I was invited the other day to a conference about innovation in the information technology sector. There was nothing remarkable about that event, except perhaps that it led me to voice an opinion I held for years: I do not understand what people are really talking about when they talk …
… and I’m the living proof of it! I had several colleagues, friends and people asking me whether they should run Arch Linux on their desktops or laptops. I even read someone’s blog today on his impression on Arch Linux and Ubuntu. It’s time for me to jump in and …
The financial crisis people started to notice around 2008 is not just financial. It goes deeper than what we usually want to admit. It is about a fundamental shift in our civilization’s balance of power, our survival plans, our values and our way of life. I regret to say that …
In this post I will not talk about LibreOffice or open standards but I thought this could be of interest to GNU/Linux users out there so feel free to comment and discuss. I’m a rather outspoken user of Arch Linux after having used and tried many other distributions (MandrakeSoft/Mandriva, Suse, …
Yesterday Michael Brauer posted on the OASIS ODF TC mailing list his farewell post. Michael, like a very large number of the other employees of the “Oracle’s Hamburg Business Unit”, if not all of them, will be let go by the end of the month. If you wonder what the …
I was expecting the point in time during the setup phase of the Document Foundation where we would start to hear the first critics and doubts about what we are doing and where we’re heading. This is never a good time, not because the questions make me uncomfortable, but because …
I am having a very busy month of April, but I mean, a really busy one. I am alive and kicking, but I am swamped. Here’s a couple of links before an even more active month of May: Ars Aperta has contributed to a pretty interesting project, dubbed ODFgr and …
In the first part of this essay I attempted to describe how communities around Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) projects are born and what is their underlying model. After having described the conditions necessary to have communities emerge around Free and Open Source Software I used Simon Phipps’ s …
How do you define”Community” in Free and Open Source Software projects? What are the roles of a community? How does one become part of a community? I think these are important questions the LibreOffice project and the Free & Open Source Software in general, and I would like to talk …