Moved by Freedom – Powered by Standards

The other day I got somewhat puzzled, like many people by the new pricing of the former Sun ODF plugin for Microsoft Office. There was first this button “free download” that was really pointing to a page displaying a price of 90$ for the dowload. I then went back on it, and perhaps I did not read this page well or they changed something. In any case, I noticed the mention “free download” had gone away, simply replaced by a generic red dowload button and so I clicked on it. What I saw was very different from the odd perception I and many others had gotten.

The dowload page does indeed not bear any mention of the 90$, but allows different lengths of support contract that amounts maximum to 90$ (5 years support). Now you have to purchase this plugin by pack of 100, which obviously changes the price somewhat, but also indicates the plugin is targeted at medium or large organizations, indirectly telling much of what Oracle’s perception of the market of Microsoft Office users interested by ODF is.

I have read several blogs, dents and tweets on whether this 90$ a seat is a really good thing for ODF. Let me bring a very short, simple answer to it: It’s good for Oracle’s revenue. Whether it will work is perhaps too early to tell, but it’s somewhat assumed here that you can dowload ODF compliant office suites, such as Openoffice.org, for free, or choose the plugin, or even choose Oracle’s own commercial support of OpenOffice.org. What we’re witnessing here can be seen as harming the adoption of ODF, but I’m not convinced by this. I will not go over Openoffice.org’s tremendous and continuing growth, nor the development of ODF tools and APIs but I don’t think the Sun’s ODF Plugin, as strategic as it was at the time of Peter Quinn, was much more than an opportunity to try document conversions and different formats. At best, it was a good opportunity to have a conversation with a vendor. At worst, the new price tag might reduce these opportunities. But I think this, again misses the point.

What Oracle is doing here is what Sun should have done all the way back: extracting actual revenues from its expertise on ODF, whether by providing support on Openoffice.org or engaging into large migration projects. To be sure, Sun had such commercial offerings, but because of its internal organization and a certain market configuration, it never realized the potential revenue it could make. The key here is not to monetize on everything for the sake of it. The key is to realize that:

• there is no market for OpenOffice.org nor any other non Microsoft Office suites. Surprised? The market as it stands today only applies to Microsoft Office versions. Procurements, measurements, feature requirements are all based on the assumption that one or several versions of Microsoft Office suites will be used and purchased. Until governments or large organizations change their own definition of requirements to stop matching Microsoft Office patterns and similarities, anything between OpenOffice.org to Google Docs will be the underdog and sales strategies embrace a “good enough” type of discourse towards the customer.
• there are in fact very few companies customers can turn to that can deliver level 2, let alone level 3 support services on OpenOffice.org . The reason is that the code is complex, the community is complex, and that the technology itself is complex. OpenOffice.org is very much a standalone software suite. Microsoft Office gets sold by licenses, but SharePoint is becoming quickly the new cashcow for Microsoft. So the market is blurred by IT service companies that promise everything in the form of global service contracts but they seldom get reassurance from their own end at the original vendor or any other qualified party. I remember last year a very large IT service company had sold a several million general support contract to a large French organization, ensuring the customer it was able to offer level 3 support on OpenOffice.org. It turns out their level 3 was very much calling me on a Monday morning and asking me grave, but expansive questions, and by doing so they were not even expecting to pay me for my time. Now these guys never paid Sun  for an incident ticket, and that’s a practice that should be stopped. The customers will benefit, and so will the people who do the real job.  I think and I hope that’s what Oracle is in the process of doing: enabling the monetization of its investment on OpenOffice.org and ODF. Too bad if it’s shocking some people out there.

This being said, it does not rule out that this confusing notion of 90$ a MS Office plugin might prove a bad business decision for Oracle. ODF as a format and as an ecosystem will not be affected (too much) but what I see as a growing concern is somewhat different, yet related: Oracle needs to listen to the community, and not treat it as some sort of fan club. Community engagement means something, and trusting it also means a lot. Not everything can be sold, monetized, especially not people. Let’s hope Oracle will not remain forever silent with us on this.

