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Open Source

“the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” – and other news

It’s been a long time I haven’t blogged, and I do plan on going back to it. I was thinking to migrate this blog from WordPress to a static site, but some events prompted me to post here earlier than I was initially expecting. First, a few words about me …

Running for the board of the Open Source Initiative – a few words

Well, it has been a while I have posted anything on this blog, a little bit over a hear to be precise. I intend to post more in 2018 but I will likely not keep a regular schedule. Today I would like to explain my reasons for my candidacy at …

An ode to releasing software

There is one particular moment in every Free and Open Source Software project: it’s the time when the software is about to get released. The software has been totally frozen of course, QA tests have been made, all the lights are green; the website still needs to be updated with …

Calendar sharing in the XXIst century

This post is a bit of a rant, and I think it will resonate with people who have chosen to use online and shared calendars that are not provided by either Google or Microsoft. I will write it from the beginning: I still cannot believe we cannot achieve proper calendar …

Women & Free Software projects

I have never written about this rather sensitive topic before, but I recently realized that when we set up the concept of “Native-Language Communities” back in the old days of OpenOffice.org, the general idea was to allow everyone to participate to a Free Software project. Now, the stated ability -the …

What makes a great Open Source project?

Recently the Document Foundation has published its annual report for the year 2015. You can download it as a pdf by following this link, and you can now even purchase a paper copy of the report. This publication gives me the opportunity to talk a bit about what I think …

The subtle art of the Desktop

The history of the Gnome and KDE desktops go a long way back and their competition, for the lack of a better term, is almost as famous in some circles as the religious divide between Emacs and Vi. But is that competition stil relevant in 2016? Are there notable differences …

Discovering the Kube project

The world of email clients is becoming exciting again. That’s thanks to Kube, an effort born out of the KDE world, and specifically the Kolab and RoundCube projects. You may wonder why I pay attention to this initiative; after all, I now use Emacs’ mu4e for about two thirds of …

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 …

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