• Have you ever listened to Soma FM? I know it’s a popular group of webradios that started out with a strong emphasis on electronic  music but broadened their audience the past two years. Still it’s not broadly known outside people who usually listen to web radios. They need your financial support too.
• The Groovera web radio. I had some conflicting opinions about this radio. On the one hand I think it provides even better music and tunes than Soma FM, but on the other hand they came up with all sorts of “protective” measures and ended up, for some time at least, to be only accessible via iTunes. It seems to be different now in all fairness as I can stream their music from VLC but it was not always so. For the amateurs of nice and beautiful electronic music though, this radio is a must-listen at.
• This one is not a radio, but a set of mixes available by podcasts. I like them and they’ve been providing very nice tunes for quite some time. Be aware that this is not the same team developing the Khavi CMS system..
• Something from the Paris underground , a collection of links leading to podcasts or webradios, mostly electronic but brace yourself: it’s not all macarons and chic in Paris.
• I love Gregorian chants but unfortunately web radios or podcasts with this sort of content tend to be hard to find on the Net. This one is a pretty interesting resource but it’s somewhat linked to extreme-right groups, although it could be a bit overblown. Music is music anyway.
• Music is music, but sometimes you also want to have open and free content to stream and download. Jamendo is very famous but what’s even better is that their content has really improved in quality over time. If you would like an overview just try out their selections that are presented under the “Radio” section.
• Another music streaming service that only provides creative commons with mp3 and ogg downloads is DogMazic : you’ll find more underground things there…
• This one is for the Cognoscenti: Ayeko 
• Last but not least, I will not end with another webradio but with a psychedelic, vaguely hip magazine I like: The Cake Magazine (no connection with cookies though). You should give it a try but don’ t hope to find any logic in its editorial line…

Enjoy your 29th of February!

For sure I do use Facebook, I am “on Facebook” just like many other people. But I also use Google Plus and Diaspora. While Diaspora aims at being something really different and relies on a fundamentally distributed model, it is in its infancy and I will not discuss it in this post. I will focus on Google + instead.

I had big hopes for Google + and still do. I still believe it is a better built, more powerful and less harmful service than Facebook, but I also believe that while any service has shortcomings of its own its operator/owner tends to correct them over time by bringing in more features for instance, something Google does not seem to be doing, hence my points below:

• Tastes and colours should not be discussed as everyone has his or her own tastes and yet… I still like Google + much more than Facebook for that matter, however, something seems not all right in Google +: could users customize the look of their page(s), or are they condemned to the everlasting white background? (on the other hand you could point out that simplicity in design never hurt anyone).
• Profiles: it’s amazing how hard it is to see someone’s profile. For this Facebook tends to be much simpler and clearer, Why can’t I just access someone’s profile in one click, instead of searching its own activity feed?
• Sharing and circles is probably what Google + does best, although in many ways it was a Diaspora’s concept that was itself hinted in the discussions around the DISO concept (the early days of a distributed social network) but there is something, specifically about sharing, that I do not understand: sharing beyond circles, such as sharing on Twitter or StatusNet, let alone on Facebook is not possible. I know about the hack for identi.ca and twitter that works by sharing with one specific profile but why would I want to share that with this probably sympathetic, yet unknown person? The most surprising part of this is that neither Google, nor Twitter, nor Facebook, seem to be willing to provide that feature (the same goes for sharing from Twitter, StatusNet and Facebook to Google +). This issue alone, to me, is a major one, and I am pretty sure it’s the same for many people. Because of that posting on Google + is somewhat of a solitary exercise; you have to repost specifically on Google +.
• More distributed content : obviously Google does perform data mining on the content we share on Google + and any of its other services, that’s not news to anyone. But while Google does handle data portability seriously (a big plus!) it might benefit from enabling some sort of “sandboxes”, that is, private spaces that could be self-hosted, yet easily connectable to the “central” Google + network. This would also allow many people to both feel more secure and enrich the overall content aggregation scheme; you would be able to use Google + as a content transport layer in between “pods” or peers and still using the big social network itself if you want to.
• A Google Wave like timeline : as people become increasingly aware that their past posts and interactions can be monitored, reused by others or simply by and for themselves, an easy to use timeline, something completely missing on Facebook, might be useful and fun to use.
• A professional page or job search as well as other specific services might also be useful; but it seems that Google + is very much like other services launched at Google: an experiment first, a product afterwards. I am usually fine with this approach, but Google + needs attention and extra features if it wants to stay and grow instead of being dumped and filed such as Google Buzz was. I really hope that won’t be the case.

It might be odd to write this, but if there’s any concept that’s both fuzzy and dangerously misleading in the software industry, that would be innovation. I have read for many years and listened to people explaining how to “stirr and create innovation” in a company or in a community. Maybe these words have been used for lack of a better term; but I still don’t see how you can create innovation. I think you might be able to stirr it somehow, as it’s already a humbler verb. But frankly, can someone out there tell me what does innovation mean in the software world?

