I tend to write a lot about how Free and Open Source Software projects rely on a community of contributors to grow and expand, and how projects without a healthy community tend to face problems and in some cases disappear. Today, I would like to discuss a sad reality of …
I have been recently reminded that while it may be hard enough to discuss the role and importance of communities for Free and Open Source Software, it is equally important to understand the complexities and the challenges that a Free and Open Source Software foundation has to meet. It may …
Common wisdom has it that sleeping dogs are better kept snoring and I tend to agree. I’m going to do what may seem to be understood as the contrary. I believe it is not the case, as prejudice is something that is hard to fight and tends to stick around …
Readers of this blog will notice a nice touch to it… Thanks to everyone who made this possible!
An attentive reader of this blog made this private comment about software commons to me a few days ago: There are no real software commons, because you cannot compare these with actual, material commons such as air or water. One should treat software proprietary or free as in freedom, as …
The release of the next major version of LibreOffice, the 5.0, is approaching fast. In several ways this is an unique release and I’d like to explain a bit why. LibreOffice matters as much for its features as it does as a platform. Every major release of our office suite …
Mandriva is certainly a rather unique company; it has also been the company for which I was privileged enough to work two times, one in 2003 as an intern for several months. Back then I used to handle the national resellers’network. The second time was ten years afterwards in 2012 …
One regular reader of this blog contacted me a few days ago to share a few suggestions and some concerns about the LibreOffice project. I did not agree with many of the points he was making, but a few of them made sense. I’d like to discuss the main one, …
When the Document Foundation announced its release policy, few people besides IT professionals understood why we were telling people about two distinct stable branches for LibreOffice. The truth is, not only do many FOSS projects share this kind of release policy, but software vendors producing proprietary software often have very …