Monday September 11, 2006 OOoCon 2006
A quick wave to you from Lyon in France, where I am about to go to bed after the pre-conference day of the OpenOffice.org conference. This year there are over 600 people registered - it's getting very big. I've had a busy day of meetings over red wine, an excellent way to do business. ODF and OpenOffice.org certainly have a lot of momentum, and the interests here are broad. Mac support is a hot topic (not least with NeoOffice as a commercial sponsor), so is ODF and its uptake in commercial products as well as by governments. I'm sorry to have to cut the visit short, but duty calls in the US.
Posted by webmink
( Sep 11 2006, 03:53:50 PM PDT )
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Wednesday July 26, 2006 Stefan's Award
At the opening evening of OSCON in Portland, Stefan Taxhet received an award in the O'Reilly/Google Open Source Awards, recognising his very long commitment to the software now known as OpenOffice.org - well deserved.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 26 2006, 10:47:59 AM PDT )
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Saturday July 22, 2006 OpenOffice.org Metro Ad: Mission Accomplished
I just got an e-mail from Fundable to say they collected on my pledge to the OpenOffice.org Metro Ad Campaign, which means - yes, we've done it! I'm still trying to work out exactly what "marketing" means in a world of open source - which is why I'll be at Doc's talk on Tuesday - but whatever it means, collecting small contributions from across the community to fund an awareness-raising campaign for the general public is very cool.
Huge congratulations to Benjamin Horst for taking the initiative to orchestrate this, and to all the individual donors whoever you are for making this happen. If any New Yorker wanted to send me a copy of the newspaper when it comes out I would be very grateful.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 22 2006, 02:46:08 PM PDT )
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Thursday May 25, 2006 "Gimme Yer Dinner Money Or I Break Yah Legs"
You may recall that, when OpenOffice.org started its "Get Legal!" campaign, people doubted the assertion that buying software from market monopolists was the start of a cycle of fear of prosecution? Well, just as the monoculture warning has now come home to roost, so has this one. ZDNet UK reports that the UK's software mafiosi enforcers, FAST, have decided the next target for their rich masters is to be the British state education system.
"The message is clear: if head teachers, schools governors and even LEAs allow the use of illegal software then it may be a fast track to a criminal record," said John Lovelock, director general of FAST.
"FAST track" indeed. This is what happens when you get mass-market software with dangerous end-user license agreements. As soon as you step on the treadmill, you are on the hook for endless inconvenience and threats-by-proxy - from the moment that you buy it (yes, you are not even trusted to use software you have legitimately purchased [kudos to Robert for disclosing that but shame on his employer for imposing it]) to the moment you finally break free.
Why put up with this sort of customer abuse (and it's not just schools that face the software equivalent of the money lender's mobsters)? Mark Taylor is on hand to advise:
Taylor said that education professionals are focused on dealing with "violence, drugs, bullying, truancy, shrinking budgets and escalating government regulations", not "worrying about whether they've got licences for anything anyone has ever installed on their ageing networks".
Taylor said that if he represented a school on the receiving end of these threats, he would start researching open source software.
"I'd begin to move away from the people locking me into proprietary solutions whilst threatening me with criminal proceedings, and towards open standards, open source-based software that gives me options, dramatically and permanently lowers my costs, and won't get me a criminal record," Taylor added.
In other words, and I quote: "Get Legal! Get OpenOffice.org!". What the old world - of charging for the privilege to use - calls "pirates" are what the new world - of providing service to ubiquity - calls customers.
Posted by webmink
( May 25 2006, 12:00:00 AM PDT )
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Wednesday April 26, 2006 NeoOffice 2.0 Alpha Available
If you're a Mac user, you'll be delighted to know that Patrick has got an early alpha of NeoOffice 2.0 ready, complete with all the features that are in other OpenOffice.org distributions including full OpenDocument support. He's experimenting with raising funds by selling access to the alpha program - well worth supporting in my view - although everything remains GPL licensed and the source remains available.
Posted by webmink
( Apr 26 2006, 05:45:04 AM PDT )
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Wednesday February 08, 2006 By The People, For The People
Just love this - Sun sponsored an advertising campaign for OpenOffice.org - run on buses in Redmond, WA. I think this has more style and mileage than having planes buzz a competitor's HQ. The rest of the photos are on the OpenOffice.org site and there are some delicious slogans there, including "Stop giving a bully your lunch money - OpenOffice.org".