In general terms, I would define innovation as the big and small changes constantly leading to a change of the art in any given field. I think that’s pretty much what one usually understands by that word. So why could this not be applied to software? Precisely because software is rarely -if at all- the result of big changes happening all of a sudden and by accident. Software development usually happens at an incremental pace, whether openly so (think about the agile development practices) or even when there’s a structured corporate environment favoring traditional code reviews and quality assurance processes through stable product development cycles. Software is not produced by accident. Software is the result of process, and in theory accidents do not happen there. In fact, I could also point out that incremental changes or a period of technological incubation might be observed right before the emergence of almost any given technology. Take the medieval rudder for instance: it’s been rumored to have been imported in Europe around the 12th century by Chinese ships, but there are tracks and evidence of previous try-outs by European sailors and shipyards to design wooden rudders and articulate them with a complete mechanism. Similarly, it is hard to say how “innovation” happened in the sixties when the U.S. decided to send manned flights to the moon, but the wave of small and not so small innovation that was the result of this huge project is still visible to everyone (think of the Tefal pans, among many other things).

Thus there are, I think, two points that need to be highlighted: First, innovation does not happen all of a sudden if the field of software field and more generally ICT. It is a set of processes that ultimately lead to new software, or software that’s supposedly not as bad as the former state of the art. Second, what’s unclear is how -to quote several people I listened to- innovation “happens”. It sounds sometimes that innovation is a mystery or the philosophers’ stone that require care and secrecy to happen. Yet in the software industry, it does not work that way, for all the marketing and bells and whistles that come out of software vendors do not brush aside the fact that even inside these corporations software development is a set of very well defined, but non-public, processes.

Innovation is not a mystery and I don’t think that you can track how it works. You can assume that a certain set of circumstances and an environment letting people code start-ups emerge and Free & Open Source Software projects grow will ultimately translate into something that someone, whether a journalist, consultant, politicians or venture capitalists will call innovation. Anything else besides that, innovation sounds more like vapor and magical boxes. This should probably express what I feel about software patents, by the way.

One last thing: Innovation is different than progress. Progress is usually applied to fields that do not necessarily belong to science or technology; it can be more a perception and may concern society as a whole. Yet the interesting thing is that while progress seems to be an even more elusive term than innovation, you can actually tell progress from regression or stagnation: people perceive it almost immediately, however relative it sometimes may be.

Enjoy the beginning of the Holiday season!

I would like to come back shortly on two of the announcements we made, regarding the porting of the LibreOffice platform (not the interface) to iOS and Android, as well as LibreOffice OnLine. While these two projects are at various stages of completion and have different requirements they help to show not just the vitality of our community, they also shed some light on how we manage to embrace a bazaar-like approach to development and think about what I call our “development ecology” (which some could really translate into development strategy, but I think it’s more subtler than that). What you see through our online office suite project and platform porting announcements is that we are taking some great care in doing something paradoxal with respect to our stated intent to change the codebase as much as possible: we keep our codebase intact. Note that we do change, upgrade, clear and trim the codebase, but we do adopt a singular codebase approach where the code used in LibreOffice OnLine, and the underlying code on iOS and Android will essentially be the same than the one inside the LibreOffice Desktop suite. In other words, we do not release a product here and something completely different there, even if in the future, a specific work on the interface for tablets will have to be made (we won’t use the existing interface on these as it would not make sense).

This “universal” approach makes sense not just for “market growth” and adoption, it has two benefits. The first one is to pool the resources as much as we can, because maintaining millions of lines of code here while maintaining a million of new and different lines of code there would not require around 3 hundred developers; it would actually require 3 thousands of them. We thus keep the codebase as a coherent whole (hence Rob Weir’s confusion answered by something like “just pull the git”) while we will enjoy in the future the second benefit of being able to make changes (and even important ones) in one codebase, thus replicating the changes for the online version at the same time as they will be made available in the desktop or the tablet version.

Exciting times are ahead. Stay tuned!

