I am not explaining that France is not an indebted country. In fact, very few european countries can claim they have clean public debts, and I won’t even mention the US debt. But the debt has been piling up in France and elsewhere since 30 years, thanks to a rather twisted amount of policies -cutting public spending, worsening economic conditions and lowering salaries while shoving more and more money to the top of the pyramid combined with reducing the amount of taxes collected, most of the time in favour of the wealthiest- and the beginning of the crisis in 2008 that prompted governments to offer bags of money to the banks and then having the same rating agencies who were claiming everything was fine tell the world the same governments were broke.

It is easy to see that governments were trapped in what could look like a pincer movement; but then there are pundits who might explain the whole unfolding of the events was “irrational” and happened “on the spur of the moment”. I rather see it as a whole set of rational decisions that were taken at some level while some levels down it appeared as some sort of unavoidable outcome from random, short term decisions. But whether one thinks of all this as a process or as an accident the issue we face today remains the same.

We have a huge national debt (granted, way smaller than anything the US have, even compared in proportion) that is fixable, but we also have governments who rush to do whatever they think the “Market” will like. More often than not, it means that the little people and the ever shrinking middle class must be punished . For what, we don’t really know, but the real question should rather be instead of whom . Because if there’s a categoy of people and entities who continue their  “economic growth” in these times of crisis, that would be some of the wealthiest people in our nation and abroad. You may call them the 1%. You may call them the “Elite”. You may call them otherwise, but it does not really matter at this stage. What’s important to realize is the power and influence of money that makes up the incentive for governments to dismantle public services and to make life harder for the rest of the population. What is also important to realize, and what is much less discussed is how some entities and people actuall benefit from the crisis.

Part of the “reforms” to “reimburse the debt” (which turns out to be a dubious concept itself as France, since 1973 cannot devaluate its money just like any other country outside the euro-zone) always (why?) involve selling off entire, profitable parts of public service. Such a pawning operation never benefits the people, but always benefits a few. It is often seent that the same people who benefit from this sale by taking control of the new privatized structure are powerful, and part of the people who usually advise the same politicians who keep on explaining that we must make more efforts to “repay the debt”, the debt that we could in fact manage much better, but that some people don’t want us to, as they might lose money in this. So while the republic itself loses power, stops its people from benefiting from social security and other public services, it graciously offers to a selected few the ability to monetize these services. I always wondered why, if we really had  to sell these services, the government did not auction this to its very own people . For instance, as public service XYZ gets privatized it is sold to thousands or even millions of people (each one putting anywhere between 10 euros and 100 euros) , and therefore would remain in the public trust. That was a common operation during the XXth century, but guess what, it seems that it does not please some very few people with a lot of influence.  (I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational explanation on why simple people cannot own such a structure and that it must be pawned off to major corporations).

So what did France lose by  losing AAA? In fact, not much, as the dices had already been thrown a while ago. A nice, velvety red curtain just fell of this past week, that’s all; and now things will become officially more difficult for most of us.

Happy New Year everyone…

Picture by Eliane Domingos of the Document Foundation

This year we didn’t go party and celebrate the new year with friends. For some reason we felt lazy and decided we’d spend the new year’s even with our family, (parents, cousins) at my parents’ place. In the end both Melissa and I knocked on the door sick with sore throat and some mild flu. Needless to say, we didn’t drink much, we mostly ate and were dosing by 1am. It wasn’t a very exciting new year’s eve but it felt good to be among our loved ones; it was a really good new year’s eve and I’m glad we were able to spend the first hours of 2012 and most of the first day with our family. May love, health, success and joy fill your life for 2012. It’s likely to get tough, business wise, but I think we’re going to have some real fun.

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.

