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Last updated: February 09, 2010 06:00 PM CET

February 09, 2010

Charles Schulz : Events & Non-events

This week started the wrong way. Some people started to create what is litterally a storm in the teacup, while some other people made announcements that in my view are extremely disappointing and quite concerning for some practitioners of FOSS licensing management and consultancy. Let me explain this point first.

Black Duck was awarded a patent on Open Source licensing conflict resolution. The patent itself seems to cover the “core technology” of the software developed by Black Duck, and not the actual practice of FOSS licensing management and optimization, which is something that Ars Aperta incidently offers both through its traditional services and certification programs. I have to say that I am not really sure what the patent covers or does not cover, but it sure brings a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt for the existing competitors or potential competitors of Black Duck Software, existing consultancies in similar field and last but not least, customers. No wonder Bradley Kuhn got upset about this. I do find these news quite unsettling myself, and I cannot wait to see Black Duck’s patent promise. At least that should remind some not to trust so called Open Source experts who use laptops with Windows, MS Office and Internet Explorer. It’s a small but telling sign they treat FOSS as some sort of disease and not as something to rationally analyze and assist their customers on. And do I need to repeat this again here? Software patents are bad, they stifle competition, customer choice, block innovation and lessen value. You may call them a reality, you don’t have to necessarily add to it.

What really strikes me as a real storm in the tea-cup is the pseudo announcement that Ubuntu will drop Openoffice.org from its upcoming Lucid Lynx release, in its netbook edition. The news came from this website and got quickly picked out by the largest french newspaper, stirring quite an uproar among the French community.

Let me offer some thoughts on why these news are nothing short of non-news, aside the mere fact that there is no official announcement by Canonical or any Ubuntu release team on this matter.

First, OpenOffice.org is a large application that usually runs well even on netbooks, but may not be the best tailored tool for specific uses envisioned for netbook users. There is nothing surprising in this, and several Linux distributions have actually never included OpenOffice.org by default because of size constraints and simplicity.
Second, even if Ubuntu were to drop OpenOffice.org from its specific netbook edition it does not mean that the software would be unavailable from the very same Ubuntu repositories. In fact it would be readily available, but it just would not be included in the default installation. How many computers shipped with Windows only include a trial version of Microsoft Word and not a coherent MS Office stack? Almost all of them don’t ship with the full copy of MS Office.
Third, we recently got hold of the first reliable statistics, aside our own count of downloads, of the actual market share of OpenOffice.org on a worldwide scale. And guess what? With these numbers, we won’t be exactly hampered by whatever decision not to ship OpenOffice.org in the default install set of Ubuntu netbook edition.

What is now needed is some sort of acknowledgment by the broader community of analysts that these stats are reliable. This would cause some real problems to Microsoft, as these statistics usually only count the shipments or the default installation images of MS Windows that come preloaded with one trial version of MS Word. Unless Microsoft patents some new market share analysis method, that is.

February 06, 2010

Louis Suarez-Potts : fosdem 2010

I missed last year's but was here two years ago, in Brussels, during winter, only without the broken hip. Fosdem is intense, exciting, great. The focus is on presentations, dsicussions that have an effect, that are not just speeches. In our case, this means the OOo developers present (and there are a lot) are going around meeting others and discussing OOo's technology and file format (the ODF) and how to contribute. (Today there is also a meeting of the ODF crew at 14:00, which I will be participating in. And that field--the ODF--is also immensely interesting.)

More later.....

Oh, cool data--so cool I wonder how much we can believe it.

See: http://www.webmasterpro.de/portal/news/2010/02/05/international-openoffice-market-shares.html

by oulipo (noreply@blogger.com) at February 06, 2010 06:54 AM CET

January 29, 2010

Sophie Gautier : Le futur de OOo

Quelques informations sur ce qui se passe en ce moment dans le projet suite au rachat de Sun par Oracle.

Si la conférence d'Oracle a duré plusieurs heures, je dois dire qu'elle m'a assez laissée sur ma faim. Pas uniquement parce que OOo n'a fait l'objet que d'une slide mais par le manque de communication sur la stratégie open source en général. J'ai l'impression d'avoir ententu parlé produit et client toute la soirée... Bref, une discours de marché corp habituel. Attendons donc les discussions de couloirs qui seront sans doute plus instructives ;)

Pour ce qui est de OOo, voici ce qu'en a dit Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect, Oracle Operating Systems and Virtualization Strategy :

Managed as an independent Global Business Unit
- Retaining Sun development and support teams
Continue to develop, promote and support OpenOffice
- Including the OpenOffice.or community edition
Deliver Oracle Cloud Office
- Web based productivity suite - integrates desktop, web, and mobile user interaction
Focus on enterprise customers
- e.g. integrations with BI and Content Management
Enhance the customer support experience
- Leverage the Oracle Customer Services Infrastructure

On peut donc continuer à agir en confiance sur la ligne suivie par Sun, Oracle ne change pas de stratégie à ce niveau. C'est bien et je suis très contente de pouvoir continuer à travailler avec Hamburg. Je pense, en pouvant me tromper, que la suite Oracle Cloud Office sera un produit propriétaire. Oracle n'aura pas de mal à améliorer la relation client, Sun n'ayant pas été très doué à ce niveau, du moins en France et en Italie.

