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

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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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What does “Help MySQL” advocate, in a nutshell? It claims that if Oracle were to merge with Sun, MySQL customers would be trapped in a market that would be pretty much controlled and captured by Oracle, both through its existing propietary databases offerings and the acquisition of MySQL. Another issue explained on the web site is that the inherent free and open source nature of MySQL will not be enough to grant effective freedoms to the market since Oracle would be the sole copyright owner of the code and trademarks.

I think I will not be the only one to notice that in a whooping twist of history, Monty Widenius explains us why the business and contribution model to MySQL he crafted himself since the beginning of the database company is terrible for customers. I am always quite skeptical of the “do as I say not as I do” lines of thinking, but so be it, let’s carry along. For months now, Monty and his interesting (and interested) acolyte, Florian Mueller,  have been lobbying everything that seems to be possibly lobbied, from the press to the European Commission where they seemed to have been giving a hard time to Oracle, confused the European anti-trust with byzantine arguments leading to have MySQL relicensed under the BSD while portraying Microsoft as “understanding towards the Open Source ecosystem”.

You might then ask, again, why would Monty want MySQL back, or separated from Oracle?  What would Monty Widenius, co-founder of MySQL, and recently an advisor of the Microsoft’s Codeplex Foundation, counter Sun’s acquisition by Oracle after having left Sun as fast as he could have? There seems to be many reasons, at least on a personal level. One of them, as Jan Wildeboer outlined today, might be that Monty just does not want to leave the command of MySQL. The problem is that the “competitive case” just does not seem to exist here. Not only can anyone fork MySQL (Monty already did it by the way), but the database market is competitive enough to have other credible incumbents fill in the gap, if Oracle were to become.. carnivorous, which remains to be proven. But there are other reasons, some of whose can be foreseen if one thinks about the possible outcomes of Oracle’s walking away from the merger at the end of the month. Sun Microsystems lost several of its most profitable and large customers with the globlal financial crisis. It is doubtful whether Sun could actually survive in the end. Sun would then be sold by chunks, and I cannot wait to see who would buy MySQL back… Monty Widenius, a fellow of the Microsoft’s Codeplex Foundation, and a man who describes the asserted and patented monopoly as being “benevolent and understanding towards Open Source”. There you go, I know you must feel reassured that MySQL will end up in good hands if it does fall in Oracle’s portfolio.

Sun Microsystems being sold in chunks, or being merged with Oracle raises a lot of questions that I ‘m not aware Monty Widenius ever addressed in a constructive way: What about Java, OpenOffice.org, and OpenSolaris (other examples might also be found)? I have not heard a word from Monty Widenius. The future of ODF does not seem to be very important, just like, in the same way, his new colleague at the Codeplex Foundation, Miguel de Icaza, seems to think. Perhaps the quest for another billion is too important and therefore Monty just hasn’t found the time to think and focus about other issues. By helping MySQL, it seems to me you are also helping the personal wealth of a billionaire who calls evil what some might do in the future while forgetting he did the same before.

All things considered, I am not really excited at the prospect of “saving MySQL”, and neither should you. For 2010, let’s rather focus on constructive conversations and projects.

Happy New Year 2010!