• I hear and read that Breivik is demented, that he’s in fact insane and should be locked up in a lunatic asylum. I disagree: the man is meticulous and seems to be fully aware of what he’s done. To label him as lunatic is to refuse to see how human his actions were and to deny him (and others, in a broader sense) complexity and responsibility for the tragedy. It’s like saying that Hitler or to a lesser degree Ben Laden were insane: They were not, and they’re responsible.
• Some people seem to have issues dealing with the fact that what happened wasn’t coming from muslim terrorists. Let’s be perfectly honest here: I, as well as many others, if not 95% of the people who learned about the news that day first thought about muslim terrorists. If you haven’t and were suspecting someone else, good for you. But let’s not try to be shy about this; it was our first thought, our first movement, the first blame we cast. We could not imagine -or rather, we had forgotten a simple truth: Extreme right activists and terrorists exist, and they do kill. They killed in the twenties, the thirties, the forties and all along the twentieth century. They do kill as well in our present century, all around the globe. Hate is not the monopoly of Islam. It’s so comfortable for some to think so . You can call yourself Christian and kill in the name of Jesus Christ; that just happened in Norway but it happened many times before. You can kill in the name of the Judaism; that actually does happen; you can kill others, or you can kill your own people, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the blood shed and the false pretense that your action is going to lead to your desired result.
• As a consequence, not just the extreme-right movements of the western world (including the tea-party spin doctors) are getting uncomfortably agitated, but the conservative and neo-conservative parties are dancing around the topic in an interesting way. Their Weltanschauung has been once again invalidated. It’s not that a conservative view of the world and society is necessarily wrong; it’s that the ideology that has seized the conservative wing of the western world politics ever since the nine-eleven events has proven, just like any ideology, to be fundamentally anti-democratic, and has led to failure. They failed to see the rise of the Arab revolutions spreading in the quest of true democracy and freedom, just like they failed to find the much sought-after weapons of mass-destruction in Iraq. Now they failed to see that you don’t have to be a Muslim (and therefore suspect to their eyes) to be a terrorist. And in front of people like Breivik, rest assured that the Neo-Cons are not overly moved, because Breivik has carried their unconscious or conscious fantasies to the extreme realization. The extreme right thinks Breivik was right, but that it came at the wrong moment, allowing then the whole “leftist” press (I wonder if they’ve ever heard about Murdoch) to paint them in a bad way.

If there’s any personal conclusion I could be making, aside the expression of deep sadness that I feel, it would be this one: let’s stop being angelical about the values of the Western world. They are worth being fought for, but we won’t have the clash of civilizations hoped by the extremists of all kind, and better yet: our values are not under siege by some foreign  civilization or religion: they’re under siege because we are so intent on destroying them ourselves. The western world economies are often crumbling, our politicians often corrupted and seemingly never able to get a hold of the special interests driving most of our policies, while this state of things only frustrate their own citizens. What can be done to fix this beyond the manufactured slogans and pseudo miracle rules advertised by lobbyists? This is the question that the Oslo tragedy asks, again and again. Will we have the courage to answer it?

I am thinking about the victims of this catastrophy, and I would like to express my deep sorrow. I hope that the rescue teams will be able to take out all the victims who are still alive under the ruins. We had some good news from Japan: It seems that the Japanese team of LibreOffice is safe -I am not sure if everyone is though, but I really hope so. Also, my good friend and longtime contributor to the OpenOffice  project Hirano Kazunari is reported to be alive and safe with his family. I had real concerns about him as I know he lives in the norther part of the Honshu island (the main island of Japan).

The issue is that our world is not just being torn apart by natural catastrophies; man also kills man. I would just like to express my solidarity and support to our users and volunteers of the Arabic world; people from Egypt, Tunisia, perhaps even Lybia, Yemen and elsewhere. Some of them have to fight for their rights, or sometimes for their own survival.

In these situation, the Document Foundation cannot do much, of course. But we are all humans, and we are a community, the Document Foundation’s community. We hope you and your relatives are well, wherever you are, and we hope to work with you in the future and for a very long time.Take good care of yourself and your relatives.

