Historically, OpenOffice.org has been one of the most downloaded Free Software out there and one of the most used (the real market share was estimated to be around 15%, far higher than the estimates based on the shipment of MS Office) all around the world. But for all its user base, OpenOffice.org proved incapable to growing a vibrant ecosystem of support and service providers, value-added resellers, OEMs and integrators. Initiatives had been launched with mixed success. Judging by its yield and popularity, OpenOffice.org was a complete business failure – and not just to Sun’s own bottomline.

The reasons for this are a bit difficult to explain, but a certain number had to do with the lack of project governance and ability to decide for itself on one side, and the lack of business development and proper management of the project towards the wider FOSS business ecosystem. Beyond the poor growth of the business ecosystem, this led to unsatisfactory situations. Potential or existing professional users of OpenOffice.org very often asked questions about the future of the project, and wanted to know what would happen if Sun ever pulled the plug. They wanted to make sure that the service provider they had selected would be able to effectively contribute a patch. Worse, because of the hazy governance of the project, trademark enforcement was almost non-existent and anyone could claim to be an expert in OpenOffice.org migrations and support. This is how some large scale migrations ended up in disaster, while real experts were not called and no revenue was coming to them; this is also how fraudulent websites could trick unsuspecting visitors in downloading spyware or in making them pay their download.

The certification program we announced does nothing in the way of trademark enforcement of course. But it helps with the former, that is, to grow the business ecosystem and make sure potential users and customers enjoy a real clarity when it comes to professional skills around LibreOffice. Right now we are starting with LibreOffice development professionals, but we will be rolling out other skills category such as migration specialists, trainers, etc. The net benefit is that by structuring the business ecosystem around LibreOffice we let the people who provide real added value gain visibility and official status, while on the other end of the rope, companies or administrations are able to make a clear and informed choice. This in turn greatly diminishes failures in deployments and migrations and provides interested professionals with the opportunity to train and become certified professionals.

We will see how this program works, and I’m confident it will; after all, while it’s correct to assume it’s a first for a FOSS project to create such a certification program, it’s however not unusual to have trained and certified professionals in the FOSS industry. I’m particularly thinking about the LPI certification from the Linux Professional Institute or the JBoss certified professionals. We, in turn, would like to see the Certification Program becoming as prevalent as these two, but only time will tell how well it is accepted and adopted. In any case, we’re in this for the long run, so stay tuned for more announcements in this field.

• We’re starting with a blog post from Andy Updegrove, world-known experts on standards, on a case that’s apparently only remotely connected with the matter. However it provides rich background on the topic.
• “How Microsoft fought true open standards” by Glyn Moody, Part 1 and Part 2.
• “Why RAND is bad for Open Source” by Simon Phipps.
• Not so much of a shameful plug, but in this interview by Glyn Moody I try to highlight the issues surrounding RAND, software patents and open standards in a synthetic fashion.

Comments and questions welcome.

Congi – Somnium (Triangle/Circle/Square) from Paulo R on Vimeo.

POP LE CHEVAL from Kristof Brandl on Vimeo.

Madeon – Pop Culture (live mashup) from Harde Baas Paard Productions on Vimeo.

She Woolf Daydreaming from Kid Loco on Vimeo.

Friends Of Mine from Kid Loco on Vimeo.

Today I would like to discuss one topic which may be regarded by some as somewhat futile, and in a sense it is: the legacy of OpenOffice.org . But these past days I have noticed blogs and mailing list threads as well as discussions on social networks that the leaders of the Apache OpenOffice project (incubating) are having a filiation problem. I would like to address this, because while I think it’s better not to feed trolls, I think this is a deep issue as it pertains to the very identity and the raison d’être of the Apache OpenOffice project (incubating).

