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Open Standards

Happy Birthday ODF!

On the Saturday 1st of May 2005, ODF 1.0 became an ISO standard. So as Rob Weir and the ODF Alliance already did, let me wish as well a happy birthday to OpenDocument Format. By this I would like to celebrate the fact that after 5 years, ODF is alive, …

The European Commission is always right. So is Microsoft.

The European Commission is becoming a thoroughly disappointing these days. Here’s a few examples. The full draft of the ACTA has been leaked (grab it here) and as my colleague and friend Andre Rebentisch has described, the European Commission seems to know very well how to dig a hole for …

Links for mid-February

In case you had missed that one, OpenOffice.org 3.2 has been released. It’s fast. Really fast. And it comes with some nice extra features too, such as the import or OOXML files (not the ISO standard, which nobody, not even Microsoft can produce, but the file format of MS Office …

Sun gets a new sales department, Apple releases a nice picture frame with DRM

So it happened. Oracle has swallowed Sun Microsystems. Monty should have gotten the news by now. Perhaps he could even be interested by the announcements of Oracle? They’re hiring good sales reps. More seriously, the announcements done through webcasts and available on the Oracle website are very impressive, product-wise and …

Every good thing has an end

This is also true for companies. Today, the European Commission has finally agreed to the purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Russian and Chinese authorities have yet to answer to this deal, but it seems that any Monty-backed answer would be more a delay than a stop for this merger …

Links for mid-December

So I ended up… installing Arch Linux. And guess what? I love it. Everthing works. The installation process is a bit rough, but everything is logical and if you don’t want to spend time doing it you can even use an impressive live-cd project, Chakra. Package management is also innovative …

Politicians, lobbyists and scapegoats: When choosing not to choose should make you vote the next time

The famous and much awaited RGI (Référentiel Général d’Interopérabilité) has officially been published and enacted. This announcement was met with mixed reactions and as I have been following the RGI for quite a few years now, I thought I would write some of my thoughts about it. The RGI is actually old, …

Rumours of Microsoft becoming more frequentable seem greatly overrated

Just back from the OOoCon I was taking some times reading my email and I am afraid what I saw does not push me into believing that Microsoft has amended much of its ways. I guess we cannot do much about it, and it’s Halloween season anyway. Just when we …

Killer Rabbits

Just as I was writing that I was about to go on vacations, some story had to break about OpenOffice.org. Essentially, the news are about Microsoft discussing OpenOffice.org as a competitor. That’s interesting, usually Microsoft does not like to speak about competitors coming from the Free Software Community, except when …

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