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OOo Postings, OpenDocument Format, OpenOffice.org

• Alex Brown criticizes OOXML, claims it will not be implemented in MS Office 2010 echoes what many had predicted or knew for years. Perhaps someone’s monthly fee was not sent in time, go figure.
• Microsoft’s troubles in court over OOXML and the i4i patent continue, and it’s serious.
• I used to write that once or twice a year, I found Microsoft actually did some things right. Today, I would like to give a very special mention to its Courier project. There are some good chances that the combination of hardware and software will turn this device into something that is just as closed and proprietary as Apple’s IPad, but I find this one to be actually useful, beautiful, and seemingly quite usable. Kudos for the design, I hope you will not forget to use Open Standards.
• the Songbird media player leaves the Linux platform… sort of. I understand there seems to be some resources problem, but then these guys either have a business model that’s not working out or something else is going on. What does “a version for engineer will be maintained”  mean ? Is that the perpetual beta or a broken, unusable version. And why can’t they fix that? Can someone else do it? Odd…
• My attempts to package the lpOD project for Suse and Fedora have started, but they’re still hesitant.
• I just got interviewed in French by Radio Libertaire on OpenOffice.org and its future, the podcast will be available soon.
• BoycottNovell becomes TechRights and expands its scope. Good luck for this new project, Roy!
• Ars Aperta upgrades its website and welcomes André Rebentisch among its team. André’s short bio is here.
• A message to everyone who lives in SecondLife as well: Penzance’s Connolly Airfield in the Independent State of Caledon needs new maintainers and financial support. Feel free to participate!
• Zaheda Bhorat is back on the web and I must say it’s good to know she’s healthy and active again.

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Ars Aperta, Linux, OOXML, OOo Postings, OpenOffice.org, Second Life, Software Patents

The European Commission is becoming a thoroughly disappointing these days. Here’s a few examples.

• The full draft of the ACTA has been leaked (grab it here) and as my colleague and friend Andre Rebentisch has described, the European Commission seems to know very well how to dig a hole for itself and stay in it.
• Meanwhile the works around the second European Interoperability Framework have taken an interesting twist. Having started on rather excellent premises, different copies of the draft are now circulating, and they appear to have been watered down by the direct influence of the Business Software Alliance.  Open Standards, let alone Open Source, now seem to have been put aside.  When will the Commission learn how to make the difference between the interests of the European people and the Chinese and US economies?
• It is also interesting to note that the Business Software Alliance and organizations supported by Microsoft have the ears of the European Commission, while Microsoft’s own search engine, Bing, is displaying interesting results on Microsoft’s own competitors. Just look up for OpenOffice.org in Bing, and you will see.
• Meanwhile it is to be noted that the Commission has also opened a public consultation on the European Interoperability Strategy; it is to be hoped that it will not be a ground for further delay and sterile talk to be ended by the Commission making decisions based on the direction of the wind.

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OOo Postings, Open Standards, OpenOffice.org, Software Patents, Web 2.0

Recently at OpenOffice.org we have decided to give more highlight to our many native-language communities, who are in charge not just of localization, but also QA, users support, documentation translation and marketing. Each month, we will interview teams, blog about it, include it in the OpenOffice.org, newsletter, etc. This month, we start with the Irish native-language project, lead by Kevin Scannell. You can find more about the Irish language here.

Conas atá tú Kevin? How are you doing Kevin?

Tá mé go maith, go raibh maith agat. (I’m doing well, thanks)!

When was the Irish native-language project founded? Why? 

I started translating OpenOffice.org into Irish during the summer of 2004. I work as a professor at a university here in the USA and I had a sabbatical leave during the 2004-2005 academic year – working on the localisation was one of my projects for the year. In fact, it was just one piece of a more ambitious plan to provide a fully-localised desktop system in Irish. Around the same time I started translating KDE and we had an energetic team working on Firefox 1.0 as well. In hindsight it was an overly ambitious goal for one person in one year, but as more people have come on board we’ve made good progress toward that goal. I worked alone on OpenOffice.org for the first year or so and I completed about 75% of the UI, after which five additional translators helped me finish the job and we released OOo 2.1 in Irish in December 2006. I’m proud to say everyone on the team is a volunteer – it’s a true community effort.

What is its primary interest?