I cannot pinpoint accurately what caused to inflate the whole issue, but it seems that some  at Apache OpenOffice (incubating) would like to stress that there are the rightful continuation of the now defunct OpenOffice.org project, to the point of showing outright hostility to LibreOffice. They base their claims upon the following elements:

• they own the OpenOffice.org domain name
• they own the trademark of OpenOffice.org
• they must be the right heirs of OpenOffice.org since the Apache incubating project they’re contributing to was born out of the will of the copyright holder (Oracle) through its donation to the Apache Software Foundation.

These three points above are of course accurate. Do these make Apache OpenOffice (incubating) the “rightful” heir and continuation of OpenOffice.org ? Well, the real answer, I think, amounts to a marketing problem. If we solve this particular marketing problem, we will in fact be able to address the psychological side of the issue, the “who am I and why do I contribute to Apache OpenOffice (incubating)?” question. It might be weird to answer such an issue through a marketing perspective, but as we’re considering FOSS development projects, trademarks and corporations, it does make real sense.

The way the Apache OpenOffice (incubating) project was formed is in fact rather simple. Oracle, out of boredom and because of its shareholders’ greed, did dump the trademark of OpenOffice.org (and its attributes, such as domain names) over to Apache Software Foundation, and set up a specific software grant to the same entity, so that the code would be properly relicensed under the Apache Software Foundation’s policies. Oracle did not transfer its assets over to the Document Foundation. I am not so sure about Oracle’s initial thinking on this, although it seemed to have acted the same way with Jenkins.  In essence, what happened when the assets of the OpenOffice.org project were donated to Apache was just that. Assets got transferred, and it seems IBM felt they had acquired a good trademark. IBM was publicly vocal about the transfer and seemed to regard it as a very good thing.  This is essentially what prompts some inside the Apache OpenOffice (incubating) project to claim they are the continuation of OpenOffice.org . Let’s deal with this assertion marketing-wise first by taking another example.

Let’s imagine a case where the Boeing company acquires the Sukhoi aircraft corporation. Sukhoi gets merged and integrated inside a new entity or division of Boeing called “Boeing-Sukhoi” and sells whatever new aircrafts will be designed by the division or even by Boeing  itself. Now the real question the customers of Boeing and Sukhoi will care about (that would be, in this case, airlines) will be the maintenance of the existing Sukhoi aircrafts, the ones that have been designed and manufactured prior to the merger or the acquisition. In some cases (just like in the aerospace industry) the maintenance of existing products will be provided for a long period of time. Sometimes though, it’s just not the case; it depends of the industry practices and the business agreement.

Let us now go back to Apache OpenOffice (incubating) and OpenOffice.org . The real question users really care about is the future of OpenOffice.org . The Document Foundation has shown to everyone that we were ready from day one to give the OpenOffice.org project a future, and a bright one. But if we stick to the brand here, we should look at the Apache OpenOffice (incubating) project. Let’s ask the question of the maintenance. We live in an environment where most of the large and not so large professional users of OpenOffice.org both from the private and public sector are using OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 or even 3.1 . A few of them already transitioned to LibreOffice and many are in the process of migrating to LibreOffice. But there is a large amount of these users who do not update their office suite every six months or even each year. These people are asking the question of the maintenance, and the question of the future. If we take LibreOffice out of the picture for a few moments now, what do we see? Apache OpenOffice (incubating): no stable release yet, but it’s planned anyway; other than that, no support nor patches for the previous versions of OpenOffice.org. Yet the important matter is the support of existing versions of OpenOffice.org . In other words, if you want to know whether anyone can claim to be the “real” continuation of OpenOffice.org, just ask this: will you support and fix the bugs that were found in OpenOffice.org 3.2.1? or OpenOffice.org 3.1? or even in the 3.3?

Today, neither the Apache OpenOffice (incubating) project, nor its steward, IBM, can answer positively to the question above. And no one should be mad at them for that. There are two reasons to this. The “OpenOffice” in “Apache OpenOffice (incubating)” does not imply a direct continuation. It’s a brand transfer. It’s a brand that got donated over to a respectable chartity. But it does not mean there’s a direct continuation. The other reason is because thanks to IBM, the Apache OpenOffice (incubating) will have a future, and no one should have any doubt about the success of the incubation of this project. I, for one, don’t have any. Just look at how much support from IBM this project gets: you see them at every corner of Apache OpenOffice so I’m really not worried about the outcome of the incubation period. More precisely, IBM does have very interesting plans for Apache OpenOffice, as it is turning a great deal of its Symphony code to the Apache OpenOffice code base. This is important as it outlines once again that Apache OpenOffice is not so much the continuation of OpenOffice.org “product-wise” as it is the IBM’s productivity suite ‘s future on the desktop. Again, this is great and positive news for the users in general as well as for the Document Foundation.

Marketing-wise we now have a better perception of the reality when it comes to the filiation of Apache OpenOffice (incubating) and it’s clearly not a poor one. Something this project does not acknowledge, however, is that the community at large has gone over to LibreOffice, which was created before by the OpenOffice.org community. The filiation of LibreOffice is quite clear and I had the opportunity to explain it on this blog the very day the Document Foundation was announced: We are OpenOffice.org . We are the next Decade and  we have no problems sharing our legacy. In fact, we’re dealing with the legacy of unused code agressively as we are acting upon it in the present, thereby improving our future versions. We don’t ask ourselves many questions about filiation: we know we must innovate in order to stay relevant and to offer a genuinely Free and Open Source Software of choice to the largest number of users out there. It was the mission of OpenOffice.org, and it is the mission of LibreOffice. But the important lesson we took out of OpenOffice.org and the LibreOffice adventure so far is that we must accept to change, to evolve and to be very aware of what we are wishing for. Legacy should not be a burden. It should not be something we should argue about. Rather, it ought to be a starting point, the point of origin. It’s neither a goal nor something we own; it’s something we’re proceeding from. If some at Apache OpenOffice (incubating) feel they are the rightful continuation of OpenOffice.org, I wish them good luck. They got a good brand but I hope they haven’t paid too much for it. If they feel so strongly about being the successors, the Document Foundation should gladly let them share that role, it’s not an easy one; the LibreOffice project, on the other hand, is not just a successor of OpenOffice.org. It has success. Legacy is only the starting point, our work define who we are and where we go.

• 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!

When the Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project were announced by the end of September 2010 we explained that the only way for the community to secure the future of the OpenOffice.org project and its very soul was to create a foundation that would serve for the “next decade”. Our manifesto was very clear and still stands today. Our commitment to an independent foundation and to our core values, the respect of software freedom, our belief in a meritocratic community, the fundamental importance of true open standards, the preservation and growth of mothertongues everywhere in the world will remain the same for a long, long time. Incorporating our community as a foundation in Germany is an essential tool to ensure these values and the community will be given the full means to live and grow, while the software itself, freed from the barriers and limitations created by vendor lock-in, is getting better and better everyday.

It took us a long time to create the foundation in Germany. We highlighted our plans in a clear fashion one year ago when we called the community to donate money so that the initial capital stock and we were surprised and happy to see that, in less than a month, the double amount of donations necessary to secure the capital stock had been collected. The reason we spent almost one year to make the foundation a reality is that the type of legal entity we were aiming for was not the usual NGO people usually think about. It is a very specific kind of entity that is designed to secure and protect assets. Its real name is a “Stiftung bürgerlichen Rechts” or just “Stiftung ” (pronounce it “Stee-ft-oong”) and its litteral translation is “foundation”. Basically this entity does not work like a business or a corportation. It operates on a non-for-profit basis but it is designed to never allow anyone to seize its assets and what it is deemed to protect. You just cannot buy or take over this kind of entity. It almost works like a vault in a bank, except that there’s no bank and no one to ask you for the keys: you, the community, own every piece and parcel of the foundation. No bank, no third party is necessary here, we all inhabit the castle we just built, and mind you, this castle is made of steel and reinforced concrete to make sure there will be no capture of any kind; but at the same time, it lets the community free to operate as it wants.

