LibreOffice project. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, but life is made so that things are never really perfect.  StarDvision team, you gave birth to many good things, your work now lives in several software, most important of all them, in LibreOffice and the Document Foundation; Apache Openoffice.org/Symphony carries your name, and will use a great deal of your code as well. Even more importantly, the Hamburg team, through the OpenOffice.org project, has also attracted and helped many people from all walks of life who over the years have worked together and grown as a team. That is the case for me, and it’s the case for many other people. You have brought us so much, and I would like to express my sincere gratitude for all what you’ve done. You have started something incredibly important; your work will not have been made in vain, and it will continue to bear fruit for a long time.

Take care!

These days I started to see some questions arise here and there, about why we’re not proceeding as fast as we could with the setup of the legal entity, why we sometimes fail to communicate a vision for the project, etc. These are all good questions. Ultimately, we have to react to them by acting on the issues that are raised. Yet it is important to keep in mind that the light at the end of the tunnel is growing fast.  I hope (I know) we will soon see several announcements pertaining to the community and the project. We’re working hard at making the foundation a reality, but we’re also working hard at securing the Document Foundation’s financial future and at improving our community processes. Questions that arise about these matters are legitimate, and if you feel we’re not answering them, then it means we’re either swamped or are currently not able to answer them (because of various constraints). But we do read them, we do hear them. And they will be answered, either in writing, or in solid fact, usually expressed by an announcement. You can help make many things a reality by contributing to the LibreOffice project. It’s fun, it’s even exhilarating and it’s a formidable human adventure alongside being technically exciting and challenging.

Among the questions I was mentioning above, there are some that aren’t really questions, but are critics that are not uttered in a constructive way. These are critics that come from those who have chosen a different course and for whom the Document Foundation is by no means a symbol of digital freedom and software freedom. You will hear them singing many tunes, until their voices gradually faint in the background chatter. We can take some critics in a constructive way, as feedback to build a better project. But extravagant theories claiming that we are the pawns of Microsoft and that we are in fact detrimental to Free Software are delusions of people who do not understand anything to the way free and open source software communities work. Which is a shame, as some of them actually used to “manage” communities (and still claim they do, but one wonders who mandated them to even pretend to the title).  These critics are in fact detrimental to Free Software and to the ODF ecosystem, as they come across as awkward in the light of the events that have taken place since a few months. When everything is said and done, the LibreOffice project’s goals have been the right ones since the very first day and firing people off their roles inside the OpenOffice.org project hasn’t made them any less right today. An old but famous Persian saying tells that caravans keep going on their path while dogs bark at them.  The Document Foundation is a bit like a caravan, in that we’re a diverse community travelling towards one goal and not hesitating to include people on our way. We share our bread, we share our wine, we share our fire, and we even accept donations. Some people will call it awkward, will demand some “adult supervision”, will doubt each of our step, question our skills and postulate ulterior motives, but in the end, we shall prevail and we will be THE Free and Open Source Office Suite, innovative, open standards-based and developed in a transparent and inclusive way. Let the dogs bark. They really only wish they could be leading the party.

Here’s a couple of links before an even more active month of May:

• Ars Aperta has contributed to a pretty interesting project, dubbed ODFgr and hosted by the OpenDoc Society. The goal of this website is to provide any developer with even a limited knowledge of ODF with resources and tools to manipulated ODF documents. We tried to design a pedagogical platform that the largest number will understand. Most of the examples are listed by languages (we mostly have Python and Perl) and you can study both the explanation and learn how to reproduce and implement it. We hope it will be the right spot for anyone willing to get started on OpenDocument hacking and development.
• Events-wise the month of May will be busy. I will attend the OASIS Board of Directors’ meetingin Berlin and meet with the Bitkom. The week after that Ars Aperta will join a session on the political and legal issues pertaining to Free Software development during the Linux Solutions 2011 event in Paris. I will also give another talk during the same event as part of the Document Foundation and our experience with forks. Spoons shall come next year.