(If you live in Japan and you’re susbscribed to any of the TDF lists, please, say hi. We’d love to hear from you. Also if you live in Lybia, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrein, Yemen… please ping us as well.)

Sometimes I do take off my computer. That’s the case this week-end as I’m in Cassis on the French Riviera.

May you enjoy your week-end as much as I am enjoying mine.

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Merry Christmas to you all, filled with love, warmth, presents, joy and health. I would like to give a special thanks to my family and Melissa with whom I will be blessed to spend this Christmas. I do look forward spending many more Christmas with them! I would also like to think about people I know and may not know who are sick and who will spend this end of the year in hospitals. That’s not a fun place to be, even without their sickness. I hope they will recover soon. Last but not least, I would like to say how privileged I am to be part of two great teams, the one at Ars Aperta and the one of the Document Foundation.  I look forward working with all of you in 2011! Finally, I have shamelessly copied the Christmas pictures from Prete-moi Paris… Enjoy and Merry Christmas!

Snow on a boulevard in Paris

from: http://i1.trekearth.com/photos/125553/galeries-laffayette-xmas-2010.jpg

• It’s Holiday Season, nonetheless, and I thought you may want to take a look at how Christmas looks in Paris, especially under the snow. (Paris is a city that looks particularly beautiful under the snow). Prête-moi Paris has all the details.

• The Opera Browser 11 has just been released, with some very nice tab-docking features, among other things. Yes, it’s proprietary, but it’s innovative and truly standards-compliant.

• India embraces Open Standards for good. Interesting read from Venkatesh Hariharan.

• The EIF and EIS 2.0 are published at last. In many ways it is disappointing, but it is at the same time a clear political gesture in favor of open standards and true interoperability.

• Murky details about the famous CPTN’s buying of Novell’s patents. The result? It looks like the mob just bought the latest casino at Atlantic City.

Best wishes for the Season!

Simon Phipps wrote a much welcome post this week-end and quoted Voltaire “I may not agree with your opinion but I will do everything I can to make sure you can express it”; the Wikileaks “cablegate” is about that, as well as about two other issues.

But first, I would like to clarify my opinion on the “cablegate” in the form of a cautious caveat emptor. Contrary to Mr Assange, I do not believe that transparency solves or will solve every problem out there. I believe transparency is good, in general, but transparency can sometimes become a deforming mirror, pun intended: Total transparency is an utopia. We all need and have secrets, and so have human societies. While crime and murky business of all kinds do require opacity to progress, it has often been shown that transparency is also a well made-up reality, whether hiding those criminal or morally reprehensible practices, or hiding conversations or more delicate but legitimate dealings under the veil. Our societies could not exist with total transparency. We could not be humans with total transparency: Or else one would have to explain that Comedy, Drama, and human subconscious are inherently bad and useless. What the “Cablegate” reveals so far is quite embarrassing for the United States of America. I read the newspapers, like Le Monde in French and the Guardian in English, two newspapers that had been working with Wikileaks on the cables. I also went straight to one of the Wikileaks mirrors and watched that specific section. My gut feeling? It’s unfortunately the world we live in. If you think this will make me become anti-American then you’re wrong. The US are failing in bringing Pakistan to become a sincere ally in the war against terrorism? I’m yawning. The US ambassador in Paris describes the French President as being nervous and extremely egotic? Guess what, watch french national television for two hours and you’d get that instantly. For the rest -and there’s more embarrassing material- killing two Reuters journalists and children from an Apache helicopter is an absolute tragedy that bears a name: War. Not that I support what the videos are showing: I hope there will be DoD investigations for this. But war is war, and if anyone thought Iraq, Vietnam, World War 2 or the War of US Independence were about pooh-bears throwing honeypots at each other, then there’s a word for it that goes beyond naivety: stupidity.

Other leaks tend to be somewhat more interesting: it shows how private companies and special interest groups are framing entire legal frameworks in Europe, how the US put spies in political parties and hosts them in their embassies worldwide. It’s obviously embarrassing, but please let’s ask ourselves: Is this all new? I don’t think it is.

