Currently browsing category

OOXML

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 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 …

The Document Foundation: a personal outlook for 2015

2015 has started and I realized that in between the New Year and last week’s tragedy, I hadn’t had the time to discuss what’s on the table for the Document Foundation in 2015. This is purely a personal opinion and does not represent any sort of official statement by the …

Public Interest, Software Freedom and Open Standards

Christmas and the New Year are coming really close now and I would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. This year was truly exciting for me and I believe that 2015 is going to be a very special one. One of the things that …

Standards and Weapons

I have been writing a lot about the benefits of standards -especially open standards- for economic growth and citizens’ empowerement. Today however, I would like to explore, or at least highlight  a more obscure side of standards. Standards can be used as weapons; by weapons I mean tools of influence, …

The Document Foundation sets precedents & paves new opportunities for Free Software

These past weeks have marked a significant twist in the way the Document Foundation is supporting the LibreOffice project and in general, the Free and Open Source Software world. Three distinct pieces of news should indeed be put together in order to shed light on the way the Document Foundation …

A personal take on LibreOffice 4.3

LibreOffice 4.3 has been released this week and it has already been noticed quite a lot, judging by the number of articles in the press worldwide. The announcement may be found here, and a thorough, technical description has been written by Michael Meeks on his blog (detailed release notes are …

%d bloggers like this: