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Rebranding OpenOffice.org

2010-03-04T21:00:49Z

What you see above is very much what could be part of OpenOffice.org’s upcoming visual design.

The project has been working on several levels (and with some confusion as to what process and team was to come up with the first elements) on OpenOffice.org’s next logo.

What do we need a new logo? Because OpenOffice.org is almost 10 years old, and that as our own interfaces change, so should our branding. But here’s the trick Oracle’s acquisition of Sun does not come very much into play here: Otherwise we would all be covered in red and have sailboats instead of our beloved Hamburg’s seagulls (the birds you have to come to associate OpenOffice.org with). So what what started here, is a refresh in our branding, and we want it to be progressive.

Updated: I just received news that Larry Ellison’s sailboat who just won the America’s Cup, has been designed based on seagulls’s shapes. A nod to OpenOffice.org maybe?

That’s why we started ith subtle, but somewhat substantial redesigns of our logo and visual appearance. Here’s our brand, for instance:

As you can see, the font, the colour sequence and even the shade of blue have changed. We will not stop there, and will also work on other visual elements, such as our icons. And here’s the great part: You can help too, by joining our Branding Initiative and participate on our dedicated mailing list. I hope you enjoy our new designs. Stay tuned!

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Links for mid-February

2010-02-18T17:13:30Z

In case you had missed that one, OpenOffice.org 3.2 has been released. It’s fast. Really fast. And it comes with some nice extra features too, such as the import or OOXML files (not the ISO standard, which nobody, not even Microsoft can produce, but the file format of MS Office 2007).
Times are changing, and changing for good. Sun is suing companies and people infringing the OpenOffice.org trademark name. It’s more than time. Not only does OpenOffice.org get hurt by scammers, actual people lose money, time because of this sort of malpractice.
lpOD 0.9 has just been released! Open access to the Git repository is also available. You may know that my company, Ars Aperta, has been contributing to this project and one of its main authors. But what the heck is lpOD about? Find out in this presentation and have a look at our documentation.
My latest review on a great email client, Claws Mail.

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Events & Non-events

2010-02-09T16:59:51Z

This week started the wrong way. Some people started to create what is litterally a storm in the teacup, while some other people made announcements that in my view are extremely disappointing and quite concerning for some practitioners of FOSS licensing management and consultancy. Let me explain this point first.

Black Duck was awarded a patent on Open Source licensing conflict resolution. The patent itself seems to cover the “core technology” of the software developed by Black Duck, and not the actual practice of FOSS licensing management and optimization, which is something that Ars Aperta incidently offers both through its traditional services and certification programs. I have to say that I am not really sure what the patent covers or does not cover, but it sure brings a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt for the existing competitors or potential competitors of Black Duck Software, existing consultancies in similar field and last but not least, customers. No wonder Bradley Kuhn got upset about this. I do find these news quite unsettling myself, and I cannot wait to see Black Duck’s patent promise. At least that should remind some not to trust so called Open Source experts who use laptops with Windows, MS Office and Internet Explorer. It’s a small but telling sign they treat FOSS as some sort of disease and not as something to rationally analyze and assist their customers on. And do I need to repeat this again here? Software patents are bad, they stifle competition, customer choice, block innovation and lessen value. You may call them a reality, you don’t have to necessarily add to it.

What really strikes me as a real storm in the tea-cup is the pseudo announcement that Ubuntu will drop Openoffice.org from its upcoming Lucid Lynx release, in its netbook edition. The news came from this website and got quickly picked out by the largest french newspaper, stirring quite an uproar among the French community.

Let me offer some thoughts on why these news are nothing short of non-news, aside the mere fact that there is no official announcement by Canonical or any Ubuntu release team on this matter.

First, OpenOffice.org is a large application that usually runs well even on netbooks, but may not be the best tailored tool for specific uses envisioned for netbook users. There is nothing surprising in this, and several Linux distributions have actually never included OpenOffice.org by default because of size constraints and simplicity.
Second, even if Ubuntu were to drop OpenOffice.org from its specific netbook edition it does not mean that the software would be unavailable from the very same Ubuntu repositories. In fact it would be readily available, but it just would not be included in the default installation. How many computers shipped with Windows only include a trial version of Microsoft Word and not a coherent MS Office stack? Almost all of them don’t ship with the full copy of MS Office.
Third, we recently got hold of the first reliable statistics, aside our own count of downloads, of the actual market share of OpenOffice.org on a worldwide scale. And guess what? With these numbers, we won’t be exactly hampered by whatever decision not to ship OpenOffice.org in the default install set of Ubuntu netbook edition.

What is now needed is some sort of acknowledgment by the broader community of analysts that these stats are reliable. This would cause some real problems to Microsoft, as these statistics usually only count the shipments or the default installation images of MS Windows that come preloaded with one trial version of MS Word. Unless Microsoft patents some new market share analysis method, that is.

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Sun gets a new sales department, Apple releases a nice picture frame with DRM

2010-01-28T18:05:14Z

So it happened. Oracle has swallowed Sun Microsystems. Monty should have gotten the news by now. Perhaps he could even be interested by the announcements of Oracle? They’re hiring good sales reps. More seriously, the announcements done through webcasts and available on the Oracle website are very impressive, product-wise and strategy-wise. Better server offerings, more powerful hardware, Java continued, OpenDocument Format praised. If Oracle executes what they just announced, we might actually end up having FUN, with capital letters. On the specific chapter of OpenOffice.org, an ODF-based, online version of OpenOffice.org has been announced and my small finger tells me that it’s going to be a very good surprize. What remains to be seen, of course, is whether Oracle will find this strategy to be profitable enough. They have discussed investments so far, but one should also expect the cost cutting part of the equation. Another thing that worries me is the lack of clear emphasis on Free & Open Source. I hear “Open Systems”, “Open Standards” and “Open everything”. But the tough part will also be in the governance of existing Free and Open Source projects. This being said, I have to stress how pleased I have been by what I heard and watched so far. So pleased, in fact, that it seems to me that Oracle has ended up merging with Sun, more than merely acquiring it. The result might very well end up being Sun on steroids, or Sun with a new sales department and a serious database offering that Monty hates. Good luck and congratulations!
What I have not enjoyed was the presentation of Apple’s iPad. To be sure, it’s a nice device, and I understand that it’s not being advertised as some sort of netbook or affordable MacBook. It’s actually a very nice device, looking like a beautiful picture frame. The inherent weakness is that it strikes me as a more powerful iPhone. The smart part of that story is that Apple is essentially offering easy and elegant Internet browsing to anyone by minimizing its own costs and risk taking. The bad part is that the iPad is riddled with DRM, and that you are essentially locked up in Apple’s infamous App Store. In short, it’s a device letting you browse the Internet as long as Apple wants it, depriving you of your most basic digital freedoms. I do not think that it will pay and that in the end, sole consumer’s satisfaction induced by very powerful marketing and excellent user experience will be enough. Other competitors will eventually be “as good” as Apple, with less restrictions and less of that Diva-like behaviour, which is another way to write the words “anti-competitive” and “proprietary”.

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

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Every good thing has an end

2010-01-21T17:55:55Z

This is also true for companies. Today, the European Commission has finally agreed to the purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Russian and Chinese authorities have yet to answer to this deal, but it seems that any Monty-backed answer would be more a delay than a stop for this merger to happen. I would therefore like to say Goodbye to Sun Microsystems. It’s been great working with you, it’s been great sharing years of my life as a Free Software contributor. You were one of these IT companies who have this strange ability to make all of us dream and feel confident we could just walk further than anyone else.

I look forward working with “another you”, inside the broader Oracle Corporation, and I am sure that it will be exciting. So farewell, Sun. Hopefully your employees will not forget who you were, what you stood for: excellency in technology, freedom, genius, and inspiration.

My friend Simon Phipps got that on Facebook for the occasion.

