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OpenDocument Format

Not so fast, open standards!

My friend Andrew Updegrove wrote a surprising essay in his latest blog post about the irrelevance of open standards. More exactly his point, if I understood correctly, was that open standards were becoming irrelevant as a topic as everyone is using and relying on them, and the software industry can …

The importance of the Document Liberation Project

Today I would like to focus on a quite interesting project, even though it is rarely spoken of: The Document Liberation Project. The Document Liberation Project is LibreOffice’s sister project and is hosted inside the Document Foundation; it keeps its own distinct goals and ecosystem however. We often think of …

In Memoriam of John McCreesh & FOSDEM 2016

I was about to write about the main topic of this post, namely FOSDEM 2016 when we learned of the death of someone who was a really nice and gentle human being, John McCreesh. For those who may not know John, it’s important to say that while he was not …

The way you write

As the first post of 2016 on this blog I was wondering what I would be writing about. Not that I am lacking ideas but I was tinkering with a post about those never-happening new year resolutions. I ended up dropping this idea in favor of a question that is …

LibreOffice Online is here!

This week Collabora has shown an early testing version of the cloud version of LibreOffice integrated with an Owncloud instance. To me and others, this marks a significant milestone in the story of LibreOffice and the Document Foundation. I’m aware that the code is not stabilized and there’s much work …

Does the Open Document Format still matter?

One of the core topics of this blog -at least one of the main reasons it came to existence- was open standards: their benefits, their advantages, and their value as a fundamental component for digital innovation and ultimately software freedom. This is still the case of course, but today I …

Drawing with LibreOffice

There are only very few software packages that can claim to be as feature-packed as LibreOffice. The thing is, sometimes it is even possible to forget about everything you can do with it. I’m not necessarily talking about the avalanche of features and improvements you can see listed on our …

LibreOffice, and the ODF legacy

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 …

ODF in the age of Big Data

On the 25th of March 2015, my son was born and to me it is by far the most important event of the day. Yet the same day the Document Freedom Day was gathering people across the world to celebrate open standards for documents and spread the word against vendor …

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