Posted by webmink
( Feb 08 2006, 08:43:03 PM PST )
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Tuesday January 31, 2006 NeoOffice 1.2 Released
This just in: Patrick's satisfied with the beta code and has released NeoOffice 1.2 - you can download it now if you're a Mac OS X user on PowerPC.
Posted by webmink
( Jan 31 2006, 03:24:11 PM PST )
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Monday January 23, 2006 Open Source ahead of Microsoft
Quick note: It may not be finished yet, but there's already an alpha version of OpenOffice.org for the Intel-based Apple Mac. Kudos to Eric, Daniel, Stephan and Florian.
That's the beauty of open source - people can just get on with it, no need to ask permission. I've no idea when MS Office for Intel Mac will be ready, but I'm pretty sure that OpenOffice.org will be a great choice even when it stops being the only choice, not least because it supports the open standard file format that everyone (except "NIH" Microsoft) is supporting!
Posted by webmink
( Jan 23 2006, 08:54:03 PM PST )
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Saturday December 03, 2005 Accessibility for OpenDocument
I note over at the OpenDocument Technical Committee that they have formed an accessibility sub-committee, as agreed at the Summit we all attended in Armonk a few weeks ago. According to the announcement, its purpose is:
- To liaise with the disability community to gather accessibility related feedback on the OpenDocument v1.0 specification.
- To gather accessibility related feedback from implementors of accessible applications that implement OpenDocument v1.0.
- To produce a formal accessibility evaluation of the OpenDocument v1.0 file format.
A great move. It's high time that the disability community was able to escape the grip of the proprietary and the cynically abusive way that the businesses involved use the trapped investment of that community for political leverage and distorted profit. Let's hope the way ODF has raised the profile of the matter accelerates that escape.
Posted by webmink
( Dec 03 2005, 11:03:58 AM PST )
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Thursday October 20, 2005 OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released
I've spoken with a wide range of local and national government officials recently, and they have almost all told me that a formal release of OpenOffice.org is very important to them as they can't deploy beta or 'release candidate' software in their organisation. I'm therefore delighted to see that OpenOffice.org 2.0 has just been released by the OpenOffice.org community. Huge congratulations to the many, many people involved in the huge task of creating a commercial-quality open source software release. It makes OpenDocument format a viable alternative for millions of people worldwide. The downloads are going to be very popular so I suggest getting the BitTorrent versions and then leaving your BitTorrent client running to help share the load. The more of us do that, the more people will have OpenOffice.org 2.0 sooner.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 20 2005, 06:00:38 AM PDT )
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Friday September 02, 2005 OpenOffice.org to use LGPL only
Following my earlier announcement that Sun is retiring SISSL, the OpenOffice.org Community Council has got straight down to business and said that OpenOffice.org will only use LGPL from now on. I applaud that decision.
Posted by webmink
( Sep 02 2005, 01:26:49 PM PDT )
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Friday June 03, 2005 Defining "Open Standard", Simply
I was going to write a long piece about Microsoft's announcement that they are copying all the design points of the OASIS OpenDocument format and using it in the next version of Office, but I don't need to because Stephen O'Grady has. I asked a whole load of European Commission folk about it this week and no-one is fooled - they want a genuinely open standard, please.
An open standard is one which, when it changes, no-one is surprised by the changes. Admittedly I'm not surprised when Microsoft repeatedly and apparently arbitrarily changes its interfaces and formats and jerks developers around but I meant "not surprised" in the sense that the change process was open to involvement and contribution by all, not in that way. The OASIS process by which OpenDocument was defined is such a process and indeed Microsoft, being an OASIS member, did visit and could have easily steered the format to suit their legacy needs - the format is in fact vendor-neutral. Instead they chose to read the overview and then re-implement it. Jean Paoli's comment "Sun standardized their own. We could have used a format from others and shoehorned in functionality, but our design needs to be different" reeks of NIH and lock-in when you take that fact into account.
Posted by webmink
( Jun 03 2005, 12:01:08 PM PDT )
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