LibreOffice is not owned by Novell. LibreOffice is independent, is a project created by the Document Foundation that counts Novell, Red Hat, Canonical, Google, BrOffice and many other entities and people as its supporters. Yes, Novell, Debian, Red Hat engineers (and others) contribute to the code of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice, just like OpenOffice.org offers the ability to handle documents in the format of Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010. As we know, these are called OOXML but are different from the ISO standard (ISO 29500) known as OOXML. Microsoft is trying hard, as far as I know, to work out something that might be implemented by MS Office 2010 and is known as OOXML Transitional, which is the polite label to call a proprietary format that still comes with a lot of undocumented areas. OpenOffice.org has offered such a feature ever since 2008, not by reading whatever specification was sent to the ISO, but in analyzing the format used in the real world and called OOXML . (yes it’s confusing) If OOo had tried to implement OOXML by reading the standard it would have ended in a dead corner, because as we know, the OOXML ISO standard is broken, and the ISO itself with it.

LibreOffice is no different than that. But there is one addition compared to OpenOffice.org: where OpenOffice.org allowed the reading of MS Office 2007 and 2010 documents only, we allow their editing and saving under the same format. It does not imply any dramatic extension of features: the same capability is in OpenOffice.org, but it’s been intentionally crippled around 2007 or 2008 for obvious strategic reasons (OOXML hadn’t become a standard yet and MS Office 2007 new formats hadn’t been widely distributed). I would not be surprised if Oracle were to enable such a feature in the coming months.

The other factor was that people connected dots: Quite murky details about the Novell/Microsoft emerged recently thanks to Groklaw : and what was known by many of us, discussed on this blog for quite some time, became apparent to the eyes of everyone: Novell got paid by Microsoft to promote OOXML and to implement some compatibility layers with it inside Go-OO. So people connected the dots, and I would understand their concern, if it had been voiced in a more polite tone and in a less oracular and imperative tone. But it was a mixed bag of everything: “stop implementing OOXML now, you’re traitors and owned by Novell, and by the way you’re based on Go-OO”. Therefore I’d like to clarify certain things again:

• LibreOffice is an independent project, not owned by Novell and not even based on Go-OO. But it’s based on OOo with some patched of Go-OO, and now more than ever before, it’s making its own choices.
• LibreOffice strives to be an independent community, not an area for people who do not know how to contribute to Free and Open Source Software Communities, do not even want to learn but only want to stand on their soapbox and shout whatever they will please. Just take a look at the founders of the Document Foundation: there are Novell engineers. Some others work for Red Hat, some others come from Debian, some others are talented community individuals, and then there’s yours truly. Call it a worldwide conspiracy for Novell if you want, and sit on it. If there’s anything that should be clear, it’s that we are for ODF. We’ve joined the OpenDoc Society, and we will be joining the OASIS Consortium as soon as we can. Free Software, Open Standards, Community and Innovation, that’s what we strive for.
• Of course, there will be the question that needs to be asked: Are we falling into Novell’s trap (or rather Microsoft’s trap) ? I think we aren’t and we won’t. Truth be told, the Document Foundation is not aware of any secret pact between Novell and Microsoft to stuff LibreOffice with OOXML and patents (were it only because 1) their cooperation is ending soon 2) MS was not in the know about LibreOffice until a long time, and Novell does not own anything in LibreOffice). But the more important -and perhaps some will find it naive- is that the Novell people we’re working with, among them Michael Meeks, Thorsten Behrens, Kendy (and all the others) have so far proven to be not just reliable and trustworthy, but also good and loyal fellows of ours. They’re not in this to serve Mr Ballmer and the dancing ponies of Redmond Club: they’re in this because just like me, just like all of us, the founders of the Document Foundation, we believe in Freedom, Free Software and Open Standards. And if it were of any reassurance to anyone: if one day we had the evidence of patches directly resulting from a secret agreement between Novell and Microsoft on LibreOffice, I trust the community would replace them as soon as possible.

Happy New Year everyone, and may the Force be with you!

To the credit of Florian Mueller, he’s been involved in the fight against software patents for over 10 years. He also seems to have worked for the Real Madrid Football Club before landing back in Brussels to defend the poor millionaire Monty Widenius against Oracle. Now Florian is all about IBM and claims that IBM essentially shot down the debate on software patents at the Supreme Court by addressing a “Friend of the Court Brief” in which IBM was essentially explaining the Court should not outlaw software patents right away, as these were valuable intangible assets that could badly hurt US companies. Florian Mueller has also been behind the infamous “Open Mainframe” initiative, targeted again at IBM and involving himself in an existing anti-trust case.