Dans le futur très proche, nous changeons d'infrastructure d'hébergement et nous quittons (enfin !) CollabNet et CEE (c'est à dire les sites, les mailings listes et IssueTracker).. Nous sommes en phase d'évaluation du projet Kenai (et BugZilla) et pas vraiment proche de la migration visiblement. Il reste encore beaucoup beaucoup de travail ne serait-ce que d'inventaire et de mappage des fonctionnalités.

Le site Extensions migre (enfin après plus de deux ans !) sur une nouvelle version de Drupal, principalement pour avoir accès à la localization sans être connecté. La localization n'est pas en reste puisque la nouvelle version de Pootle est en cours de mise en place et SunGloss est maintenant figé et nous devrions maintenir nos glossaires sur OpenCTI. Mais, bon pour OpenCTI, je suis pas sûre, le peu que j'en ai testé ne semblait pas du tout répondre à ce que j'attendais. Enfin, à tester encore un peu plus et à discuter avec Elsa.

by sophi at January 29, 2010 05:22 PM CET

Leif Lodahl : Victory

The Danish Parliament has decided to create a list of allowed standards. The standards MUST be implemented before end 2011.The decision includes two important things:ODF is on the list - OOXML is NOT!New standards MUST live up to certain criterias, among others it must be fully inter-operable with existing formats (formats already on the list). Microsoft is therefor responsible for

by Leif Lodahl (noreply@blogger.com) at January 29, 2010 12:36 PM CET

January 28, 2010

Charles Schulz : 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 strategy-wise. Better server offerings, more powerful hardware, Java continued, OpenDocument Format praised. If Oracle executes what they just announced, we might actually end up having FUN, with capital letters. On the specific chapter of OpenOffice.org, an ODF-based, online version of OpenOffice.org has been announced and my small finger tells me that it’s going to be a very good surprize. What remains to be seen, of course, is whether Oracle will find this strategy to be profitable enough. They have discussed investments so far, but one should also expect the cost cutting part of the equation. Another thing that worries me is the lack of clear emphasis on Free & Open Source. I hear “Open Systems”, “Open Standards” and “Open everything”. But the tough part will also be in the governance of existing Free and Open Source projects. This being said, I have to stress how pleased I have been by what I heard and watched so far. So pleased, in fact, that it seems to me that Oracle has ended up merging with Sun, more than merely acquiring it. The result might very well end up being Sun on steroids, or Sun with a new sales department and a serious database offering that Monty hates. Good luck and congratulations!
What I have not enjoyed was the presentation of Apple’s iPad. To be sure, it’s a nice device, and I understand that it’s not being advertised as some sort of netbook or affordable MacBook. It’s actually a very nice device, looking like a beautiful picture frame. The inherent weakness is that it strikes me as a more powerful iPhone. The smart part of that story is that Apple is essentially offering easy and elegant Internet browsing to anyone by minimizing its own costs and risk taking. The bad part is that the iPad is riddled with DRM, and that you are essentially locked up in Apple’s infamous App Store. In short, it’s a device letting you browse the Internet as long as Apple wants it, depriving you of your most basic digital freedoms. I do not think that it will pay and that in the end, sole consumer’s satisfaction induced by very powerful marketing and excellent user experience will be enough. Other competitors will eventually be “as good” as Apple, with less restrictions and less of that Diva-like behaviour, which is another way to write the words “anti-competitive” and “proprietary”.

We are in the end of January 2010: Sun just disappeared, Apple re-releases its Newton. Happy future, everyone.

January 22, 2010

Sophie Gautier : Nouvelle boîte de dialogue d'impression

Dans la future 3.3, vous découvrirez une nouvelle boîte de dialogue d'impression pour tous les modules.
Voici les copies d'écran faites sous Writer, elle dispose maintenant de 4 onglets regroupant les différentes options proposées. Bien sûr, elle n'est pas encore en français, mais on peut déjà tester son fonctionnement.

Le premier onglet :

Il permet donc de choisir l'imprimante, les pages et le nombre d'exemplaires.

Le deuxième onglet :

Celui-la est spécifique à Writer et permet de déterminer le contenu à imprimer

Le troisième onglet :

Il vous permet de déterminer le nombre de page à imprimer par feuille de papier, ainsi que d'autres options de mise en page.

Enfin, le dernier onglet :

Quelques derniers réglages contenant des options d'impression plutôt relatives au type de job d'impression.

La fenêtre de gauche vous permet de contrôler la mise en page et de faire défiler les différentes pages. Un dialogue bien pratique au final.

by sophi at January 22, 2010 06:16 PM CET

January 21, 2010

Charles Schulz : 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 to happen. I would therefore like to say Goodbye to Sun Microsystems. It’s been great working with you, it’s been great sharing years of my life as a Free Software contributor. You were one of these IT companies who have this strange ability to make all of us dream and feel confident we could just walk further than anyone else.

