Meanwhile, you can dive right inside the official lpod documentation, which is at this stage covering only the lpod-python part of our platform.  Speaking about languages, I can already point our interested readers to an early, development stage version of lpod-perl, currently hosted on the CPAN repository (as this development version is thoroughly unofficial).

Last but not least, here’s where you can get our code, and if you are interested feel free to take a look at our custom ODF News Reader. It agregates the feed from many interesting sources (blogs, websites, etc.), you can export them as an OPML file, and it’s a good place to stay tuned to what’s going on inside the ODF ecosystem.

Enjoy!

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Steve Jobs is therefore a many of the “entertainment industry” as much as he’s an IT genius. Too many people forget it. Because of the focus on developing and selling machines for digital content consumers who are supposed to pay for it, one can come to see the iPad as one other device to consume paid content. The point, unfortunately, is that the lines are very much blurred at this stage between pundits taking on the angle of the tablet metaphor and the ones focusing on the business model instigated by Apple on the iPad (and the iPhone, indirectly).

The fact that the iPad is not capable of multitasking might have come as a disappointment to mostly IT people, but it’s beside the point: We will see multitasking iPads, make no mistake about it. The problem, and the one that Cory Doctorow does in fact properly discuss in his article, is not the hardware. The hardware is very nice, somewhat weak, but it will improve anyway. The problem lies in the economic model of the iPad: Digital content publishers adapt to one particular sales channel for one or two specific devices with a revenue sharing model that does not seem to satisfy them for the most part, and by doing this they essentially relinquish control to one player (Apple) controlling both the delivery channel and the device.  That does not end there. The device itself, be it an iPhone or an iPad, is not meant as something you can create anything with. Sure, there’s IWorks, but that hardly counts as a truly creative software. Anyone can get an office suite. On the iPad… you can only have this one. So because of the tablet metaphor, which in itself is not bad at all, the content delivery channel and the inherent limitation of the software platform, the iPad turns its “owners”‘ as passive consumers of digital content.

Now, there is surely a market for paid digital content. It would be better if this paid content was in the form of non-DRM riddled open standards and if you could actually have the tools to freely collaborate, share and create. That’s not what the iPad is intended to do. And that’s where Cory’s article hits the target. But there is more: the civilization in which the solely accepted way to use software and digital content is to be a passive consumer is over. It may perhaps never have really existed. The reasons for this are complex, and relate directly to the very end of the mass consumerism era as we know it, with its environmental and social damages (see the Story of Stuff for instance) it induces.

The iPad essentially is perhaps a beautiful tool, but it litteraly frames us in an environment where the only accepted form of creative creation comes from the established entertainment industry. It’s the television that everyone can take in his/her hands, and that dream already existed for 3G phones 10 years ago. But today, in the age of social networks, collaborative platforms, free and open source software, this model looks strangely outdated. As the famous sociologist Bernard Stiegler puts it, people have become sick of mass consumerism and eerie marketing strategies that tend to frame people as objects.  Entertainment consumerism is no different. And the irony of all this is that we still perceive macs as being computers for the creative bunch. It’s actually quite the contrary. And that’s why, by the way, my next laptop will not be a mac, inasmuch as I love its hardware.  Macs, iPads, iPhone will continue to generate enormous revenue, but they  have it backwards and will have to be reinvented (again): Apples never fall far from the tree…

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• Excellent post by Jean-Louis Gassée (French software genius, inventor of BeOS and former Apple employee) on Microsoft’s troubled future.
• There is, in a related but previous post, some hope about that though. I tend to agree with Mr Gassée here: I simply do not buy into the whole all-cloud, no-desktop system. It simply does not work no matter how large your bandwidth is. This being said, it will be interesting to see how Microsoft’s strategy with respect to cloud services and office suite evolves. As for OpenOffice.org, you might ask… Well, that one could also end up being interesting as well. But make no mistake on that one: Fat, Monolithic clients are out.
• Great post on combining some microformats, in this case OpenID & OAuth. Microformats are extremely important in Cloud contexts and are the most pragmatic tools to fight off cloud and social lock-in by companies like Facebook.
• The UK Government promotes open data. If only we could do the same over here…
• Don’t miss Steve Job’s & Steve Ballmer’s interview on All Things Digital, starting tonight at 6 pm California time!
• Last but not least, OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 is almost out. Last RC is looking good, so be prepared to download it.

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I have accepted my nomination for the elections of the Board of Directors and I would like to thank the people who nominated me. My name is Charles-H. Schulz and I’m a founding partner of Ars Aperta, a French consultancy providing strategic client assistance on open standards and IT governance.

As a member of the OASIS I have contributed to the ODF Committees and am also serving at the steering committee of the e-government member section. It’s been now over three years that I have been contributing to the OASIS Consortium’s effort of advancing digital standards, and I believe we have some unique value propositions we should seek to push forward and enhance.

