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Bloggings on native language topics by project members - see disclaimer. November 19, 2009Charles Schulz : 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, not just because it was already online as a final draft in May 2009, but because the RGI as a project dates back several years. Its story goes like this: Somewhere in 2006 the decision is made by the French government to draft a public sector-wide policy on IT matters. This policy is to be published in several parts, one on security, another on accessibility and the last one on interoperability. The last one, called the RGI, is published as a draft on the same year and submitted for public comments on a wiki, which was at the time something daring and courageous. The feedback that was received was ominously good. In fact the first version of the RGI was mandating the use of Open Standards, and most notably ODF throughout the whole administration. At that very moment, Microsoft decided it was time to intervene and through a violent strategy of pressure and influence, managed to repel the RGI and have the process restarted. The process did restart and the same document finally got finalized for official approval in 2007. There the RGI progressively fades away, partly because of the presidential elections taking place in France at that time, partly because of a strongly applied pressure from the outside. The freshly elected government seems to have not so fresh ideas about I.T. Its track record in the matter is probably one of the worst possible as it is the one who authored and championed the Hadopi law (the french three strikes system) and other network censorship legislation. Any communication system that is not controlled by the Hungarian director of police glory of our nation, the President, is progressively being put under his control. In this context one could believe that the RGI would have lost not time being reexamined again. The exact opposite happened, partly because of the neo-conservative bias of the new government who seems to believe in the omnipotence of markets vs State intervention, partly because of a strange proximity with Microsoft (four ministers inaugurated the new Microsoft offices in Paris!) and a common hatred of Google. In this context, the people in charge of drafting the RGI discovered they were deprived of any political support. Moreover, they also realized that the opportunity for a clear policy drafting had gone away. They are public servants, after all, and public servants cannot do a lot without the support of the politicians in power. This is how we come to the present RGI. The document by itself has been totally rewritten, choosing to leave aside the policy aspect in favor of an exhaustive referencing and classifying of existing technology and standards. This document itself integrates well with the upper echelons of European interoperability framework and does not attempt to dictate what the public sector stakeholders should do. On the crucial question of the office file formats, it is obvious that the authors spent some time carefully choosing their words. While the use of xml-based file format is clearly recommended, ODF is being put under observation (the reason for this is unclear) and so is OOXML, but at least we know the reason for this: OOXML has no known implementation (and won’t have any until a long time, they might have added) and therefore cannot be used. This is what happens when a government is fiddling too much with powerful corporations and forget the interest of its own people: honest, competent, public servants have to compose with whatever they have in order to keep things going. If I were to judge this document from this standpoint only, I would actually give it a big cheer.The problem is that the whole concept of the RGI has become somewhat of a loaded gun in France, and it is I believe useless to use people of the DGME as scapegoats. With what they have, they could not have done better. But what was at stake was an opportunity for France to become a champion of open standards and sustainable digital future. It’s sad to see this government never gave it a chance. I hope one day we will realize that the ideological bias against any form of openness entertained by the present President and Prime Minister is something akin to the outrageous denial of global warming by the previous U.S. administration.I look forward to the future versions of the RGI, and think they will bring more constructive, innovative and positive elements to the development of a coherent information infrastructure for our national public sector. by Charles at November 19, 2009 11:40 AM CET November 09, 2009Leif Lodahl : Another municipallity chalenges MicrosoftCity of Roedovre (Rødovre) is the next municipality in Denmark to challenge Microsoft on expensive software licenses.From today, employees at the city hall will use OpenOffice.org in conjunction with their case- and document handling system.http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=da&js=y&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.business.dk%2Farticle%2F20091109%2Ftechmobil%2F91108011%2F&sl=da&tl=en& by Leif Lodahl (noreply@blogger.com) at November 09, 2009 07:48 AM CET November 07, 2009Sophie Gautier : It's over, it's over, Orvieto.
La OOoCon09 est terminée. Je rentre juste et détaillerai dans les jours qui viennent les différents moments de cette conférence encore une fois très chaleureuse et pétillante. Sans doute encore plus conviviale que les autres du fait d'Orvieto. Ancien village étrusque, perché sur une falaise à 325m de hauteur, on le traverse en 1/4 d'heure si on prend le soin de ne regarder nul part ailleurs que ses pieds. C'est un site superbe, les lieux dans lesquels se sont déroulés les conférences l'étaient tout autant. Pleins de photos et de vidéos vont peupler le web de ces rencontres, je ne m'étends donc pas sur la ville.