I disagree with Dana Blankenhorn on several points. First, Florian Mueller is by no means a leader of the Free & Open Source movement.  Florian had his shot several years ago when the debate on software patents in Europe emerged and was a defining moment for the European community of digital rights and innovation proponents. It was in a sense a “rite of passage” for many. Since that time, some went their own way, some others maintained the flame and vigilance that is tested again these days.  Florian was part of the former group. He went to work for the Real Madrid Football Club, and we somehow lost his track.  Sometimes after the OOXML standardization odyssey, Florian took several planes to Brussels. He went to see many people, including many of my own personal friends and colleagues. His big project was to crush IBM, and Oracle, and anyone who was benefiting from software patents. Well, not exactly anyone: Microsoft was thoroughly avoided each time, sliding through the raindrops, but leaving everyone with an odd taste in the mouth. Soon enough, Florian’s campaigns, backs and forths appeared to many as  they have always been since his come-back: an over-inflated bag of wind.

Let me explain: There is no division when it comes to software patents inside the Free Software & Open Source community. Software patents are evil. They stifle innovation. When used by patent trolls “non-practicing entities” they are at the core of a despicable racketeering system that can at times be seen as proxy war between some large software vendors. When piled up by software vendors, they are used as weapons of mutually assured destruction. That is, by the way, what the Open Invention Network is doing, piling up patents and neutralizing them, and it’s one of the reasons why Canonical recently joined it, as Ars Aperta has done a few years ago. Let there be no doubt: Software patents suck. We do not want them in Europe, no matter how high the pressures are. In this game, every major software vendors has patents on software: IBM, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Computer Associates,  Novell… heck, I even think that Red Hat has some. Is this a situation we wish to solve? Certainly. Does the fact of owning software patents mean you stand against Free & Open Source Software? Hardly. Does IBM own Software patents? Yes it does. Does IBM help Free & Open Source Software? It did more than most of the others, Red Hat excepted. Does IBM benefit from Free & Open Source Software? It certainly does, it even makes billions of dollars out of it, and they’re not the only ones. But the question is perhaps asked the wrong way, so let me rephrase it: There is a project, there is a team, or only one person, there is code. And when the code is available online, in the form of source code and binary bits, that you can access, study, modify and redistribute the software under these two forms with no constraints attached on the code, then you have Free & Open Source Software. That’s where contributors or sponsors come in. IBM is no different than any contributor or sponsor. There is given project with available code. IBM decides to contribute to it (the same is true for anybody else), period. Free and Open Source Software does not have bow to anyone to strive, because it does not have to “join” one camp or another. It is its own camp, which IBM, Oracle, Google, Red Hat, Novell, etc. agree to join for contributions or not.

In this sense, Florian Mueller has been rattling his saber for almost a year now, launching “fatwas” and anathemas on selected vendors (IBM and to a lesser extent, Oracle) while refusing to address the very big elephant in the room: Microsoft. Now this is not a rant against Microsoft I’m engaging into, but truth be told, Ballmer must have a crack at watching its competitors diving into various anti-trust cases in which they’re involved. And he sure must be very grateful to Florian Mueller, although Florian’s actual impact is very much limited to his own buzz: There is a reality distortion field that seems to be on around Florian’s weblog. It does not go beyond it. Florian has no troops, no clout, no beef, no legitimacy, no credibility among the Free & Open Source Software community. The man seems to have enough money to drum along though and in this sense, he’s acting a bit like  the infamous “Tea Party Movement”: You create a pretendedly grassroots movement in the hope people will believe it’s real until some more people actually joins your cause. In this case, however, I’m afraid this “Tea Party Movement” is stuck at level 1: The Astroturfing stage.

Make no mistake though: we all stand against software patents. But Florian Mueller’s tactic is strange, extremely partial, and leaves some big questions unanswered: Who does benefit from an anti-IBM campaign? Who does benefit from Oracle not merging with a dying Sun? Who does benefit if everybody thinks Google infringes your privacy?

In the ODF Alliance’s whitepaper, you will see an interesting chart that I have included below. What’s interesting is to read between the “lines” of the chart.

What is shown on the chart are the joint evolution of the format development itself, the emergence of an ecosystem of applications using ODF and the rate of governmental adoption. Based on these three trends I’d like to make a few comments:

- Contrary to what some lobbyists have been trying to explain to various types of customers but most openly to governments, there is no difficulty in the fact that ODF, just like any other standard, has multiple versions and that these versions evolve with time. As long as the standard does not stop to be retro-compatible with itself, it’s perfectly normal. Which means in simple mathematical terms, that if ODF 1.0 has X features, ODF 1.1 may have Y features but not only will Y include X, it will also be perfectly possible and easy for an application implementing X to read the X in the Y format.

- Indeed, the rate of government adoption has not stopped. We are now entering a new phase where we see relatively less announcements, but much more deployments, which also means that the governments are now effectively adopting ODF.

- The number of ODF-ready and capable applications and platforms is growing, which is a telling sign of the health of a standard. More than that, the number of software libraries for ODF is growing (check out lpod) for a good example.

- Last but not least OOXML, which is not shown here, has not so far made any inroads and has zero or extremely limited adoption. The reason is simple: the ISO standard known as OOXML is not even stabilized and its main implementer, Microsoft, does seem to have some trouble enabling it in Microsoft Office. The file format with .docx and .xlx suffixes used in Microsoft Office 2007 is but a proprietary and undocumented format with a name similar to the ISO standard does not help with the confusion. This format does not have a strong adoption except when dictated by deployments of Microsoft Office 2007 and it seems that it is becoming a tough sell for governments.

So what is left for us to accomplish? Where will ODF be in 5 years from now?

More adoption, a stronger ecosystem, and a gradual but quick merge of the online realm with the one of the good old office suites, making ODF not just a “document format” but a pivot format of everyone’s data on the desktop and in the cloud. But this story remains to be written…

• 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!

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.

• Just when we thought the European Commission was leading the way in getting rid of proprietary and foreign technology, helping Europe master its digital independence, the second draft of the EIF v2 (European Interoperability Framework) got leaked last week.  The draft contents are nothing short of appalling. Open Standards are simply erased from the document and Open Source seems to be considered as some shameful condition that needs to be discarded as a possible option for the European digital infrastructure, and reading in between the lines one may get the perception that it might just all be easier in a pure Microsoft environment. I understand that some people are whispering in the corner that Jonathan Zuck stands again behind the leak, but I really have no opinion on that. Go figure who leaks the leaks. Anyway, this might keep some of its credibility if we are to believe this representative of the Polish government, who basically explains that the leaked draft is, well, not a draft but something that does not seem to emanate from the Commission. Here and there outraged reactions have been heard. The good folks at OpenForum Europe who are usually known for their moderation, have spelled it out quite clearly in this press release. Another reaction from another insider in Brussels is also quite telling of a situation where entire pieces of legislation are being hijacked by the will of lobbies while the citizens of the European Union would like more control over the Union’s growingly opaque policy making structures. Basic mental and political sanity would recommend that this leak was actually a leak of a real draft of the EIF or another manipulation by some lobbies pushing an anti-competitive agenda by sabotaging open standards and open source.
• If that weren’t enough, Jomar Silva from the ODF Alliance Brazil has posted its latest revelations about the infamous Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) on OOXML in Geneva and how Alex Brown, its dubious convener, did everything to stop some delegations asking some interesting questions. It is amazing to see how international processes can be bent towards one and the same goal.

Halloween season, I tell you…

So Kevin Turner, COO of Microsoft makes some interesting points about OpenOffice.org; but I would also like to react about Matt Asay’s own blog about OpenOffice.org as a weak competitor to MS Office. In some way, I found Matt Asay’s blog to be very much unfair to OpenOffice.org, but I will come to that later. Microsoft’s words on OpenOffice.org are unusually fair, not so much because they take into account OpenOffice.org as a competitor, but because they describe very well the reality of the “good enough”. True, the market wants good enough products to use, especially in these troubled times. But how you measure good enough is where the devil hides (as it were, he always hides in details, doesn’t he?).

By coining the issue of the “good enough”, Kevin Turner describes perhaps unwillingly what the market wants, what the market believes it consciously wants and what it’s really running after. OpenOffice.org does not qualify as a good enough competitor office suite: this office platform has been around for a over 15 years in its different incarnations, and expert features have been around just like in MS Office. It would be perhaps good to remind that about 90% of office productivity suites users only use about 10% of the features existing in every full-fledged office suite from any vendor. What this means is that customers usually don’t use these suites to their full extent. What this also means is that “good enough” is pretty hard to define. I think it can mean two distinct things: either good enough means that products are very much interchangeable feature-wise, or it means that nobody has a clue what are the actual product requirements in order to rationally choose one and not the other.

