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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 …

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 …

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 …

Affectio Societatis

I have been meaning to write this post since this Summer, and since we will have a session at the Paris Open Source Summit in November about this topic, I thought now is the right time to discuss it here. There is a mystery of sorts about the reasons people have …

A word to the Wise…

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 …

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 …

Surprises, claws and various articles

Dear readers, something nice but unexpected came up recently. As you can imagine, preparations for the release of LibreOffice 5 are keeping many people busy these days. Among the things that need to be found is the choice of collaterals and various elements for communication. It could very well be …

Pondering FOSS foundations

This year the OpenWorld Forum in Paris will take place the 30th and the 31st of October. I will be one of the speakers of Community Track, and I’ll be discussing the Document Foundation’s example. My co-panelists include representatives of the Eclipse Foundation, the OW2 Consortium, Red Hat and others. …

Reuniting LibreOffice and AOO – a personal take

As we are approaching the 4th anniversary of the LibreOffice project in just a few days, an old theme has been reappearing on the Internet: Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice should reunite. I would like to share my perceptions on this topic although I think it is not a really important …

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