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What you see above is very much what could be part of OpenOffice.org’s upcoming visual design.

The project has been working on several levels (and with some confusion as to what process and team was to come up with the first elements) on OpenOffice.org’s next logo.

What do we need a new logo? Because OpenOffice.org is almost 10 years old, and that as our own interfaces change, so should our branding. But here’s the trick Oracle’s acquisition of Sun does not come very much into play here: Otherwise we would all be covered in red and have sailboats instead of our beloved Hamburg’s seagulls (the birds you have to come to associate OpenOffice.org with). So what what started here, is a refresh in our branding, and we want it to be progressive.

Updated: I just received news that Larry Ellison’s sailboat who just won the America’s Cup, has been designed based on seagulls’s shapes. A nod to OpenOffice.org maybe?

That’s why we started ith subtle, but somewhat substantial redesigns of our logo and visual appearance. Here’s our brand, for instance:

As you can see, the font, the colour sequence and even the shade of blue have changed. We will not stop there, and will also work on other visual elements, such as our icons. And here’s the great part: You can help too, by joining our Branding Initiative and participate on our dedicated mailing list. I hope you enjoy our new designs. Stay tuned!

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• 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.

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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.

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• 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 strategy-wise. Better server offerings, more powerful hardware, Java continued, OpenDocument Format praised. If Oracle executes what they just announced, we might actually end up having FUN, with capital letters. On the specific chapter of OpenOffice.org, an ODF-based, online version of OpenOffice.org has been announced and my small finger tells me that it’s going to be a very good surprize. What remains to be seen, of course, is whether Oracle will find this strategy to be profitable enough. They have discussed investments so far, but one should also expect the cost cutting part of the equation. Another thing that worries me is the lack of  clear emphasis on Free & Open Source. I hear “Open Systems”, “Open Standards” and “Open everything”. But the tough part will also be in the governance of existing Free and Open Source projects.  This being said, I have to stress how pleased I have been by what I heard and watched so far. So pleased, in fact, that it seems to me that Oracle has ended up merging with Sun, more than merely acquiring it. The result might very well end up being Sun on steroids, or Sun with a new sales department and a serious database offering that Monty hates. Good luck and congratulations!
• What I have not enjoyed was the presentation of Apple’s iPad. To be sure, it’s a nice device, and I understand that it’s not being advertised as some sort of netbook or affordable MacBook. It’s actually a very nice device, looking like a beautiful picture frame. The inherent weakness is that it strikes me as a more powerful iPhone. The smart part of that story is that Apple is essentially offering easy and elegant Internet browsing to anyone by minimizing its own costs and risk taking. The bad part is that the iPad is riddled with DRM, and that you are essentially locked up in Apple’s infamous App Store. In short, it’s a device letting you browse the Internet as long as Apple wants it, depriving you of your most basic digital freedoms. I do not think that it will pay and that in the end, sole consumer’s satisfaction induced by very powerful marketing and excellent user experience will be enough. Other competitors will eventually be “as good” as Apple, with less restrictions and less of that Diva-like behaviour, which is another way to write the words “anti-competitive” and “proprietary”.

We are in the end of January 2010: Sun just disappeared, Apple re-releases its Newton. Happy future, everyone.

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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 to happen. I would therefore like to say Goodbye to Sun Microsystems. It’s been great working with you, it’s been great sharing years of my life as a Free Software contributor. You were one of these IT companies who have this strange ability to make all of us dream and feel confident we could just walk further than anyone else.

I look forward working with  “another you”, inside the broader Oracle Corporation, and I am sure that it will be exciting.  So farewell, Sun. Hopefully your employees will not forget who you were, what you stood for: excellency in technology, freedom, genius, and inspiration.

My friend Simon Phipps got that on Facebook for the occasion.

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