Part of our mission is accomplished and I feel deeply good about this. We secured the future of the OpenOffice.org project and we have given its community a forever home. But it does not stop here. In fact, it’s just the beginning, as what we have achieved is to lay the cornerstone of our construction. Don’t be afraid, we’re not looking to build a cathedral but even bazaars need basilicas (in fact basilicas’ first purpose was to host bazaars).

Now we are free to move on, to innovate, to grow and to show the world that this old office suite of ours can be turned into the most exciting piece Free Software will see in a long time. The community is getting strong, growing by the day, but we need to strengthen it, to fix our own bugs, and to extend our reach to the web, to the tablets, while changing our codebase and our user interface. This is a job that is going to keep us busy for quite some time, but it’s worth the challenge: this is the new chapter in our history, the history of OpenOffice.org and now LibreOffice. It is probably not per chance that the same month the foundation was incorporated we released LibreOffice 3.5, our version with the largest amount of changes and fixes we ever offered and that we announced this great partnership with Intel. It shows the momentum a community can achieve, when, starting from the ground up, it is able to grow and move forward by making sure it keeps things simple, remains true to its spirit and realizes its full potential by being in charge.

To everyone who made this possible, I’m truly grateful. This has been an exciting month, and I look forward many more months to be (at least) that exciting.

Listening to user feedback hardly makes up a democracy. It’s user feedback. In some cases it might be a case of “nice customer service”. But it does not help that much. I’ll explain myself.

Let me describe to you what I called limited democracy here and how “power” and influence are distributed in FOSS projects.

A FOSS project mainly produces code. Its sole reason, in fact, is to produce code; whether someone pays for it or manages to be a guru at product strategy and marketing so well he can even entrance hackers in its “Reality Distortion Field” is another question. FOSS projects produce code. Then, around that rough code you have another categories of contributors: the QA testers, the localizers, the documentation writers, the marketers (no particular order here); sometimes you have the extension developers as well. All these people do something very specific: they contribute to the project. Granted it might not only be code, but that’s beside the point. They contribute and they make the project. The reason they contribute might be completely unknown to you, or there might be as many reasons as there are contributors. It’s good sometimes to question or to know what’s the “general reason” to contribute from one or two active contributors, but it’s not always necessary. Back to our contributors; they form the active people who push the project forward, heck, they are the project themselves. But because each of them might contribute for various and sometimes opposite reasons, any of them, sometimes even all of them or a good majority of them, will stop contributing; conversely, they might even increase their contribution. If you stick to the original line from Eric Raymond (the Cathedral and the Bazaar, a must read), the reason any developer would contribute is because he/she’d like to “scratch an itch”. Granted that scratch might be for hire or is already funded, but that’s besides the point.

In the end, it’s the people who make the software (and distribute it, promote it) who call the shots. They call the shots because they get to “make” the software at various levels. So it’s a meritocracy because it’s a “do-ocracy” in a sense. The good news here is that it makes up for quite a lot of people. The not so good news in a sense, is that “mere” users, by which I mean “passive” users, who do not contribute anything in terms of code, tests, localization, documentation, dictionaries, pamphlets, designs, etc. are only left with one choice: to use the software if they like it, or to stop using it. The only reason is not that it’s not a democracy, it’s just that they don’t have the power to act on the software project unless they adopt or reject it.

There is also a more subtle good part in this: no user is barred to join the contributors’ ranks; and when this user actually does, he’ll have a say as long as he remains a contributor.

There are projects who do not formally formalize too much who specifically are their contributors. Some others do. The Document Foundation does formalize it to the extent that it is our contributors who “own the foundation” and nobody else does. It’s not just in our social contract or an unwritten assumption, it’s legal . There are rather broad criteria to define what a contributor is and does (our bylaws and statutes define them) and anyone who qualifies become thus a member of the foundation with rather large ” political” rights. In this sense we have democracy. But FOSS projects do not run on open and democratic structure; they run on transparent and agreed processes, with a free and open source code at their core.