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The tale of the Chinese skeletons in the closet and the pink elephant in the room

2010-01-18T18:03:33Z

It’s time to wake up. It really is. Google has decided to pull out of China (more or less) and the reactions of the press have been so far quite interesting, to say the least. I will not go over these events in detail. Shortly put, Google claimed it underwent a series of alarmingly advanced attacks on its infrastructure (and its GMail service). These attacks appeared to have been led by Chinese crackers working for the government of PRC. Google made the public move to declare it would pull out of the Chinese market, something that is considered as sheer insanity by some and a smart, calculated move by others.

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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Arch Linux makes Linux fun to use again.

2010-01-11T15:12:30Z

It’s been a month since I have installed Arch Linux on my workstation and I thought I would talk about this Linux distribution a bit. Arch Linux is pretty much all the rage these days in the world of Linux distributions. If we are to believe the famous Distrowatch stats that were recently published and compared with the data of 2008, Arch Linux is the fastest growing Linux distribution these days. It gained quite many users, probably at the expense of distributions like Gentoo, yet it is not usually considered to be an “user-friendly” distribution. I will briefly outline what have been, and what is, my experience with Arch, and I believe I am going to stick with this particular flavor for a very long time.

I have tested several Linux distributions in the past years, starting with Mandriva and using Debian, Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, while having installed Linux several times on my family and friends’ computers. You can read in this previous post of mine that while my “usual” distribution was Fedora I had some rough issues with the upgrade from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12, and that prompted me, after some adventures, to install Ubuntu. Well, I stayed about two weeks with Ubuntu, in the end. There was nothing wrong with it, it’s a beautiful distribution (except for the buggy packaging of Claws Mail, my default email client) everything runs just fine, drivers, 3D, Second Life, third party repositories, etc. But I was somewhat dissatisfied for egotistic reasons: I have been using Linux, as a desktop user, ever since 2001 (with some intervals with OS X) and although I don’t want to fiddle too much with the system, I like to customize it, to tweak it and to gain a technical knowledge of it. So when I found myself at a barcamp in Paris in December sitting next to someone who was less technical than I am using Ubuntu on her desktop, I got the personal, but awful epiphany that I was, just like everyone else, using the Windows XP of the distros. Sorry for this Canonical, sorry for this, Nick, it’s actually a major achievement to be thought of a Windows XP in your industry, but I’m perhaps too much of a twisted, egotistic nerd.

I don’t exactly know how I came to Arch Linux. I guess I was reading an article about it, then in one evening I documented myself, and what attracted me to it was the different packagine, the style, and also the fact that hardware was not a problem (wireless, video card, etc.) So I gave it a try, and the first impression I got, besides thinking I was back in 2001, was that it all made sense. What I mean is that once you have gone past the two minutes of emotional intensity (oh my God, the screen went black and these small white letters are being typed by an invisble hand!) and that you… read what your options are, it’s not that difficult for you to install and configure the system. In a sense, I would even say that since Arch Linux installs only what you want it to install, there is no instant clutter on your desktop. I often found out that I spent more time configuring my desktop by pulling out what I did not need and replacing it sometimes by other programs than the actual time I would be spending installing the system. In this regard, Arch Linux, whith some rough edges at the beginning, was a different experience. You get what you want and it’s all right if you don’t manage it the first time, there is plenty of a well organized documentation for Arch available on their wiki or even as a book. Documentation is clear, well written, and asking on the forums really helps.

In the process, I leaned, or relearned a lot of things. From the point of view of the desktop user, Arch Linux can be configured by using pacman (the package manager available in command line and graphically, through Shaman, a direct competitor to Synaptic), editing the rc.conf file in the /etc/directory (it’s all human readable, don’t worry), and starting or stopping services through /etc/rc.d . You don’t really need to go beyond that on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis. Package Management is quite interesting. Updates, even when you are not using the testing branch of the distribution, are not updates that are pushed at you and that you have to digest. Arch Linux is a rolling release, which means that it’s a distribution without release. You install a base system (itself on a rolling release) and it “morphs” according to your needs without any need to reinstall. That’s the theory, because I think one would need to reinstall it every few years, unless everything runs perfectly. So this rolling release mode makes it possible for you to use the latest versions of software without the need to wait for the next big release or the issuing of a backport. But it depens on you to understand what you are about to upgrade: Going from Firefox 3.5.6 to 3.5.7 should be no problem, but changing the version of nvidia modules is a different game. That’s why it is recommended to check out announcements and the Arch forums each time you want to update your system.

Package management, however, does not stop there. Arch packages (which are really tarballs of the binary versions of the software compiled from the source) are vanilla packages (except in some very rare instances) but the team maintaining the core and extra repositories is too small. That’s why you can have access to the community repositories and the Arch User repositories. These sources are places where the community contributes packages it has compiled using Arch’s own build system, the ABS. That’s where you can find many interesting software. It is also easy for you to compile any software provided you have the source, and upload it in the distribution.

My big surprize was perhaps the fact that Arch works. It is a system that actually works. By this I mean that there is no “tweaking around” solution. It works and the reason why it works makes sense on Linux, not on one specific distribution only. All this , in the end, brought a lot of fun in using Linux for me. I am not suggesting Arch is for everyone, but if you want to try a rock-solid distribution that’s blazingly fast and in the end, pretty easy to configure, you should give a try to Arch Linux. It’s a good way to start 2010!

Below is a screenshot of my desktop under Gnome.

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Monty Widenius wants another billion dollars, should we help him?

2010-01-05T17:37:26Z

Sometimes inbetween Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the “Help MySQL” initiative was founded. This initiative, publicly supported by Monty Widenius, the co-founder of MySQL would be interesting if it wasn’t somehow indecent. Let me explain.

What does “Help MySQL” advocate, in a nutshell? It claims that if Oracle were to merge with Sun, MySQL customers would be trapped in a market that would be pretty much controlled and captured by Oracle, both through its existing propietary databases offerings and the acquisition of MySQL. Another issue explained on the web site is that the inherent free and open source nature of MySQL will not be enough to grant effective freedoms to the market since Oracle would be the sole copyright owner of the code and trademarks.

I think I will not be the only one to notice that in a whooping twist of history, Monty Widenius explains us why the business and contribution model to MySQL he crafted himself since the beginning of the database company is terrible for customers. I am always quite skeptical of the “do as I say not as I do” lines of thinking, but so be it, let’s carry along. For months now, Monty and his interesting (and interested) acolyte, Florian Mueller, have been lobbying everything that seems to be possibly lobbied, from the press to the European Commission where they seemed to have been giving a hard time to Oracle, confused the European anti-trust with byzantine arguments leading to have MySQL relicensed under the BSD while portraying Microsoft as “understanding towards the Open Source ecosystem”.

You might then ask, again, why would Monty want MySQL back, or separated from Oracle? What would Monty Widenius, co-founder of MySQL, and recently an advisor of the Microsoft’s Codeplex Foundation, counter Sun’s acquisition by Oracle after having left Sun as fast as he could have? There seems to be many reasons, at least on a personal level. One of them, as Jan Wildeboer outlined today, might be that Monty just does not want to leave the command of MySQL. The problem is that the “competitive case” just does not seem to exist here. Not only can anyone fork MySQL (Monty already did it by the way), but the database market is competitive enough to have other credible incumbents fill in the gap, if Oracle were to become.. carnivorous, which remains to be proven. But there are other reasons, some of whose can be foreseen if one thinks about the possible outcomes of Oracle’s walking away from the merger at the end of the month. Sun Microsystems lost several of its most profitable and large customers with the globlal financial crisis. It is doubtful whether Sun could actually survive in the end. Sun would then be sold by chunks, and I cannot wait to see who would buy MySQL back… Monty Widenius, a fellow of the Microsoft’s Codeplex Foundation, and a man who describes the asserted and patented monopoly as being “benevolent and understanding towards Open Source”. There you go, I know you must feel reassured that MySQL will end up in good hands if it does fall in Oracle’s portfolio.

Sun Microsystems being sold in chunks, or being merged with Oracle raises a lot of questions that I ‘m not aware Monty Widenius ever addressed in a constructive way: What about Java, OpenOffice.org, and OpenSolaris (other examples might also be found)? I have not heard a word from Monty Widenius. The future of ODF does not seem to be very important, just like, in the same way, his new colleague at the Codeplex Foundation, Miguel de Icaza, seems to think. Perhaps the quest for another billion is too important and therefore Monty just hasn’t found the time to think and focus about other issues. By helping MySQL, it seems to me you are also helping the personal wealth of a billionaire who calls evil what some might do in the future while forgetting he did the same before.

