Currently browsing category

Free Software

The significance of a Foundation

It was quite a month for the Document Foundation; the press rightly picked our three main announcements: the 3.5 release, the foundation’s incorporation and our partnership with Intel. I would like to go back to the foundation matter and show why the two other announcements are made more significant by …

Community, customer service and Free Software

This is an edited version of a post of mine on the discuss mailing list of LibreOffice. The thread is ongoing at the moment I’m editing this post. Feedback and questions welcome. Listening to user feedback hardly makes up a democracy. It’s user feedback. In some cases it might be …

Seasonal Greetings

It is this time of the year again; so… Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, Merry Winter Solstice celebrations wherever you are, and a happy healthy new (calendar) year 2012. It’s going to be quite a year on many fronts, but I think we’ll get out of this one stronger, and we’ll …

On Citrus UI, and a zest of realism

A few days ago I was surprised to learn that LibreOffice was to get a brand new interface called Citrus. The series of mock-ups called Citrus are not a surprise, they are the result of the enthusiastic work of Mirek M. with the feedback of our Design team. However, the …

A few thoughts on innovation

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 …

ArchLinux, not just for the elite

… and I’m the living proof of it! 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 …

We are the 99%

The financial crisis people started to notice around 2008 is not just financial. It goes deeper than what we usually want to admit. It is about a fundamental shift in our civilization’s balance of power, our survival plans, our values and our way of life. I regret to say that …

AppSet: a refreshingly nice package manager for Arch Linux in the times of app stores

In this post I will not talk about LibreOffice or open standards  but I thought this could be of interest to GNU/Linux users out there so feel free to comment and discuss. I’m a rather outspoken user of Arch Linux after having used and tried many other distributions (MandrakeSoft/Mandriva, Suse, …

A Word of Thanks

Yesterday Michael Brauer posted on the OASIS ODF TC mailing list his farewell post. Michael, like a very large number of the other employees of the “Oracle’s Hamburg Business Unit”, if not all of them, will be let go by the end of the month. If you wonder what the …

%d bloggers like this: