On Tuesday the news that the UK Government had decided to use ODF as its official and default file format started to spread. The full announcement with technical details may be found here; the Document Foundation published its press release on Thursday morning there. This decision is a landmark for …
It has been a while since I have discussed open standards here, even though I have alluded to them in passing. There are currently a number of initiatives and policies ongoing at the European level that are bringing this topic back on the table, especially with regard to public procurement …
Friday and Saturday were great days of excitement: The LibreOffice Hackfest in Montreuil, organized by the Document Foundation and Simplon.co, a “startup factory” born in a large struggling -yet charming- urban neighbourhood next to Paris, gathered active developers of the project and members of Simplon Co. The hackfest was a …
Some time around 2009 or 2010, the OpenDocument community realized that while it had won the moral battle over Microsoft and its dubious OOXML standard, it had lost the adoption and ecosystems war. Microsoft Office had been released and with it an undocument format called OOXML which, as far as …
As the Document Freedom Day is approaching I realized that we don’t push ODF and open standards as loudly as before. Certainly most of the battles for the mind and market share are past, at least when it comes to office file formats. But the recent public consultation of the …
On Thursday the Document Foundation released its newest stable branch, LibreOffice 4,2. Don’t let be misled by its number; if we weren’t on a strict time released scheduled alongside a clear number scheme without any nickname for each release, I would have called this one the 5,0. Yes, you read …
As the British Cabinet Office opened a consultation on open standards and the best procurement practices for the United Kingdom’s public sector a wave of lobbyists, flown in from the US or just homegrown on British soil, came flocking the Cabinet offices near St James a few weeks ago. The …
Recently we had a bunch of quite furious people storming one of our lists at the Document Foundation. The issue at stake was that someone understood that LibreOffice was going to have OOXML filters. It sparkled quite some debate and I read so many inaccuracies, not say so much outright …
The light is shed on OOXML; I’ve lost count of how many officious, ISO sub-versions (and subversions) , alongside the proprietary formats also called OOXML but used in MS Office are now floating in the air. In any case, this short document from the ODF Alliance explains this obscure matter …