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• OpenOffice.org’s market share will ceased to be constantly looked down upon by analysts. I had recently explained why measuring its market share is complex, and why it is constantly underrated. But now it seems that Microsoft (and the press) are taking good notice of the fast-growing adoption of OpenOffice.org by, well, pretty much everyone out there.
• Standardization of the most recent release of OpenDocument, the 1.2, will be painful, and might perhaps never see a happy ending. For one thing, Microsoft controls the ISO through seemingly fortuitous and massive participation in every national standards bodies forming the ISO, and the ISO’s JTC 1 seems to have decided that the world should be content with some sort of ODF 1.1 “plus plus”. Note that this ODF 1.1 is not a bad thing in itself, but it is very much the result of connivings against ODF and everything non-Microsoft. You never should bite the hand that feeds you, after all…
• The lpOD project, already well underway, will be a success and might become one of the main references for the ODF ecosystem.
• Second Life, the largest online virtual world or metaverse will have to innovate again, or will lose its customers progressively to the new show in town, “Blue Mars“.
• It’s almost becoming a cliché, but cloud computing will again be part of the hype in 2010 and gain a strong momentum on the market. Among many challenges, there is the fundamental need for portability and openness of the users’ data, its control by these very users, and more generally the increasingly clear divide between centralized and decentralized data architecture. In the end, this will become political, and as important, if not more, than the freedome to code and its sharing.
• In the aftermath of the Bilski case, there seems to be a consensus that the criteria for “software patentability” will be much more demanding in the U.S. Of course, a few illuminated curmudgeons inside the European sphere of power, influenced by pro-patent lobbieswill fight hard to implement software patents in its whole horror. But in the end, what we need to do is not being satisfied with raising the bar on patentability criteria, we need to get the message straight and clear that software patents are not acceptable anywhere. ACTA anyone?
• Arch Linux will continue its growth among technical and power users (I’m one of them) while Ubuntu will stagnate (unless Canonical opens its online media store), OpenSuse somewhat loses users, Fedora will grow its userbase, Mandriva will make a strong comeback if they manage to secure their business. How do I know all this? I’ve been in the Linux distributions business, punditry and expertise for quite some time (since 2002, actually) and if there’s something you can count on over the long term, it’s… the Distrowatch billboard. This thing has never proved to be really wrong. I’ll cover more of these topics in 2010. Meanwhile, have a great New Year’s Eve and a happy new year to you!

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Calcification is an indication of the global number of people who actually use the software, because downloading is inherently a voluntary action, and an action induced by curiosity and hearsay. Over a certain period of time, therefore, negative hearsay reduces the average number of downloads to a trickle or to a certain category of people who are happy to use it. When the growth of the download rate is important, it does not mean that more people have access to the Internet. It means that hearsay, let alone curiosity, is working well, and that it’s positive hearsay going around. That’s what’s happening with OpenOffice.org. For over two years now we had scattered and sometimes sparse (for lack of actual information) reports that download rates were going north at full speed, but the raw data we were analyzing revealed important surges for specific language (French, Italian, or Chinese) while the rest was progressing at a slower rate. At Orvieto, we celebrated the “Cento Millioni” conference, because OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 had made us hit the symbolic threshold of 100 million downloads. I think above this level we’re getting the respects of Matt Asay, but I’m unsure of this.

Although these 100 million downloads are an accomplishment and a tribute to the unwavering commitment of our community of users, developers and contributors in general, I think we should consider this number as a weak signal of an impressive global momentum in favor of the adoption of OpenOffice.org on any platform. Another trend was discussed at Orvieto, one I find much more telling. In several, actually many countries, we see an impressive uptake of OpenOffice.org “on the field”. By this I mean that we’re having clear indications and reports that not only do people download OpenOffice.org but that they stop using Microsoft Office altogether. Of course this last trend -abandoning MS Office- is not going to be witnessed soon, for two reasons: MS Office’s market share is accounted by entreprise sales and by OEM bundling. Because Microsoft’s domination is encroached on well-known monopolistic practices, we are often put in the situation where market shares ‘ comparison ends up very much like comparing apples and bananas: The office suite market is a Microsoft Office market, with different slices owned by different pedigrees of Microsoft Office, while any outside incumbet is left at the fringe as the calculation method ignores downloads and values “entreprise sales” and OEM contracts.

In this regard, what we witnessed in Orvieto was important. For the first time we recorded about a dozen regions, states and any sort of upper administrative layers in many countries (Italy, Germany, South America, India, etc.) that migrated to OpenOffice.org and is effectively using it. In some countries, some of them earth giants and some others lesser giants, we witnessed purely and simply a national uptake. Brazil is a very telling example of this. It started by Brazilian states and the migration went up to the federal state. After that it reached large central administrations, central banks, large companies, and is now spreading to small businesses. We estimate today between 7 and 30 Million professional desktops that have been migrated to OpenOffice.org in Brazil. It is always possible that Brazilian citizens themselves are craving for MS Office and therefore lined up in IT stores to purchase licenses from Microsoft but local observers seemed skeptical of that. Brazil, some might think, might be the exception in all this (even if it were, what are you doing of their market share?) but we got very clear reports that such phenomena are witnessed elsewhere; albeit on a reduced scale. OpenOffice.org is gaining users in almost every public sector in the world, and gaining many more in the private sector (both small and large companies) while it’s quickly becoming the well known free (as in beer) alternative to Microsoft Office at home.

