Moved by Freedom – Powered by Standards

• I wrote a bit more about Ars Aperta’s new certification project. The basic idea is to award certifications to organizations that contribute or lead FOSS projects. Several types of certification exist, but in this article I discuss the specifics of what is probably the first comprehensive FOSS certification to date for companies.
• Some people do not seem to be happy with Microsoft Office’s implementation of ODF. Check out the ODF Alliance blog. What I find amusing, besides the fact that the unfortunate side of this situation, is that there seems to be a willingness to explain that OOXML was not so bad after all.
• I could point to other blogs, but this one comes from Jeremy Allison, author of Samba, now working for the great Satan Google. It’s actually quite interesting because what Jeremy is saying is that all this dispute seems to be based on the impression that Microsoft did the minimum to have ODF work inside MS Office. My take on this is we should first stop getting ballistic at each other, especially inside the ODF TC. What is needed in the interest of ODF and the users, is to have a careful examination not on the ODF conformance in MS Office, but on why, based on experience, the interoperability is severely hampered when using ODF with MS Office. Based on this analysis we should be able to go forward. But don’t let this fool you: this has, I’m afraid, nothing to do with the development of ODF 1.2.
• As an interesting reminder, here’s what the European Commission was saying about Microsoft’s announcement on the support of ODF inside MS Office last year.
• Now, Ladies and Gents, something completely different that do not require you getting your hands dirty with Redmondian half-truths: You can test OpenOffice.org’s wiki publisher extension. What does it do? It allows you to write your document directly inside OpenOffice.org, and it then translates it into the Mediawiki syntax; the extension integrates a wizard that is used to directly upload the content to any Mediawiki-style wiki out there provided you have the address, your username and password.

Enjoy the Spring!

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Ars Aperta, Free Software, OOo Postings, Open Source, Open Standards, OpenDocument Format, OpenOffice.org, Web 2.0

The time of the year for predictions started in December, the time of resolutions started a few days ago. Let’s tie those together in this post…Predictions:

•  It will be a great year for Free & Open Source Software. I know it’s been written several times that because of dwindling I.T. budgets resulting from the global crisis money would be less spent on expensive licensing, but I do buy into this theory. However it’s certainly not the only explanation: Free Software gets better, Microsoft is losing its grip on the desktop (yet tries hard to come back with Silverlight and other initiatives), and applications go in the cloud.
• Talking about the cloud, we will see this trend going. But there’s a paradox in this pattern: do not believe that people only need a browser and do not pay attention to their actual desktop. They do, and they want a nice user experience, bells and whistles that do not actually annoy them, and fewer glitches.
• It’s been a reality in 2008, and will get even more obvious by 2009: consumers dictate what they want as an user experience, corporate (office) computing follows, just the opposite as what was going on in the eighties. But perhaps a better way of putting it is that those lines defined by mom and pop marketing concepts are blurring. 
• Office computing, the good old days: Microsoft seems to have some trouble implementing ODF. But they claim to have no difficulty with OOXML. That alone should remind all of us of an all too well known pattern: the format wars. It’s made a come-back ever since 2007, it will get sneaker, although less flamboyant in 2009.
• Microsoft is changing. Yes you read that well, on this blog. I sincerely think that there is an old guard and a new guard in Microsoft. I also think that this company is becoming more and more like any other big business: people will be fired by the thousands, and that does not make me happy. But while some of the teams there want to play a normal game, most of the people who call the shots don’t want to do that; hence friction will be in the air. I don’t really expect to see a visible schism inside Microsoft happening before 2011-2012, but it will be interesting to watch what will be going on in 2009 on this issue.

Resolutions

• This year, I promess: I will make money. I swear. Tons of money. Yeah, right. 
•  I’ll get greener. I don’t have a car, happen to eat organic food very frequently, recycle my trash, but there are many other ways I can contribute to save the planet.
• That’s it, you caught me right there: I will come back on GNU/Linux. What this means is that in my craziest deams, I will have a real workstation with Linux, and a nice MacBook(Pro?) running OS X. Aside DRM on iTunes which seems to stand on an EOL support ever since yesterday, Macs are pretty cool, both on hardware and software. But I miss Linux. I really do.
• Using Linux, I will mostly use KDE 4. I tried it, configured it on several desktops and although it’s not fully completed, it rocks and it’s really impressive. You should give it a try.
• Last but not least? Think hard about how not to annoy my readers.

