There is a growing momentum towards specialized “text editors” these days, and these tools are not meant for “geeks” or “hackers”, far from that: there are targeted at people who write long chunks of texts, and only text. You may have already guessed who they might be: fiction writers, journalists, …
Some time around 2009 or 2010, the OpenDocument community realized that while it had won the moral battle over Microsoft and its dubious OOXML standard, it had lost the adoption and ecosystems war. Microsoft Office had been released and with it an undocument format called OOXML which, as far as …
As the Document Freedom Day is approaching I realized that we don’t push ODF and open standards as loudly as before. Certainly most of the battles for the mind and market share are past, at least when it comes to office file formats. But the recent public consultation of the …
On Thursday the Document Foundation released its newest stable branch, LibreOffice 4,2. Don’t let be misled by its number; if we weren’t on a strict time released scheduled alongside a clear number scheme without any nickname for each release, I would have called this one the 5,0. Yes, you read …
More information available on the Document Freedom website Other links of interest: OpenDocument Format Information site (OASIS) LibreOffice PDFReaders
Two years ago, the OpenOffice.org community decided to break away from the domination of one vendor and instead create an independent foundation that would host the free and open source office suite “for the next decade”. I could not help but re-read a few of my posts then, you can …
Tomorrow, I’ll be flying with Melissa to our honeymoon somewhere in the Mediterranean. It will be our first and well deserved vacations for over a year now. In this warm and quite busy month of August (my friends at Mandriva will know what I mean), I am reminded of something …
As the British Cabinet Office opened a consultation on open standards and the best procurement practices for the United Kingdom’s public sector a wave of lobbyists, flown in from the US or just homegrown on British soil, came flocking the Cabinet offices near St James a few weeks ago. The …
Matters of heritage can be tricky to solve. Every family out there has had and will have its share of feuds, issues and tears. People don’t always stick together. Should we expect any better from corporations and organisations such as Free & Open Source Software projects? Today I would like …