I am not explaining that France is not an indebted country. In fact, very few european countries can claim they have clean public debts, and I won’t even mention the US debt. But the debt has been piling up in France and elsewhere since 30 years, thanks to a rather twisted amount of policies -cutting public spending, worsening economic conditions and lowering salaries while shoving more and more money to the top of the pyramid combined with reducing the amount of taxes collected, most of the time in favour of the wealthiest- and the beginning of the crisis in 2008 that prompted governments to offer bags of money to the banks and then having the same rating agencies who were claiming everything was fine tell the world the same governments were broke.

It is easy to see that governments were trapped in what could look like a pincer movement; but then there are pundits who might explain the whole unfolding of the events was “irrational” and happened “on the spur of the moment”. I rather see it as a whole set of rational decisions that were taken at some level while some levels down it appeared as some sort of unavoidable outcome from random, short term decisions. But whether one thinks of all this as a process or as an accident the issue we face today remains the same.

We have a huge national debt (granted, way smaller than anything the US have, even compared in proportion) that is fixable, but we also have governments who rush to do whatever they think the “Market” will like. More often than not, it means that the little people and the ever shrinking middle class must be punished . For what, we don’t really know, but the real question should rather be instead of whom . Because if there’s a categoy of people and entities who continue their  “economic growth” in these times of crisis, that would be some of the wealthiest people in our nation and abroad. You may call them the 1%. You may call them the “Elite”. You may call them otherwise, but it does not really matter at this stage. What’s important to realize is the power and influence of money that makes up the incentive for governments to dismantle public services and to make life harder for the rest of the population. What is also important to realize, and what is much less discussed is how some entities and people actuall benefit from the crisis.

Part of the “reforms” to “reimburse the debt” (which turns out to be a dubious concept itself as France, since 1973 cannot devaluate its money just like any other country outside the euro-zone) always (why?) involve selling off entire, profitable parts of public service. Such a pawning operation never benefits the people, but always benefits a few. It is often seent that the same people who benefit from this sale by taking control of the new privatized structure are powerful, and part of the people who usually advise the same politicians who keep on explaining that we must make more efforts to “repay the debt”, the debt that we could in fact manage much better, but that some people don’t want us to, as they might lose money in this. So while the republic itself loses power, stops its people from benefiting from social security and other public services, it graciously offers to a selected few the ability to monetize these services. I always wondered why, if we really had  to sell these services, the government did not auction this to its very own people . For instance, as public service XYZ gets privatized it is sold to thousands or even millions of people (each one putting anywhere between 10 euros and 100 euros) , and therefore would remain in the public trust. That was a common operation during the XXth century, but guess what, it seems that it does not please some very few people with a lot of influence.  (I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational explanation on why simple people cannot own such a structure and that it must be pawned off to major corporations).

So what did France lose by  losing AAA? In fact, not much, as the dices had already been thrown a while ago. A nice, velvety red curtain just fell of this past week, that’s all; and now things will become officially more difficult for most of us.

Happy New Year everyone…

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.

Picture by Eliane Domingos of the Document Foundation

This year we didn’t go party and celebrate the new year with friends. For some reason we felt lazy and decided we’d spend the new year’s even with our family, (parents, cousins) at my parents’ place. In the end both Melissa and I knocked on the door sick with sore throat and some mild flu. Needless to say, we didn’t drink much, we mostly ate and were dosing by 1am. It wasn’t a very exciting new year’s eve but it felt good to be among our loved ones; it was a really good new year’s eve and I’m glad we were able to spend the first hours of 2012 and most of the first day with our family. May love, health, success and joy fill your life for 2012. It’s likely to get tough, business wise, but I think we’re going to have some real fun.