• The Document Foundation has joined the OpenDoc Society. The OpenDoc Society is an international community (based in the Netherlands) that promotes the use of open standards such as ODF and helps various initiatives related to open standards. I think it illustrates our unwaving commitment to ODF -despite what you might have read around the Internet these past weeks- and you should expect more news to come about our commitment to ODF in the coming months.
• LibreOffice RC3 has been released; will we be releasing the final version soon? Suspense! In any case, give it a shot, and bring us your feedback!
• By now you may have noticed that we do indeed have a new and beautiful website. I would like to thank everyone who worked hard on it. In fact since the Steering Committee of the Document Foundation wanted to improve the clarity and the organization of the work around the website it has decided to appoint a team of four persons who will effectively further the development of our website, each of these persons being responsible of one specific area: content, site design, user experience and site administration/infrastructure.
• While we have a final draft of our Community Bylaws we hadn’t implemented them. Part of the reason was a lack of time, and part of the reason was that we felt that until we hadn’t properly incorporated our foundation we might have been led to amend them for legal reasons. Yet some people pointed out that we could at least start to implement them and progressively enact them as to enable a clear governance and leadership of the community. It’s a good point. So we started by appointing the first Membership Committee, while the Engineering Steering Committee will be formalized very soon.  The Membership Committee is in charge of managing our contributors, who in turn have the power to elect the Board of Directors, run as candidates for various roles, etc. It is in fact this process that defines the fabric of our community, and it’s therefore a crucial one, for almost everything else will depend on contributors running our project.
• Much in the same way we were lacking a trademark policy. We were really missing one, with people coming to us asking for the permission to use our logos and names and also a few people misrepresenting themselves as LibreOffice or the Document Foundation. Here’s the stable draft; we’re waiting for legal reviews on it.
• We also started to work on the incorporation of the Document Foundation. As we have chosen to incorporate an actual foundation in Germany, the process will take time, effort and money. We will keep you posted on this.
• We will be present at several shows soon, throughout the world: the FOSDEM in Brussels and the SCALE in southern California: come and visit us!
• Last but not least we just received the news that the former “OOoAuthors” team who was writing quite a lot of good user documentation for OpenOffice.org has changed its name to ODFAuthors, working now on manuals and documentation about LibreOffice as well. Congratulations folks, we look forward working with you !

In a nutshell, OpenSuse has been breaking away very slowly from its main sponsor, Novell, for about 2 and a half years. The first visible sign of this -which really was a weak signal nonetheless- was the decision taken by the community to switch back to KDE as their preferred desktop instead of Gnome. Of course, just like Mandriva/Mandrakesoft, Suse had always been more KDE oriented than  Gnome. Yet Gnome is where the business, the stability, and theenterprise applications are supposed to be found, and on Gnome lied Ximian, the Groupwise integration etc. Then the OpenSuse folks started to open a brainstorming plan in order to define a new strategy for OpenSuse, apparently independent of what Novell was planning to do or sell with respect to that. This strategy brainstorming session ultimately reached its conclusion a few days ago:

https://lite.co-ment.com/text/lNPCgzeGHdV/history-version/RE3kSeg3LGI/

As you will see, what OpenSuse intends to be is a general-purpose, desktop oriented distribution; which means at the same time that nothing will change in its actual orientations and that it even departs from its usual enterprise polish it always had had. But what this also means is that we will not see OpenSuse or Suse on handhelds or tablets or any other new markets. This is a significant information, especially if you see that whoever will buy the Suse part of Novell in early 2011 might not be able to have its own way if  it does not take the time to engage with the community: The OpenSuse project seems to be very autonomous and not at all ready to fall into whatever new goals any future sponsor might want to achieve. And if it takes a fork to dot it, there’s the Mandriva case.  But always remember that OpenSuse has a very strong userbase and market share, although it’s been declining ever since 2009. What will be interesting nonetheless will be what the future owner of the Suse brand will want to do and how it plans to innovate. OpenSuse can be a general-purpose distribution; the user base is there, but the value might be hard to create if there’s no real business story to tell behind it.

Back to Mandriva / Mageia now. It’s perhaps to early to say anything about Mageia, except they seem to be made of some pretty skilled  people; and that’s usually not the kind of engineers you find easily on the market. They claim to continue what Mandriva as a distro was good at, only in a better way, and without the perceived historical failures of the past management teams.

Interestingly enough, I think Mageia is bad news for Mandriva, and it means that Mandriva should find an innovative business model and acquire/change to a new focus. Let me explain. Reading the Mageia website and going around the Internet, here’s what I understand:
- Mageia realizes the need to be a linux distro for other kinds of
terminals (tablets, handhelds, etc.)
- Mageia has crafted two strong bulletpoints in its storytelling that DOES hurt Mandriva starting today: Mageia “is” Mandriva, since it is
made of the engineers who have coded Mandriva ever since a few years; second, Mageia is “better” since they understood what “is wrong”: the management of Mandriva. (Nobody ever found anything to complain about Mandriva as a distro, it’s still one of the best on the market).
- Mageia is soon to “take over” the market: everyone on the forums  seem to dig Mageia; and in a sense, it’s what the Mandriva community and the French FOSS community was expecting.

If the last claim sounds bold, think again: what is the value of having a Mandriva desktop outside of a corporate support contract (same goes for a server) now that there’s Mageia? The way to create value for Mandriva is to depart from the traditional all-purposes distribution model (which still does not mean they would have to “cut” the actual distribution) and innovate first at the distribution level, and then, if possible, go up the ladder by growing a very skilled technical team able to innovate as an operating system, either by contributing upstream again, which it hardly does anymore these days, or innovating on the user experience just like Ubuntu does and is now clearly intensifying as a strategy.

In the case of Mandriva and Mageia, what might become interesting to watch is the potential race between the two twin-distributions; one is now almost an empty shell, deprived of its developers, and the other one has developers but no resources. In any case, it’s time these two get a real shot at innovating, for the sake of the entire Free and Open Source Software ecosystem.

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!

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…

• 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.

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.