The OASIS Consortium hosts, promotes and develops some of the most advanced and comprehensive digital standards. Our unique choice of IPR makes it possible to develop, distribute and use the most secure and stable specifications, and the adoption the OASIS standards throughout the industry is an evidence that we serve an important purpose: To produce the most reliable, versatile, easy to implement and use standards for the digital world.

By electing me to the Board of Directors of the OASIS Consortium you will be choosing someone dedicated to push forward the agenda of open standards that provide an effective answer to real world problems met by industries and governments worldwide. You will be voting for someone who has a first hand experience of the challenges faced by the small and medium businesses, both as producers of standards and as their users.

As a member of the Board of Directors of our Consortium I will also dedicate myself to ensure that the adoption of our standards becomes one of our top priorities; this entails promoting the standards themselves but also growing our presence in large industry fora and public sector’s initiatives such as research projects.

Last but not least, I will help improving efforts such as OASIS Blue that aim to bring our expertise on digital standards in the fields of green equipment for the household and the industry. These fields are promising both by their efforts towards a greener industry and the improvement of the general interest, and also by the economic growth they help to nurture.

Should you have any questions I am available to discuss them with pleasure and interest. I am confident that we can build upon the existing success of our consortium to reach something even bigger.

Charles-H. Schulz.

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

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I tend to think it’s a smart and calculated move by Google, as it was, among other things, noted that the company has a rather weak market share in China. By leaving the Chinese market it will not lose much, and will gain a lot of credibility and positive outlook that Microsoft has been working hard to undermine. The reaction of Steve Ballmer to the story is quite telling, and now he looks like the Borg again. But what I am quite amazed at is the amount of hypocrisy seen in the media about this issue.

Certainly, there is more that meets the eye when it comes to Google and PRC. But this story should have been the opportunity to remind the Free Market Integrists (the ones who believe Free Market actually exists and that we live in an ideal world – many of them, interestingly, were patented communists thirty years ago) that China does not play by the rules of the Free Market. China does not want to play by these rules and has slowly imposed its own rules, special labor laws, low currency, local joint-ventures, and now, a special Internet behind a Great Wall. Most companies fail to see that they will eventually lose, if that’s not already the case for some of them (the French Alcatel and Thomson companies are blatant examples of such “soon-to-be-departed” companies) and that only a few will survive a system they may have contributed to define, but one that automatically creates fierce competitors by the will of one government.

Google, for good or bad reasons, has decided it would stop to gleefully agree to whatever the Chinese leglislators would dictate, and only a few commentators have so far realized the change it has been compared to any other companies.  For the record, I am actually quite admirative of China, its culture, and how it managed to lure Western industries through greed into thinking that what they were going to get by outsourcing/working in China would automatically be a success. To some, it’s even become a duty, although they overlook the evergrowing lack of balance in our trade equilibrium with China.  Ideology has been the sickness of the twenthieth century. In our times, I am afraid ideology is still very prosperous.

But let’s go back to Google and China: Do not be shocked by Google’s move; rather, we should perhaps think at what kind of double standard in business, ethics, and politics we have to set when dealing with PRC. I am disappoined that few have noticed these skeletons in the closet, but I guess a pink elephant is always more visible than they are.

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Stay tuned (although I won’t be close to my computer for most of the month of August)!

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I may surprise many of the readers of this blog, but as the title puts it, this blog is about how Mono does not matter anymore. Actually, I believe it stopped mattering 24 hours ago. But let me go back quickly on the last weeks and the come-back of Mono in the debates of the Free Software community.

It started with one Debian developer explaining why he thought Mono was a pretty good choice technologically-wise and not at all the patent-trap that those extremist punks with beards usually think it is. Actually I enjoyed reading this blog (for all the links check out OSNews and BoycottNovell) as it was very credible at least on one point: Mono is, for the best or the worst, essentially important for Gnome developers. Very few developments happen with Mono as the gateway from the Windows environment to the Linux one, and the ones that did happen have so far never been conclusive. Mono is very much present inside Gnome, pushed and shoved by Miguel De Icaza and Novell who seem to work hard at making Linux the constant second platform behind Windows (Why will remain up to everyone to figure out). So instead of having become this “Switzerland” of software platforms, Mono became a sub-level glue for Gnome, while being judged legally unsecure except by its own authors.

But let’s go back to the blogosphere. The discussion started once again, but this time with an acute political intensity, which prompted several major distributions to make a public statement about the Mono issue. Fedora/Red Hat (the other big Gnome contributor) decided to scrap Mono out of its own Gnome in its upcoming releases, Debian stuttered and then didn’t decide anything, while Canonical took a pragmatic stance and declared that if someone had a patent on Mono, that someone should better come out in public and stop the fearmongering. Add to this a comical episode about TomBoy and Gnote that illustrates well the Mono dependency hell: why code light when you can code with Mono?

… And all of the sudden the elephant in the room, aka Microsoft, started making a strange, rumbling noise in the background.

