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Open Standards

Mozilla, a tale of gentrification

This post has a high trolling potential, I am aware of it. So let’s start with a few points meant as a caveat emptor. The views expressed here are mine , solely mine and do not represent the views of the Document Foundation nor my current employer. As a consequence …

LibreOffice, the distraction-free way

There is a growing momentum towards specialized “text editors” these days, and these tools are not meant for “geeks” or “hackers”, far from that: there are targeted at people who write long chunks of texts, and only text. You may have already guessed who they might be: fiction writers, journalists, …

Keeping a promise made a long time ago

Some time around 2009 or 2010, the OpenDocument community realized that while it had won the moral battle over Microsoft and its dubious OOXML standard, it had lost the adoption and ecosystems war. Microsoft Office had been released and with it an undocument format called OOXML which, as far as …

Document Freedom Matters

As the Document Freedom Day is approaching I realized that we don’t push ODF and open standards as loudly as before. Certainly most of the battles for the mind and market share are past, at least when it comes to office file formats. But the recent public consultation of the …

LibreOffice: My birthday wish list

This post is a bit unusual. Let me explain: LibreOffice is a bit like my baby, and when I blog about it, I write with passion but also with the notion to get specific points across. Now, it does not mean that this post will be different in this regard, …

Why LibreOffice 4.2 matters more than you think

On Thursday the Document Foundation released its newest stable branch, LibreOffice 4,2. Don’t let be misled by its number; if we weren’t on a strict time released scheduled alongside a clear number scheme without any nickname for each release, I would have called this one the 5,0. Yes, you read …

Expanding the battlefield for Free & Open Source Software

The title of this post may sound rather belligerant, but it is for a reason. Ever since this Summer -longer in fact- I ended having several conversations with people from the FSF, OSI, April and FSFE (as well as other orgs). Something is becoming increasingly obvious: FOSS has come of …

FRAND, Uncertainty & Doubt

It’s been interesting to watch the latest patent litigation between Microsoft and Motorola. The judge’s opinion has been well documented (see Groklaw’s copy here and an annotated one there over at the Essential Patent blog). Now I’m not going to offer an informed  legal perspective in this post and by …

The case for Open 3D Printing (now with links)

3D Printing is all the hype these days, at least among some communities. What it really is however spans  a lot of different things, several different uses and in general many different realities. 3D printing has actual uses in lots of industries and can be considered to be born out …

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