I look forward working with “another you”, inside the broader Oracle Corporation, and I am sure that it will be exciting. So farewell, Sun. Hopefully your employees will not forget who you were, what you stood for: excellency in technology, freedom, genius, and inspiration.

My friend Simon Phipps got that on Facebook for the occasion.

January 18, 2010

Sophie Gautier : FOSDEM again!

We will be at FOSDEM again this year! You need to have a coffee or a tea and some nice discussions with OpenOffice.org community members, our booth is just around the corner, waiting to meet you :-) We also have a dev room where you can learn and exchange with our developers on the OOo code or ODF. Don't be shy, come and meet them! The program and further information are available on our wiki. So see you soon...

by sophi at January 18, 2010 11:04 AM CET

January 13, 2010

Sophie Gautier : Jeudi, c'est libre !

Le premier jeudi de chaque mois est le jeudi du libre! Ça tombe bien, hein, vous ne saviez pas quoi faire ;-) Donc, cela se passe à Bruxelles, et toutes les informations sont disponibles sur le site jeudis du libre.
Retrouvez également la conférence réalisée par Benoit Leseul, contributeur Mozilla, qui a retracé l'histoire du projet et son futur, une conf intéressante pour un projet pas simple. La prochaine conf sera sur GLPI, ne la ratez pas, je connais le conférencier, il est super :)

by sophi at January 13, 2010 07:31 PM CET

January 11, 2010

Andreas Mantke : OOoAuthors - Update to a new Plone version

The OOoAuthors uses the Content Management System Plone for writing, reviewing and publishing of Documentation about OpenOffice.org. The documents themselfs are created with the Office-Suite of the year 2010 - OpenOffice.org. The Plone CMS for OOoAuthors was initialized with a buildout script. This makes an update to a newer version of Plone (i.e. a bugfix release) very fast. It takes less than 20 minutes.

by andreasma at January 11, 2010 08:34 PM CET

Sophie Gautier : Renaissance, un point sur la roadmap

Un point sur ce projet qui suscite beaucoup d'intérêt auprès des utilisateurs, mais aussi beaucoup de rumeurs et comme c'est parfois elle qui prend le dessus, autant essayer de rétablir un peu de vérité.

Rappel du projet

But du projet
Le projet Renaissance a pour but de connaître et comprendre nos utilisateurs tels qu'ils sont et de les aider à accomplir ce qu'ils souhaitent en leur fournissant un accès facilité à des fonctionnalités utiles à travers une interface agréable.

''Design de l'interface"
L'interface va être améliorée, notamment les interactions avec l'interface afin qu'elles soient plus rapides et intuitives. Il n'y aura pas de nouvelle interface, mais une interface révisée ou mise à jour.

Quand ?
Ce projet Renaissance s'inscrit dans la durée. Petit à petit, étape après étape, les améliorations prendront place dans l'interface. Il n'y aura pas une version 4 affichant une interface profondément réformée, mais une version 3.3, une version 3.4, etc... contenant chacune de multiples améliorations de l'interface et des fonctionnalités.

Les modifications visibles

Ce que vous pourrez voir, si tout va bien, dans la version 3.3 qui se concentre sur le module Impress quant à ces améliorations, c'est la disparition des onglets Notes et Prospectus en haut de la diapo. Les trois onglets (Normal, Plan et Trieuse) seront sur le côté gauche de l'interface, en haut du volet Diapo. Un volet Notes sera dispo en bas de l'interface et les onglets de droite seront renommés pour être plus compréhensibles. Plusieurs améliorations sont prévues en ce qui concerne l'affichage, par exemple la réduction ou le grisé pour les diapos masquées (ce n'est pas encore décidé), une vignette des diapos en mode plan, une meilleure adaptation à la taille de l'écran, etc... et plusieurs autres petites améliorations, mais rien de plus drastique.

Pourquoi

Nous avons enquêté auprès de nos utilisateurs, via des questionnaires en ligne, via l'enregistrement des actions réalisées dans l'interface, via des questionnaires spécifiques dans des entreprises en cours de migration ou ayant migré sur OOo. La version 3.2 propose même un questionnaire sur le pourquoi de la désinstallation. La réponse a été assez unanime quant à la modification de l'interface : personne ne souhaitait une modification radicale de sa présentation.
Et heureusement, parce que si nous devions réellement complètement modifier cette interface, il nous faudrait réécrire la plupart de la documentation et de l'aide. Il nous faudrait réécrire tous les tests de QA alors qu'il y en a actuellement des centaines. Les équipes de localisation, qui sont de plus en plus nombreuses y compris à fournir des versions avec une QA renforcée, devraient reprendre l'énorme travail déjà réalisé au risque de voir les équipes se démotiver. Non, sincèrement, qu'il y ait des choses à améliorer certes, mais rien qui ne fasse remettre en cause tout ceci qui est et fait aussi la richesse et la qualité de notre produit et de notre projet.

by sophi at January 11, 2010 04:38 PM CET

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