In fact there’s two ways to understand what the Wikileaks cables’disclosure reveal. One is the factual disclosure of actions, affairs, skeletons in the closet, various projects and information that enlightens the perception of the US Government on worldwide topics. You can feed anti-Western sentiment or anti-american feelings with this material, but frankly it’s not like these two memes would be fading away anytime soon without the leaks. Another one is the notion that all of a sudden transparency will fix the state of the world, starting with America. Transparency helps, but some things have to remain buried for a long time, some things are not meant to be disclosed. And talking about transparency, we should not be anymore naive and demand that the same kind of information be disclosed from countries like Iran or North Korea: I’m sure it would highlight another well-known reality: that US or democratic countries are not just no worse, but are in fact much better than these countries (some people are ready to absolve them from their wrongdoings on various grounds).

So why did I call this post “Discernment”? For various reasons; the first one is that the US Government in general is behaving in such a way that few will believe that they have a legitimate defense to present. Mafious-like pressures, persecution of one man, denial of reality, outrage do not serve them. The world we live in isn’t the Sopranos’ BadaBing strip club; and if I may write so, even if “shit does happen” one should try to think about not being seen as the culprit. I must indeed say that I find it extremely concerning that a man like Eric Holden is behaving the way he does, using expressions alluding to underground actions used to fight Julian Assange. A government does not fight one man; it discredits him, or it reuses his ideas to gain an advantage, otherwise that government is weak. It only leads to one result in the end: Assange is seen as the victim, the US Government and Barack Obama as the black knights (excuse the pun).

The second reason why I titled this post “Discernment” is that to the best of my knowledge, and interestingly enough many US lawyers seem to think that way, Julian Assange has not violated any US Federal or State Law. This means something quite terrible for the United States: There is simply no due process of law in this affair, only angry politicians. But angry politicians do not constitute a law themselves; you need a legislative and transparent process for this, otherwise you’re no better than in a dictatorship. This law has so far failed to materialize. Meanwhile, Wikileaks is being hunted down around the Internet, large companies withdrawing essential tools for its infrastructure. Julian Assange just went to the London Police and will remain there in custody until the 14th of December under the alleged charge of sex crime. Let’s stop the hypocrisy and speak out the truth: making up a lace of lies will only reinforce Assange’s position: Otherwise, Facebook’s Fan page of wikileaks now has over a million “terrorists”, the Internet should be censored and Wikileaks banned, (China-style) while the KKK, anti-semitic and djihadist groups are free to graze and prosper. And I forgot to add to the list: Pigs can now fly. Unfortunately, that seems to be the situation we are in. But there’s more.

As one may see I’m not exactly a fan of disclosing diplomatic cables, from the US embassies or elsewhere -while in some cases such as private corporations wrongdoings the disclosure helps and is important- but it’s not so much about what Assange did or did not do. Let’s consider this: the whole affair should never have been about Assange in the first place: Wikileaks has not stolen the cables, a whistleblower uploaded them, but nobody really cares. No, the whole point of the scandal is that we now have a great democracy whose government is incompetent in addressing a massive disclosure of confidential material, and its incompetence is now setting a precedent on free speech and free press. What Wikileaks did -and dare I add the newspapers that collaborated with the site to the culprits- was disclosing an information from an “unknown source”. That’s what newspapers in the free world do all the time. Does this mean that under the quite specious argument of the fight against terror we should now ban this? By the way, who will be able to “ban the ones who are banning free speech”?

Therefore, unless we specifically have a due process of law following a public and opend debate on whether initiatives of Wikileaks could be condemned on specific grounds, unless it’s clear for everyone that Free Speech is safeguarded and is actually enacted and thoroughly protected, Assange and every anti-American will have won.

Again, let’s have a public debate about this: It’s well worth the effort, and it’s well worth using our sense of discernment.