When I was freshly elected at the OpenOffice.org’s Community Council the Free Software Foundation approached us with a question related to our extensions web site. Basically they felt that we should not be hosting non Free Software extensions and requested we take those down otherwise they would open their own …
Microsoft is again at work undermining Linux by signing patent agreements with OEMs. This time, it’s HTC, and it’s about Android. While it’s another sign that software patents should not exist and need to be taken out of the global IP system the WIPO and others are trying to develop, …
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. …
So it happened. Oracle has swallowed Sun Microsystems. Monty should have gotten the news by now. Perhaps he could even be interested by the announcements of Oracle? They’re hiring good sales reps. More seriously, the announcements done through webcasts and available on the Oracle website are very impressive, product-wise and …
This is also true for companies. Today, the European Commission has finally agreed to the purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Russian and Chinese authorities have yet to answer to this deal, but it seems that any Monty-backed answer would be more a delay than a stop for this merger …
Sometimes inbetween Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the “Help MySQL” initiative was founded. This initiative, publicly supported by Monty Widenius, the co-founder of MySQL would be interesting if it wasn’t somehow indecent. Let me explain. What does “Help MySQL” advocate, in a nutshell? It claims that if Oracle were to …
Fall season is one of the busiest times for Linux distributions, and this year is also a very busy time for me. Ever since two years now I gradually migrated family and friends to Linux. This year these new Linux users gave me quite some work, especially on week-ends, and …
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 …
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 …