I think everyone on the team is working on OpenOffice.org because we care about the Irish language and want to do something to help secure its future. Even in the strongest remaining Irish-speaking regions in Ireland (theGaeltachtaí,mostly on the west coast), it is difficult to live your life entirely in Irish. The vast majority of TV and radio programming is in English. The only two Irish language print newspapers closed in the last year. By creating a fully-localised desktop, we’re allowing people to live (at least) their virtual lives entirely through the medium of Irish. It seems to be working: there is now a vibrant community of online news sites, social networks, bloggers, etc. in the language.

How many Irish speakers are there in the world? And can we tell how many of them use OpenOffice.org?

Most people in Ireland learn the language in school, so in the last census more than a million people claimed some knowledge of the language. But really not this many can speak it well – in Ireland it’s a cliché to talk about having the “cúpla focal” (just a couple of words). So it’s a much smaller number who use the language on a daily basis. It was estimated, for example, that in the Gaeltachtaí only about 70,000 people are using the language habitually.

Because the Irish version is freely available from several mirror sites, we don’t track the downloads and so it’s hard to say exactly how many users we have. We have better numbers for how many people have downloaded the Irish language spell checker for OpenOffice.org – more than 5500 to date. This is comparable to the number of people who are using the Irish version of Firefox, so it’s a plausible guess for our user base. Relative to the French or German or Chinese teams this number probably seems amazingly small, but really I’m quite happy with it. Because there’s never been a lot of software available in Irish, native speakers aren’t always completely comfortable with technical terminology in the language and may still prefer the English versions. But I think that having OpenOffice.org and Firefox available for the last few years has helped turn the tide a bit.

Does any company or public administration use OpenOffice.org in Irish?

There is a growing number of Irish-medium primary and secondary schools (gaelscoileanna) inIreland, both inside and outside of theGaeltachtaí. We know of several of these schools that are using OpenOffice.org on their computers, as well as some universities and small companies as well. There may be government agencies that are using OpenOffice.org as well, but honestly I’m not sure. An “Official Languages Act” was passed in 2003 that requires public bodies to provide services in Irish, so this is an area where we see a lot of potential for growth. It’s just a matter of spreading the word more effectively.

Do you think Free and Open Source Software is useful to help the Irish language survive and strive in the 21^stcentury?

It is essential, and not just for Irish. My academic work involves collaborating with minority language groups around the world on language revitalization projects, focusing on technology and computing. I’ve argued elsewhere that free software is the only realistic way for small language groups to sustain long-term development of language resources, given the lack of funding and commercial interest. Free software effectively ensurescommunity ownershipof resources. Without community ownership we are dependent on the goodwill of large corporations that have no real interest in minority languages or cultures.

What do you like the most about the OpenOffice.org community? 

I enjoy the way the localisation community brings together like-minded people from many different language communities around the world. I’m sure that a lot of what I’m saying here about open source and language revitalization will ring true with the other “small” localisation teams – I’m thinking particularly of good friends I’ve made from the Kurdish, Haitian Creole, Oromoo, Chichewa, and Mongolian teams. We’re all in the same boat!

Question to the users/developers/Irish Gaelic OOo community:

What would you like to see improved in OpenOffice.org both as a software and as a community? 

• More advertising. Let people know it’s out there.

• Getting the word out is imperative.

• More exposure and information about what OOo is all about. Many people doubt open source software and probably don’t realize that there is an alternative… which is just as good.

• It would be good if free CDs were available for all Irish localized software so we could distribute these more easily.

Do you see a growth in usage of Openoffice.org in Irish Gaelic?

• Yes. Now that we are seeing Irish language on mobile phones, etc. the Irish speaking community are becoming more aware that we can have technology that works in our own language.

• Potentially. I don’t know how many organizations in Ireland use OOo but I suspect there are a lot of organisations/schools/businesses who could be persuaded to use it. I think few people realise there is actually software available in Irish.

What would you like to do inside the OpenOffice.org project, not just as an user but as a contributor?

• Helping with translating and testing.

• I’ve distributed OOo (+Firefox, Thunderbird & Sunbird) to grateful members of my Irish class.

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OOo Postings, OpenOffice.org

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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OOo Postings, OpenOffice.org