Microsoft essentially declared that most of the Mono core was clean by publishing its community promise on CLI and the C# language. Is that good news? It is good news because it’s always good to know that Microsoft is embracing competition and openness. Their promise is pretty good, although it does not clear up GPL implementations from any threat. Some of my readers will think that I can never be satisfied, but here’s the thing: I’m reading the FAQs, and as much as I have to say that there is progress, we’re still not there yet.And by the way; Bob Sutor and many others would love to see the same kind of promise applied to Linux, it would not hurt anyone. 

Anyway, who should care about this? Gnome developers mostly. The rest of us have gone out of the .Net and Java wars after around 2004 or 2005, and have realized that there other realities such as Qt and Python (to name just a few), and most of all, there is the Internet, and the POSH (Plain Old Simple Html), and that new little Linux distributions launched by Google… And so much more.

Mono and .Net is one of the last schemes from an outdated behemoth; both the scheme and its inventor will soon fade in blissful irrelevance. It does not mean it cannot sting back though….

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As many of you know, Ars Aperta has been active in standardization ever since its inception. Shortly after starting our business in 2006, we realized how critical a standard like OpenDocument Format would become for the ICT world.
By creating an effective, xml based format for office documents, the OASIS Consortium has not only developed an alternative solution to the office format imposed to the market: It has set a defining moment, after which both the industry and the ICT users were no longer forced to use closed and unreliable formats, but instead had the choice between those and an open and sustainable standard. For the qualities of OpenDocument do not just lie in its technical capabilities. OASIS-developed standards are among the best ICT standards around, thanks to the contributions of world-class experts and a constant, steady work towards the advancement of the state of the art. OpenDocument is the first standard to be called “open”, because its intellectual property regime, as much as its development processes and inclusive nature allow the contributions of the largest number of stakeholders and have been thought to design an unique alternative that will help drive the ICT industry towards a more sustainable, open, and interoperable era.

I am grateful for all this to the OASIS Consortium. It would be pretty difficult to return the favor to this honorable institution, but today I would like to contribute something back by taking one extra step. I am running as a candidate for the election of the Board of Directors of the OASIS Consortium, and I intend to serve the OASIS together with my colleagues for the benefit of the whole ICT community: software vendors, users, governments, citizens, integrators, developers, etc. All have their importance, and every single one of them can be an OASIS stakeholder.

What can I bring to the Consortium?

First, it is important to realize that we are standing at a turning point for standardization. The way ICT standards are developed today may not seem much different from the way they were just ten years ago, but standardization processes are facing an increasing pressure from various players and emerging, collaborative ways to develop common sets of protocols and formats among I.T. experts. It is no mystery that several technological revolutions have changed the ICT landscape in the last few years: Free and Open Source Software brought, among other things, the fundamental demand for transparency, users and developers’ rights and the quest for uncompromising quality in code. Collaborative methods have shown that they were not so much methods than a succession of epiphanies based on the careful observation of the power of people sharing their skills and knowledge in a networked mode. Last but not least, the network gave birth to an economy of abundance of knowledge, which in turn made possible the appearance of ad-hoc, online standardization teams working on specific technologies designed to provide the answers to technological problems. All this does put a strain on traditional standardization methods; we may want to think how best to adapt ourselves to them. The time of ICT standards designed by and for the sole benefit of their authors is now over: We must accept the fact that the normative power previously devolved to a few has now become inherently distributed across the Internet. We must also realize that although standards should always been designed in order to solve one identified set of problems, we develop standards not just for our own benefit, but for the benefit of all; and by its ubiquity, the Internet and Cloud computing made this an even more stringent reality. In short, our industry is changing, and we have to embody this change ourselves, for our constituencies, our peers, and our communities.

Second, our demand for uncompromising quality in the standards our consortium develops relies not just on the best will of our men and women, but on effective tools and adequate answers to the everyday’s work going on inside our technical committees. We should make sure we continue along the path that the OASIS Consortium has taken a few years ago, by using and integrating our wikis more effectively in the OASIS website and improve the access to collaborative tools and documents repositories. More to the point, we should help the various committees developing and using online conformance and test tools. These tools should be easy to access, reliable and transparent for the sake of peer review and efficient work inside the committees.

Third, we should explore new potential markets. Standards form an integral part of many industries; but as the usage of ICT grows exponentially across industries that were previously thought immune to the field of ICT, so does the need for digital standards. In this area, the OASIS consortium has already a position that is strong enough to put us in the front seat of this standardization field, as we focus on developing xml standards that serve entire vertical markets.
But this is a mere stand only, and we should strengthen it by not just focusing on xml standards, but expanding our reach to encompass markets that strive for sustainable digital standards. By doing this, we will not just protect and grow our reach across the standardization field, but we will also serve our constituencies and the ones who will come after us in developing unique standards for tomorrow.

I will be happy to work on all this with my colleagues at the OASIS, and also with you, members of the broader Internet community: Citizens, small and large businesses, government, developers, and others. If you are a voting member of the OASIS consortium, don’t forget to cast your ballot this month, it is important. If you are outside the OASIS voting members category, you can help too: By communicating around you about this election, by finding out if you know people at the OASIS and telling them about this project that I believe is comprehensive, pragmatic and at the same time, I hope, inspiring.

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