• The Hungarian President ruling over France -I guess it is now a correct qualification of Nicolas Sarkozy based on the distinctions between French citizens he would like to make- has managed to stir quite a bit of outrage these days. The problem is that the case is a bit more complex than  what it seems. For several years now, taking the metro in Paris or walking on frequented streets, you couldn’t have missed the presence of Roma begging or playing music. Earlier this summer though, an incident between cops and a few Gypsies (not to be mixed with Roma, as they have been French centuries ago) prompted our beloved Hungarian President to demand laws that could lead a fresh French citizen to have his/her nationality withdrawn.  The absurdity and dangerousness of such measures set aside, the whole move was, according to some presidential majority representatives, an electoral maneuver designed to lure extreme-right voters back to the President’s camp. I predict this strategy is doomed to fail, as 30 years of recent French political History have shown.  On top of that, the methods of the French police to arrest the Roma and shove them in an airplane are not just outrightly scandalous, they are also useless: not only are Roma European citizens, they’re also migrant, poor, and many of them are locked inside mafious organizations that will put them back on the same streets they just left. But no attempt to fight this sort of crime ever emerged from the brain of our genius -and Hungarian (& partly Greek)- President. In fact, many people were wondering why the police was not doing anything to stop some of these Roma and take them away from the streets. When metros and public spaces are filled with CCCTVs you have to wonder what was going on… and in fact, their sudden arrest and expulsion of 100 people was a sheer act of disingenuity from a government that acted as if it had just discovered the issue one week before. That’s what I call a lie, as these Roma were literally kept on the back burner in case their public arrest might serve for political purposes. How convenient.
• How convenient here again: Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, gets charged with rape accusations, arrested by police and … the police withdraws the charge. “Strong social pressure” is the way a lobbyist once described these sorts of interesting events to me. If you thought the CIA could do something more effective than that, think again: they could not even predict 9/11.
• On a different level, but very much disingenuous: Oracle sues Google over alleged patent infringements on Java. This does not just highlight the absurdity of software patents once again, it shows an incredible lack of understanding on how ecosystems and FOSS work. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m confident that Google has money to pay its lawyers, and so does Oracle, but why wasting so much money? Time to land back on earth, Iron Man…

Share This

Return to the Mobile Edition.

• Join us at the OOoCON 2010 in Budapest, we’ll be happy to meet you, the city is beautiful, the conference topics quite interesting (as far as the ones I reviewed)… And don’t forget to register before the 27th of August! More details here.
• Just alongside the OOoCON in Budapest, there will be an unique event: the OASIS Interop Demo on ODF. This will be the opportunity for ODF implementations to compete and stress test both the different applications and libraries, but also the standard itself. Ars Aperta will represent lpOD there.
• Mark your calendar for the OpenWorld Forum in Paris and attend Ars Aperta’s conferences there. We have quite exciting news coming up for you.
• Last but not least, I have to share something that may interest a relatively minor portion of the readers of this blog, nonetheless I won’t refrain from letting you know that upon installing the latest OpenSuse 11.3 on my father’s laptop, I noticed a notable performance improvement of the Evolution Email and groupware suite. However, I still do not understand why for the love of G*d Evolution cannot use multiple inboxes…

Time for vacations!!!

Share This

Return to the Mobile Edition.

Share This

Return to the Mobile Edition.

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?

Share This

Return to the Mobile Edition.

For the sake of clarity, extensions are “plugins” for OpenOffice.org that work very much like Firefox plugins. They extend the feature set of  OpenOffice.org and are a great way to grow our community. I should mention that the number of Free and Open Source Software extensions outgrow by far the number of the proprietary ones: They are in fact more the exception than the rule. The Community Council has been working on a press release which we just released and that you can read on this page. I am sorry we could not find a good solution, but we have essentially and respectfully agreed to disagree on a topic which I find quite unimportant. Shortly after I posted the announcement on behalf of the OpenOffice.org project, I received a flurry of emails, both satisfied and unsatisfied, both public and private.

As for my very own, personal opinion, I do have the highest respect and regard for the Free Software Foundation and count myself as one of their most fervent supporters. But I would have hoped  that they understand the merit of prioritizing their agenda items and the timing of their actions. When the FSF approached the OpenOffice.org project via our Community Council we were shaken by the buyout of our main sponsor, Sun Microsystems, and had to reassure both our contributors, our users, and perhaps ourselves as well. The request from the FSF caught us off-guard and although we dealt with it with the utmost attention, I could not help but think that the folks over there in Boston must be living in another dimension. I got the feeling they were like a bunch of officiers from the logistics department of an army who would stop everything on the wake of a war just because the markings underneath the trucks have not been properly painted.

Seriously, did they have nothing better to do ? Asking questions on the future of our project? On the ODF standard? On how the new main sponsor thought of its future leadership? On the changing grounds of FOSS vs. proprietary software in the context of the emergence of cloud computing? Really, did they have nothing on their plate besides picking the five proprietary extensions on the OpenOffice.org website and make a whole cheese out of it? Now the FSF seems busy creating another extensions website, which I can’t help  finding useful for OpenOffice.org, as it is just a second “app store” for our users and a second venue for our developers. Congratulations, FSF, you know how to pick your fights.

Share This

Return to the Mobile Edition.

Share This

Return to the Mobile Edition.

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.

Share This

Return to the Mobile Edition.

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

Share This

Return to the Mobile Edition.

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.

Share This

Return to the Mobile Edition.

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!

Share This

Return to the Mobile Edition.