Short announcement: I’ll be speaking at the Open Source Summit in Paris on the 18th of November: the panel discussion will be about community and contributors’ engagement (the panel is dubbed “from the individual to the collective and the collective to the individual…”). You will find more information here and …
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 …
There are only very few software packages that can claim to be as feature-packed as LibreOffice. The thing is, sometimes it is even possible to forget about everything you can do with it. I’m not necessarily talking about the avalanche of features and improvements you can see listed on our …
I tend to write a lot about how Free and Open Source Software projects rely on a community of contributors to grow and expand, and how projects without a healthy community tend to face problems and in some cases disappear. Today, I would like to discuss a sad reality of …
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 …
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 …
An attentive reader of this blog made this private comment about software commons to me a few days ago: There are no real software commons, because you cannot compare these with actual, material commons such as air or water. One should treat software proprietary or free as in freedom, as …
The release of the next major version of LibreOffice, the 5.0, is approaching fast. In several ways this is an unique release and I’d like to explain a bit why. LibreOffice matters as much for its features as it does as a platform. Every major release of our office suite …
Mandriva is certainly a rather unique company; it has also been the company for which I was privileged enough to work two times, one in 2003 as an intern for several months. Back then I used to handle the national resellers’network. The second time was ten years afterwards in 2012 …