My friend Italo Vignoli is adamant at stressing that the infamous Ribbon put Microsoft in trouble, as it frustrated users. That’s possible, but I think it’s far to be the only reason why Microsoft is bleeding users and customers these days. It’s a combination of factors, but most of all, the coming of age of a great office suite that liberates people from vendor lock-in and false promises. “It will be better with the next version” became an all-too well known song to the ears of everyone. OpenOffice.org delivers quality, ease of use, convenience and freedom, and it shows.

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.7

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The RGI is actually old, not just because it was already online as a final draft in May 2009, but because the RGI as a project dates back several years. Its story goes like this: Somewhere in 2006 the decision is made by the French government to draft a public sector-wide policy on IT matters. This policy is to be published in several parts, one on security, another on accessibility and the last one on interoperability. The last one, called the RGI, is published as a draft on the same year and submitted for public comments on a wiki, which was at the time something daring and courageous. The feedback that was received was ominously  good. In fact the first version of the RGI was mandating the use of Open Standards, and most notably ODF throughout the whole administration. At that very moment, Microsoft decided it was time to intervene and through a violent strategy of pressure and influence, managed to repel the RGI and have the process restarted. The process did restart and the same document finally got finalized for official approval in 2007. There the RGI progressively fades away, partly because of the presidential elections taking place in France at that time, partly because of a strongly applied pressure from the outside.

The freshly elected government seems to have not so fresh ideas about I.T. Its track record in the matter is probably one of the worst possible as it is the one who authored and championed the Hadopi law (the french three strikes system) and other network censorship legislation. Any communication system that is not controlled by the Hungarian director of police  glory of our nation, the President, is progressively being put under his control.  In this context one could believe that the RGI would have lost not time being reexamined again. The exact opposite happened, partly because of the neo-conservative bias of the new government who seems to believe in the omnipotence of markets vs State intervention, partly because of a strange proximity with Microsoft (four ministers inaugurated the new Microsoft offices in Paris!) and a common hatred of Google. In this context, the people in charge of drafting the RGI discovered they were deprived of any political support. Moreover, they also realized that the opportunity for a clear policy drafting had gone away. They are public servants, after all, and public servants cannot do a lot without the support of the politicians in power.

This is how we come to the present RGI. The document by itself has been totally rewritten, choosing to leave aside the policy aspect in favor of an exhaustive referencing and classifying of existing technology and standards.  This document itself integrates well with the upper echelons of European interoperability framework and does not attempt to dictate what the public sector stakeholders should do. On the crucial question of the office file formats, it is obvious that the authors spent some time carefully choosing their words. While the use of xml-based file format is clearly recommended, ODF is being put under observation (the reason for this is unclear) and so is OOXML, but at least we know the reason for this: OOXML has no known implementation (and won’t have any until a long time, they might have added) and therefore cannot be used.

This is what happens when a government is fiddling too much with powerful corporations and forget the interest of its own people: honest, competent, public servants have to compose with whatever they have in order to keep things going. If I were to judge this document from this standpoint only, I would actually give it a big cheer.The problem is that the whole concept of the RGI has become somewhat of a loaded gun in France, and it is I believe useless to use people of the DGME as scapegoats. With what they have, they could not have done better. But what was at stake was an opportunity for France to become a champion of open standards and sustainable digital future. It’s sad to see this government never gave it a chance. I hope one day we will realize that the ideological bias against any form of openness entertained by the present President and Prime Minister is something akin to the outrageous denial of global warming by the previous U.S. administration.I look forward to the future versions of the RGI, and think they will bring more constructive, innovative and positive elements to the development of a coherent information infrastructure  for our national public sector.

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