My preference goes to the second definition. After several years of analyzing migrations and deployments of OpenOffice.org, having talked to people in charge of the migration at various level of executive positions, I can pretty much say that people often don’t know why they stick to MS Office. But they generally tend to know why they want to get away from it. Most of the time, it’s not because of a feature they would absolutely miss if they were to switch office suites; this is an argument for status quo that is often pushed forward, but 99% of these “special features” are not so special. Competitors offer the same or similar ones. But it’s fear, laziness, and issues that exist inside the organization that hinder migrations. I read Kevin Turner’s speaking Outlook as a key value in MS Office and as something that OpenOffice.org does not offer. I get the feeling two things are being completely overlooked here: You don’t pack features in software like you do with a car. This is software after all, and it’s immaterial, unlike a car. Mr Turner’s points may have been valid in the context of a car brand’s qualities compared to another. Do we really think people cannot deal with downloading a separate mail/groupware client ? If that is so, I think this is a wrong way of looking at things. The real stickiness to Outlook is the Exchange servers that lock customers and hinder them from moving to another solution, not any special features (Zimbra anyone?). And in the end, good enough also means that once you broke on through all these gimmicks, half of the market finds out it really just needs something to type in notes and letters, and do some bit of accounting. For the rest, such as presentations, either grab Apple’s Keynote if you know what you’re doing, or stick to Powerpoint or Impress if you really feel like inflicting your poor artistic tastes to the rest of your colleagues. Which does just really mean: open an account on Google Docs or Zoho. Period.

Customer lock-in is something that drive people away from MS Office. I understand that Mr Turner keynotes Microsoft’s business partners and therefore talks in terms of market opportunities; but although SharePoint may be a great business opportunity for the Microsoft ecosystem, it’s a formidable capture engine for its customers. SharePoint has slowly become the foundation of Microsoft office platform, and one should not expect any sort of openness there. It’s a bit like a mousetrap: it looks appealing, you can get in but never go out; it’s a proprietary and non-standard realm by definition.

OpenOffice.org on the other hand, has something else to offer: Freedom. Freedom to use, freedom to improve, freedom to distribute, freedom to go away. Not less money for you and more gasoline to pay for. The time for pork-barrel spending progressively comes to an end in IT. True, OpenOffice.org does not benefit from a very large partner’s ecosystem (read “ISV”) and I understand that you will not feel alone if you have just acquired your expensive license to use Outlook and Word. I’m pretty sure that someone out there will also sell you something else, like business intelligence applications that “seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Office”. This usually means that their standard output is a *.csv file whose extension is renamed to “.xls” on the fly so that you can open it with Excel (or with OpenOffice.org Calc!) and send it via Outlook to your colleague next door without him gasping in horror at the sight of a new file format. That will be 354 Euros per seat my dear. By the way, are you part of these people who rename “.xlx” extensions (MS OOXML for spreadsheets) to “.xls” so that other people around can read your file and hope nobody else will notice you messed with the file format? Because if that’s the case, you are part of Microsoft’s problems.

And that’s what Matt Asay has apparently not understood. Matt’s problem here is that he reacts exactly like any open source software pundit: there’s always a good way to remind the Beardies how lame and unprofessional they are. Matt seems to be expecting that the OpenOffice.org project orders market analysis on a monthly basis. Matt seems to have some trouble understanding why an office suite that is not properly marketed with a commercial entity behind it may make inroads. Last but not least, Matt does not seem to consider OpenOffice.org (that’s OpenOffice.org to you and anybody else, Matt) as a credible competitor to MS Office. On what ground does he draw these conclusions is not clear to me. But there is something I know about Matt’s employer, Alfresco: Alfresco as a platform is a very interesting and important success for the Free and Open Source Software progress. It shows that you don’t have to be a complex, gas-guzzling, feature packed document management system to compete head to head with SharePoint. In fact, I hear Alfesco software is really popular. And Alfresco does also “seamlessly integrate” with OpenOffice.org thanks to an OpenOffice.org extension that allows you to upload and download your documents to and from the Alfresco system. Why am I telling you all this? Much of the success of Alfresco is correlated to the success of OpenOffice.org, and vice-versa. When an organization turns to an Open Source document management system, it tends to look for lower prices, affordable service fee, and no lock-in. Which means the very same organization has completed or is contemplating a migration to OpenOffice.org, which, incidentally offers the same benefit.
Who’s eating the other’s crumbs now?