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Free Software, OOXML, OOo Postings, Open Source, Open Standards, OpenDocument Format, OpenOffice.org, Second Life, Software Patents, The Cloud, Web 2.0

After some time of long and intensive work, we completed our migration to our new infrastructure. We migrated our corporate website to a new server and we moved from a FreeBSD-powered server running Caudium to a Gentoo platform with Apache running on top of it. You won’t notice much, except for the language selector. However we changed everything under the hood. Our website was minimalistic and Caudium made it fast.

We now use the Ikaaro CMS for our website and will soon use its facilities such as calendar and corporate wiki for everyday operations. Ikaaro is developed by our good friends at Itaapy, a french FOSS company that is located exactly on the other side of the hill of Montmartre, where Ars Aperta is also located. Ikaaro is very easy to use and I encourage everyone to take a look at the tools developed by Itaapy: they’re GPL v3 and some are actually ODF-centric. Last but not least, our community web site wich hosts many things (although it’s not being advertised enough) and used to host one of the Pootle servers for OpenOffice.org will stay the same and does not migrate.

I would like to thank everyone at Itaapy and Ars Aperta for this work; stay tuned for announcements related to both Ars Aperta and Itaapy in the future.

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Ars Aperta, Free Software, OpenDocument Format, Web 2.0

I am bit swamped these days, and you must have noticed it by now. These things happen: lots of work items, lots of backlog, and lots of exhaustion as well. Since I don’t want to leave this blog « unattended » for even 2 or three weeks, I am posting today some links I find interesting to visit. Enjoy! I’ll be back soon, by the way…

• Microsoft releases Windows Azure. But what is it really? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. It seems it’s a server platform tailored for cloud computing environment. And what is cloud computing? I’m still figuring it out… Seriously, Cloud Computing is the up and coming state-of-the-art in IT. The idea is to use and benefit from data, applications, and networks that are hosted not on your desktop, and not on a server near you. In fact, data and applications are always available but out there, on the Network, in the cloud. Of course, it sounds simple, but it’s very, very complex. It’s a true shift of paradigm, a copernician revolution asking as many questions that it answers, from data portability and users’ rights to virtualized environment and application frameworks. And that’s where players such as Amazon, Joyent and Google are striving. And of course, Microsoft wants to be the dominant player there. So it released a nifty platform that is both a server for running distributed applications and hosting data, and a Microsoft’s Live set of Services. That’s where it’s not clear. They say everything works on Azure, but it seems you better want to use their stuff first. Just like the others, it will work, but… better.

• Do you remember the nice subway map picturing the trends of web sites and online services? Well, that map was for 2007. But there’s the new one I completely missed. Enjoy…

• There you go. Firefox 3 with the newest javascript engine, and all of a sudden, it actually becomes a fast browser on the Mac! Try Minefield, it’s a surprisingly stable development version of Firefox 3 with a different javascript engine.

• Food for thought: I share with them the conviction that large corporation are dwarfing most governments these days. I am no pessimist though: those very same governments could very well come back if they were willing to. But most of them seem to be ideologically blinded, and that’s a pity. Meanwhile, feel free to adhere. It comes from Europe, and it’s free…

• Pondering Boycott Novell must be a funny thing to do. But what’s the problem? The news web site is accused by some to be a troll machine, while some others worship it. My view on this is simple: I’m a reader of this web site, and whenever I was involved in some specific situations or was having some solid information on them, I was able to read accurate reports on these. That’s the about the most honest answer I can make. Roy is a good guy, he’s actually taking out the meat and lay it on the table. Should he be doing it in a different fashion, with more style and less passion? Perhaps. Meanwhile, I have more fun reading his prose than the one Mr Byfield regales us with along with his paternalistic advices on why we, the community of freetards & beardies, should learn from big businesses.

• People are getting busy preparing the OooCon 2008 in Beijing; for our Asian community, the location makes it an obvious point of focus. But this illustrates how OpenOffice.org has become an international community of choice. Good luck with the conference! And see you next year, OOoCon.

• News without a link: OpenOffice.org 2.4.2, the last maintenance release of the 2.x branch, is about to be uploaded. If you don’t want to use the 3.0 (some organization needs time before fully qualifying new versions of office suite), that one is for you. Stay tuned.

• News without a link continued: the ISO 26300 (aka ODF 1.0) gets an errata, and you’re welcome to comment on it for the next 15 days. No big news, here again, it’s all about maintenance…

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Free Software, OOo Postings, Open Source, OpenDocument Format, OpenOffice.org, The Cloud, Web 2.0

More information and registration link here. To answer to the question many around are asking: No, OpenOffice.org 3.0 has not been released yet. Target date is now 13th or 14th of October, and there will be a RC 4 coming in on Monday. In the meantime, I hope to see many of you on the 13th !

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Free Software, OOo Postings, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Web 2.0