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It’s official, MS Office looks like The Gimp.

Taken from the GullFOSS blog, Andreas Mertel’s post, this is how MS Office 2008 on Mac OS X may look like, if you don’t pay enough attention: Now this is, after 5 minutes of fiddling with pretty much every toolbar possible, how OpenOffice.org 3.01 looks on my Fedora 10: To …

Standards for Change

Dear Readers As many of you know, Ars Aperta has been active in standardization ever since its inception. Shortly after starting our business in 2006, we realized how critical a standard like OpenDocument Format would become for the ICT world. By creating an effective, xml based format for office documents, …

Links for the 20th of May 2009

I wrote a bit more about Ars Aperta’s new certification project. The basic idea is to award certifications to organizations that contribute or lead FOSS projects. Several types of certification exist, but in this article I discuss the specifics of what is probably the first comprehensive FOSS certification to date …

Should we waterboard Rob Weir? And other crucial questions…

These are very interesting times for ODF and Open Standards. Microsoft’s latest outrage by Gray Knowlton does at least show that if there’s a company who practices the « Do as I say, not as I do », it’s Microsoft. Gray Knowlton is now calling for Rob Weir, chair of the ODF …

ODF with no excuse

Reports start to appear in the press about the ODF support quality enabled by the Service Pack 2 inside Microsoft Office 2007. I could say that I’m not surprised, but I somewhat had also expected the contrary. Unfortunately it seems we have here a poor implementation of ODF. If further …

Preliminary thoughts on the implementation of ODF in Microsoft Office.

To keep this post simple and clear, I would like to clarify two things: First, I have not tested the SP2 of Microsoft Office 2007, and hence I cannot relate my own experience of Microsoft’s implementation of ODF. Second, I do believe that given the information we have, and as …

News of the Weird (April issue)

IBM votes for OOXML at the ANSI (the U.S. standards body) and the Microsoft-sponsored mob rejoices. The problem? Despite what it seems, the rules of the particular TC at the ANSI did not allow members to go against a previous ISO vote on the standard. In short, Jesper & Co …

Links for the Beginning of Spring

I happen to write articles on email clients. And this time, my friend Tristan Nitot is not going to like it. Interesting description of one of the upcoming features in OpenOffice.org: Secured digital signatures. Guess what, we will soon be the only ones to have them! An excellent exemple on …

50 Million downloads and still counting

These days are occasions to celebrate, both for the ODF and OpenOffice.org communities. Yesterday was the Document Freedom Day, celebrating the liberation of documents through open standards such as ODF. This global initative attempts to let people know about the importance of true Open Standards and why they matter in …

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