by sophi at November 07, 2009 06:23 PM CET October 29, 2009Leif Lodahl : 100,000,000 downloadsOn October 28th. 2009, the one hundred millionth person clicked on the Download OpenOffice.org button since version 3.0 of the software was announced just over one year ago.www.openoffice.org by Leif Lodahl (noreply@blogger.com) at October 29, 2009 12:49 PM CET October 27, 2009Charles Schulz : Running for Lang Representative at the Community Council
I thought it might help if I’d post here my “official” information page for the OpenOffice.org Community Council Elections. This page can be found on the OpenOffice.org wiki. A few words on Charles-H. Schulz My name is Charles-H. Schulz and I have been a contributor to the OpenOffice.org project since its 1.0 release. I live in Paris and have been working in several IT-related jobs. Today I run a small consultancy in the fields of Free Software and Open Standards. I’m not really what you will call a technical person, but at least I know how to use a terminal and, among other things, start OpenOffice.org from there. In fact, I even know how to start it as a server in “headless” mode, more accurately. By the way, I’m running a Fedora 11 on a quad core HP computer as my main machine, a two years-old Mac Book Pro you might see me with if you go to Orvieto, and as of very recently a Samsung with Android on it. My other areas of interest include litterature, History, philosophy and organic food, among other things. So why am I writing all this? Because we are in the process of electing some of the future members of the OpenOffice.org, and I’m running as a candidate in the Native-Language category. The rules of renewal of Council members are a bit complex, but there are different types of possible candidates that may run, and I’m running in one of them this year. It is the first time I’m running for the Council. What does Charles do inside OpenOffice.org?I’m doing several things inside OpenOffice.org . I have somewhat of a strange title “Lead of the Native-Language Confederation”. It sounds like it belongs to Battlestar Galactica, but it actually is a very OpenOfficeish thing. What this means is I’m in charge of organizing and helping new and existing communities of OpenOffice.org developers, users, marketers, documentation writers who speak in their own native-language. These communities are called native-language projects. They work with the entire project and are one of the key factors of our success. When I took on that role, they were about 5 of them. Now, they’re around 100. Serving as a volunteer in that position makes one both a player and a witness of how the OpenOffice.org community works. On the one hand I have a social and administrative task, on the other, one should not stop there: you have to look for more volunteers who may start new projects. That’s a fascinating job. I have also done other things inside our community. I was among the founders of the Business Development project (aka bizdev) and I am also very proud to be a co-lead of the ODF@WWW project. It is an incubator project that fiddles with ODF documents online, and allows them to be edited real time on a wiki and inside OpenOffice.org. In fact, this project is very important for the future of OpenOffice.org, and for our final goal, which is world domination. What would Charles do in the Community Council?That’s a good question, isn’t it? My first duty, as a “Lang” representative, would be to represent the worldwide communities of OpenOffice.org. I’m not going to make promises like a politician, because this is not a campaign: it’s an information page. So I’m just going to explain what I think I could do there and how I could help. So my first duty would be to express the point of views of these worldwide communities to the Council, which means explaining their issues, their needs and wants. I will also have to work with the other Lang representative (because there’s two of us at the Council) and help the Council run our project. I should also try to get a bigger perspective on things, because OpenOffice.org is not just the addition of all the interests of categories, people and organizations that make up the project. It’s something bigger, more beautiful and more powerful. We are on a mission, and our mission is twofold: make OpenOffice.org one of the best Free Software for the future, and have fun. Because if you don’t have fun, well, you won’t even finish reading what I’m writing. More seriously: The future might be tough. But it’s going to be exciting, and in the end, I think we’re going to have a pretty awesome project, a project with a strong basis and foundation, that will genuinely be a great place for its people and its supporters. At least that’s what I will also try to help with at the Community Council, and I will consider myself satisfied if I remain true to these objectives and to the value of software freedom and true openness. by Charles at October 27, 2009 05:29 PM CET October 26, 2009Sophie Gautier : OOoCon Orvieto, c'est pour bientôt !
Après un programme chargé entre l10n et tests de la future 3.2, je commence à préparer mon voyage à Orvieto et la conférence. Cette année, pas besoin de se lever aux aurores, il semble que tout soit à côté des hôtels, Orvieto est une petite ville :) Je ne fais pas de présentation à cette édition, mais je vais assister aux diverses réunions qui sont calées le mardi (communauté native-lang et l10n notamment). Je vais également participer à l'atelier QA avec un focus plus particulier sur la QA de CWS qui m'a occupée un moment ces derniers temps. Évidemment, il y a toujours des conférences qui se chevauchent et il va encore falloir jouer à pile ou face pour savoir à laquelle assister. Le programme est dense en tout cas et très intéressant. Pour moi, ce sera plutôt packaging, l10n et QA avec un peu de documentation sans doute. J'aimerai bien assister aussi à l'atelier UX mais il est en même temps que le QA Camp... Comme l'an passé, je ferai un résumé des confs auxquelles j'ai assistées et de l'ambiance générale de ce meeting. C'est le seul moment de l'année où nous nous rencontrons, c'est donc un moment très important pour nous tous dans la construction de la communauté. by sophi at October 26, 2009 10:47 AM CET October 25, 2009Leif Lodahl : November 2009 NewsletterNewsletter November (Danish) is out: http://bit.ly/3H4Txw. Read about 100 mio. downloads and a nine year old girl. There is also something about OpenOffice. by Leif Lodahl (noreply@blogger.com) at October 25, 2009 08:07 PM CET October 23, 2009Andreas Mantke : OOoPortable at OOoCon 2009In a few days the OpenOffice.org Conference 2009 take place in Orvieto. I'll give there two presentations. On 4. November I speak about OpenOffice.org Portable and a new built enviroment for this special version of OpenOffice.org. This environment will make it very easy to create a new portable version. by andreasma at October 23, 2009 09:11 PM CET Disclaimer: all views expressed on this page are those of the individual contributors, and may not reflect the views of the OpenOffice.org Community. If you find any offensive or objectionable material, please notify the Native Language Confederation Leads. |
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