All things considered, I am not really excited at the prospect of “saving MySQL”, and neither should you. For 2010, let’s rather focus on constructive conversations and projects.

Happy New Year 2010!

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Some predictions for 2010

2009-12-30T17:01:13Z

This will be the last post of the year 2009. 2010 will be an interesting year to come, for many reasons, and that’s why I have outlined a few predictions below for the year to come. Feel free to comment or add to this list, and happy new year 2010!

OpenOffice.org’s market share will ceased to be constantly looked down upon by analysts. I had recently explained why measuring its market share is complex, and why it is constantly underrated. But now it seems that Microsoft (and the press) are taking good notice of the fast-growing adoption of OpenOffice.org by, well, pretty much everyone out there.
Standardization of the most recent release of OpenDocument, the 1.2, will be painful, and might perhaps never see a happy ending. For one thing, Microsoft controls the ISO through seemingly fortuitous and massive participation in every national standards bodies forming the ISO, and the ISO’s JTC 1 seems to have decided that the world should be content with some sort of ODF 1.1 “plus plus”. Note that this ODF 1.1 is not a bad thing in itself, but it is very much the result of connivings against ODF and everything non-Microsoft. You never should bite the hand that feeds you, after all…
The lpOD project, already well underway, will be a success and might become one of the main references for the ODF ecosystem.
Second Life, the largest online virtual world or metaverse will have to innovate again, or will lose its customers progressively to the new show in town, “Blue Mars“.
It’s almost becoming a cliché, but cloud computing will again be part of the hype in 2010 and gain a strong momentum on the market. Among many challenges, there is the fundamental need for portability and openness of the users’ data, its control by these very users, and more generally the increasingly clear divide between centralized and decentralized data architecture. In the end, this will become political, and as important, if not more, than the freedome to code and its sharing.
In the aftermath of the Bilski case, there seems to be a consensus that the criteria for “software patentability” will be much more demanding in the U.S. Of course, a few illuminated curmudgeons inside the European sphere of power, influenced by pro-patent lobbieswill fight hard to implement software patents in its whole horror. But in the end, what we need to do is not being satisfied with raising the bar on patentability criteria, we need to get the message straight and clear that software patents are not acceptable anywhere. ACTA anyone?
Arch Linux will continue its growth among technical and power users (I’m one of them) while Ubuntu will stagnate (unless Canonical opens its online media store), OpenSuse somewhat loses users, Fedora will grow its userbase, Mandriva will make a strong comeback if they manage to secure their business. How do I know all this? I’ve been in the Linux distributions business, punditry and expertise for quite some time (since 2002, actually) and if there’s something you can count on over the long term, it’s… the Distrowatch billboard. This thing has never proved to be really wrong. I’ll cover more of these topics in 2010. Meanwhile, have a great New Year’s Eve and a happy new year to you!

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Links for mid-December

2009-12-16T10:46:48Z

So I ended up… installing Arch Linux. And guess what? I love it. Everthing works. The installation process is a bit rough, but everything is logical and if you don’t want to spend time doing it you can even use an impressive live-cd project, Chakra. Package management is also innovative breaks with the rpm and deb tradition of “packaging” for a simple, straightforward way of actually fetching the original versions of the software. The result is that everything works just fine if you take the time to think about what you’re about to install and upgrade. Heck, even Second Life works perfectly, on my 64 bits architecture!
I’m announcing it with a week late, but lpOD 0.8 has been released. Come on over and test it!
At the height of his one of kind career as a Microsoft-puppet-pretending-to-be-impartial, Alex Brown wants to take out Brazil out of the ISO. As Berthold Brecht once wrote, if you are not happy with the people, just replace the people.
Last but not least, you are more and more readers of this blog, so let me thank you for it, and wish you a merry Christmas and happy new year!

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