Donnerstag August 30, 2007

Russia to adopt ODF
Great news from Russia:
"The Russian Government has taken a step towards endorsing ODF through an e-government program that would mandate use of software that conforms to "widely used standards" in all government contracts.
According to the Russian Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications "within the project to form an e-government concept in the Russian Federation, support of ISO/IEC 26300: 2006 is planned.""
Found here.
( Aug 30 2007, 02:27:35 PM CEST ) Permalink

Donnerstag August 23, 2007

Positive Sun Weblog Publisher Review
Computerworld just published a positive Sun Weblog Publisher Review. Here is a quote:
"Overall I'm very impressed - write your entry in Writer, adding links, formatting etc as you would with any document, and then click Send to blog and off your post goes to your chosen blog.
...
I think it will be best used by the managers, secretaries and other people who use Writer all day, but perhaps aren't used to using a blog. For them, writing in Writer is natural, blogging is confusing, and a quick way to send their thoughts to their blog is required. For them, the WebLog Publisher should help to encourage blogging by those influential people."
( Aug 23 2007, 02:22:07 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Correcting false statements by Microsoft
I think it is important to correct the false - or maybe misquoted - statements by Vijay Kapoor, national technology officer of Microsoft India that I found in this interview under the question "Why does Microsoft want another standard, what's the rationale?". Microsoft starts the reply with "There are at least 4 good reasons why:" and then states the first reason.

Microsoft says: "ODF started out and was completed as an XML format, specifically supporting OpenOffice with a tight scope around that product."

As can be read in this white paper, the OpenOffice.org file format was designed as an application agnostic file format right from beginning. The goal of the OpenOffice.org file format, which later was chosen as the basis for the work on the ODF specification at OASIS, was to define a document file format that could be used by any vendor. Thus, instead of just dumping OpenOffice.org's internal in-memory document structures into an XML file format, generic representations were chosen. The strong reuse of existing open standards (e.g. Dublin Core, MathML, XForms, HTML, SVG, etc.) is a good proof point for that, i.e. accepted best practices for representing specific document elements were chosen instead of using proprietary elements or reinventing the wheel.

In addition, very early KOffice also decided to use ODF as the default file format. Thus, two completely independent open source office suites are using the same file format as the default, not just as one additional file format.

Finally, the initial charter said "The purpose of this TC is to create an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications.", i.e. the file format should be usable by any office application.

David Faure from KOffice said in October 2004 in an interview: "More than that, I made sure that this format would be a good base for KOffice :) That's what my job in the OASIS technical committee is: ensuring that the file format can be used to express everything that KOffice supports. But I definitely think the OpenOffice.org file format was a very good basis for the OASIS format, since it was designed, from the start, as a file format that should be as independent as possible from the design of the application. It reuses standards like XSL/FO, CSS, HTML etc. as much as possible, so the goal is to make the OASIS format another one of those formats, where the application used to edit the document doesn't matter."

Microsoft says: "It wasn't until 2005 that the spec was offered up as a general XML office document format and consequently renamed to ODF."

The work at the OASIS ODF TC started in 2002 and all OASIS discussions as well as draft documents are publicly accessible. Even before the technical committee at OASIS started the work on ODF, the OpenOffice.org file format was discussed and defined as part of the open, transparent and public XML project on OpenOffice.org. See also Michael Brauer's public welcome email from October 2000.

Draft versions of the specification were available long before the public review phase started in January 2005. A first draft carries a date of "7 February 2003". The first committee draft shows a date of "22 March 2004". Thus, useful specification drafts were available much earlier than 2005.

Microsoft says: "No opportunity existed for Microsoft to actually participate in this full process - given the original scope, the 6 months between the re-naming of the spec to ODF, and its subsequent approval by OASIS as a standard."

I'm not aware of any attempt by Microsoft to formally submit proposals as part of the ODF specification process at OASIS. AFAIK, Microsoft decided to just be an observer at OASIS all the time. Anyway, if Microsoft ever made a formal proposal, it should be visible in the publicly accessible OASIS email archives. However, if I did not overlook a posting from Microsoft, Microsoft never actively participated in the OASIS ODF TC and Microsoft never formally submitted a proposal.

However, every OASIS member including Microsoft was invited to join the OASIS ODF TC. Microsoft was in fact a board member when the official Call for Participation for the OASIS ODF TC was sent out to various OASIS mailing lists including the members list (members@lists.oasis-open.org)., and thus Microsoft could not possibly have been unaware of the formation of the group and was definitely aware it had the inalienable right to join at any time. Thus, Microsoft had the opportunity to fully participate in the OASIS ODF TC right from day one.

The Call for Participation says "The proposal, which includes a statement of purpose, list of deliverables, and proposed schedule, will constitute the TC's charter. The TC Process allows these items to be clarified (revised) by the TC members; such clarifications (revisions), as well as submissions of technology for consideration by the TC and the beginning of technical discussions, may occur no sooner than the TC's first meeting." Thus, Microsoft even had the chance to influence the wording of the charter.

Microsoft says: "The scope of the ODF spec never included even the basic requirements that Microsoft required to support a fully open format, and nor did the OASIS technical committee want to include these requirements."

It would be interesting to know how Microsoft defines a "fully open format". The current ODF charter can be found here and the first charter is included in the Call for Participation. The original charter says: "The purpose of this TC is to create an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications." and "it must be suitable for office documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents,". Thus, I don't see what "basic requirements" ODF does not try to address.

Thus, all in all, the arguments provided by Microsoft in the interview don't seem to be valid.
( Aug 23 2007, 01:50:07 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [4]

Singapore Airlines will put StarOffice in front of every passenger
As can be read here, Singapore Airlines will put StarOffice in front of every passenger on its newest planes.
( Aug 23 2007, 01:48:40 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [2]

Mittwoch August 22, 2007

Germany / DIN votes "yes with comments"
As can be read in this German press release just issued by DIN (the German national standard body), the German SC34 mirror committee voted "yes with comments" as part of the ISO standardization process of Microsoft Office Open XML. Unfortunately, due to the DIN rules I'm not allowed to disclose details about the discussions (which I personally believe is strange for a standards organization in a democratic country, because the German citizens can't easily find out and follow how the standards are being defined and approved that ultimately might affect how their tax money will be spent or what standards and standard implementations they have to use). Nevertheless, the press release by DIN includes a piece of important information, i.e. that dozens of pages of technical improvement suggestions had been generated. However, the vote resulted in a "yes with comments" which means that the technical comments can be ignored. A "no with comments" which is suggested by ISO for "conditional approvals" did not win the vote.
( Aug 22 2007, 02:59:50 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Dienstag August 14, 2007

Malaysia embraces ODF
Great news from Malaysia:
"The Malaysian Administration Modernization and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) last week issued a tender for a nine-month study to evaluate the usage of open standards in its information communications technology (ICT) deployment. The study will also look into how the Malaysian public sector should migrate to open standards and the ODF, according to the Malaysia Open Source Software Alliance (MOSSA).
... In July this year, Japan became the first country in the Asia-Pacific region to embrace open software standards. Last August, the United Nations urged countries in the region to adopt the ODF."
The full article can be found here.
( Aug 14 2007, 11:08:00 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Montag August 13, 2007

Portuguese Ministry of Education distributes open source CD (OpenOffice.org included)
As can be read in this Portuguese announcement, the Portuguese Ministry of Education is distributing an open source CD to K-12 students. Equivalent commercial software would have cost the affected more than 1.6M K-12 students more than 300 million Euros. The CD which includes OpenOffice.org will help to eliminate the digital devide and reduce software pircacy.
( Aug 13 2007, 10:26:36 PM CEST ) Permalink

Mittwoch August 08, 2007

Don't forget to register for the OpenOffice.org Conference 2007!
This is just a short reminder. Don't forget to register for the OpenOffice.org Conference 2007! From September 19th until September 21st OpenOffice.org developers and users will meet in Barcelona, Spain to discuss all the latest and greatest stuff around OpenOffice.org. I'm sure it will be a lot of fun again!
( Aug 08 2007, 12:32:32 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Dienstag August 07, 2007

Green and open source hardware
It's fun to work for a company that is a leader in both, eco-computing and open source. Check out Sun's latest announcement:

"This next generation of the UltraSPARC family of processors also extends its lead in eco performance, bringing Sun's revolutionary CoolThreads(TM) chip multithreading (CMT) technology to the UltraSPARC T2 processor, powered by fewer than two watts per thread. At one-tenth to one-thirtieth the power consumption of competitive offerings, the UltraSPARC T2 processor sets the gold standard for green computing and efficiency, combining the industry's lowest power consumption with double the cores, 16 times the threads, 4 times the throughput, with on-chip network and security functionality. Bottom line: The UltraSPARC T2 processor has the potential to save systems builders and their end users millions of dollars on skyrocketing power, cooling and space expense.
...
Having surpassed 5,500 downloads of the OpenSPARC(TM) T1 source code, Sun is working to release source code for the UltraSPARC T2 processor to the OpenSPARC community at www.opensparc.net."

The full annoucement can be found here.
( Aug 07 2007, 05:21:36 PM CEST ) Permalink

Dell/Ubuntu systems will be shipped in Germany, France and the UK as well
According to this German article, Dell will ship their Ubuntu systems in Germany, France and the UK as well. Great news for the open source world and OpenOffice.org!
( Aug 07 2007, 03:52:26 PM CEST ) Permalink

Microsoft Project alternative going open source
As can be read here, OpenProj, an alternative to Microsoft Project is going open source. Here is a quote from the announcement:
"Projity Inc. is releasing a free desktop version of its 18-month-old Project-On-Demand service. Called OpenProj, the still-in-beta software will be bundled with several leading flavors of the Linux operating system, according to an interview last week with Projity CEO Marc O'Brien."
Considering that quite a few of the millions of users adopting OpenOffice.org will look for alternatives to Microsoft Project, these are great news!
( Aug 07 2007, 03:49:34 PM CEST ) Permalink

Montag August 06, 2007

Lenovo bundling Linux (and thus OpenOffice.org)
According to this announcement, Lenovo will now also ship Linux on their notebooks. Since OpenOffice.org is included in the Linux distro, OpenOffice.org will now be shipping (directly or indirectly via Linux) on computers from Dell, Lenovo and Everex. Cool!
( Aug 06 2007, 04:28:22 PM CEST ) Permalink

Freitag August 03, 2007

Great endorsement for OpenOffice.org
"Finally, I tell parents not to bother springing for Microsoft Office. This can take a $499 laptop and increase its price by at least 20%. OpenOffice is a bargain-hunter’s friend and I make sure that teachers can support it if they receive files electronically from students."
Found here.
( Aug 03 2007, 03:15:57 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Sun's new radio star: Barton George
Sun has a new radio star: Barton George! Check out his cool interviews from Ubuntu Live! Day 1 is covered here, and the Day 2 interviews can be found here.
( Aug 03 2007, 10:18:38 AM CEST ) Permalink