10.14.10
Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Oracle, Videos, Windows at 7:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Like the scorpion and the tortoise
Summary: Additional proof that the “Open Source” policy at Microsoft is still something along the lines of “We are not allowed to be seen as attacking Free software but quietly we have to”
THE RECENT REMARK from Hernán Rincón (insulting “Open Source” [1, 2, 3], which gets adopted widely where he works for Microsoft around Brazil) have helped a lot of people see that Microsoft it no friend of “Open Source”, but this does not prevent Microsoft from carrying on with this PR charade. Microsoft’s booster Marius Oiaga is helping them right now:
Microsoft, once the anti-open source poster child, says that the company has evolved as the world changed and that it is now committed to openness.
Watch them use their beloved Novell to spread this lie:
Microsoft made a critical move in 2006, when it inked a Windows and Linux interoperability alliance with open source vendor Novell.
Since then, both Microsoft and Novell have made investments into making sure that Windows Server and SUSE Linux can play nice together for customers that need to run both platforms in their heterogeneous environments.
Let’s face it, Microsoft’s biggest cash cow is suffering (that’s Office) and while Microsoft keeps pretending to harbour “open source” on Windows it is actually attacking OpenOffice.org for Windows, even though it’s “open source” and for Windows. What does that say about Microsoft’s attitude towards “open source” on any platform at all?
Microsoft’s hiring of people specifically to fight OpenOffice.org (and LibreOffice or Lotus, by extension) is something that we covered before [1, 2]. It has turned rather pathetic. Microsoft is now blatantly lying in new videos. “Source of one of the quotes in #MSFTvOOo video,” says Jan from Red Hat, is a case “from 2006(!) about Windows 2003(!)” (he also gave a pointer to Microsoft.com). Someone who prefers to remain anonymous has chosen to study Microsoft’s ‘beef’ in this latest FUD campaign and here is what he or she found, based on this video:
The people quoted in the spot against OpenOffice:
James Fleming, Infrastructure and Support Manager, Speedy Hire
Jeff Cimmerer, Director of Technology for the Pittsford School District
David Sterling, ICT Manager, Central Scotland Police
Bülent Türker, Product Manager, Scarves Department, SARAR Group
Eugene Mariotto, ICT Director, Cobra Automotive Technologies
Eros Borgogelli, Information Systems Coordinator, Ciar
Randall C Kennedy, InfoWorld
Tisome Nugent, Educator, Orange County Public Schools
Sergey Sakharov, Business Process Optimization Manager, Art of Transport Logistics
Darek Muraszko, Information Systems Admninistrator, Kaczmarski Inkasso
Igor Gentosh, Head of System Integration Department, Kredobank JSC
Tiziano Battilana, Information Systems Coordinator, Euromobil Group
Joerg Lenze, System Administrator, Heinrich Berndes Haushaltstechnik GmbH & Co. KG
Leonid Medvediev, Head of IT Department, CJSC SPC, BorschagivskiyChemical and Pharmaceutical Plant
Bailey Mitchell, Chief Information Officer, Forsyth County Schools
I am in the process of checking the quotes and I have noticed they are effectively taken from quite old “success” stories, here some examples:
David Sterling, ICT Manager, Central Scotland Police
Source of the quotes:
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-Office-2003/Central-Scotland-Police/Central-Scotland-Police-Cuts-Maintenance-Costs-30-Percent-By-Replacing-Linux-Desktop/49609
This is a “success” story of 2006 about a migration to Office 2003/Windows 2003. Linux desktops in 2003 and OpenOffice in 2003 are ancient IMHO, not really a good way to convince customers NOW 
You can find more, for example:
Tisome Nugent, Educator, Orange County Public Schools
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?casestudyid=4000005095
Joerg Lenze, System Administrator, Heinrich Berndes Haushaltstechnik GmbH & Co. KG
http://65.55.21.250/caseStudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?casestudyid=4000006523
Etc. etc.
All you will find are arguments on how the lock-in of Microsoft Office makes sure noone can switch to alternatives.
Decide for yourself
Here is some coverage about Microsoft’s latest steps (the video is said to have been removed/gone private, probably for PR/damage control reasons):
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Microsoft has a long-established practice of disarming competition by not acknowledging it, because acknowledging the competition gives it power. Well, the Redmond giant has changed stance when it comes to OpenOffice and launched a video attack on the free alternative to the Office software suite.
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A few hours after this story was published, Microsoft set the video as “private,” meaning it can no longer be viewed by the public. We found it hosted on Microsoft.com, however, so if you have Silverlight, go watch it there.
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Educational organizations get locked-in and so do students. What happens if a student goes to work at a place that uses OpenOffice.org on GNU/Linux? Are they doomed? Nonsense. It’s a GUI and they point, click and type. For a school district to spend $millions annually on software they can do without should be a crime or at least a breach of fiduciary responsibility to use the tax payers’ money wisely. What does it teach a kid that his school spends more on software that they don’t need when the system has to be cut back somewhere else because the premise of the whole situation was that the budget was tight? Do you think they might have to cut something that does educate students, Homer?
Oh! The Horror! The Horror of educational systems that cannot do the maths. There are thousands of systems that have deployed OpenOffice.org and GNU/Linux with no problems except what to do with the savings.
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In due course, more details emerged of how Mindcraft had been able to draw directly on support from Microsoft when tuning the system, but had not involved Red Hat, whose distribution was being used for the tests, in the same way. This meant that several important tweaks that would have improved the latter’s performance were lacking. Indeed, it later turned out that the tests had actually been conducted in a Microsoft laboratory.
[...]
It seems that Microsoft has forgotten this important lesson. For it has put together a three-minute video of customers explaining why they switched from OpenOffice.org to Microsoft Office.
The criticisms made in the video are not really the point – they are mostly about OpenOffice.org not being a 100% clone of Microsoft Office, and compatibility problems with Microsoft’s proprietary formats. The key issue is the exactly the same as it was for the Mindcraft benchmarks. You don’t compare a rival’s product with your own if it is not comparable. And you don’t make this kind of attack video unless you are really, really worried about the growing success of a competitor.
Just as it did in 1999 for GNU/Linux, Apache and Samba, the company has now clearly announced that OpenOffice.org is a serious rival to Microsoft Office, and should be seriously considered by anyone using the latter.
Thanks Microsoft.
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OpenOffice
The most popular open source office solution is OpenOffice, original released as an office suite for Linux but later released for Windows.
OpenOffice features the Writer, Calc, Impress and Base applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and database management, all free, while technical support is provided in the form of help documents on the website and a directory of consultants, although this last option is intended only for businesses. OpenOffice is available from download.openoffice.org.
Note that in the near future, OpenOffice will be available as LibreOffice.
Oracle Open Office
If Open Office appeals to you but you require online support, then Oracle Open Office might be your best choice. Offering the same functionality as OpenOffice, Oracle Open Office is available to purchase from www.oracle.com as an enterprise-class office suite based on the same open standards as OpenOffice.
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Regarding that last one (a press release), the Microsoft booster just had to say something negative:
Oracle is spinning its participation in a forthcoming Open Document Format (ODF) event as proof of its continued commitment to the OpenOffice.org community.
Gavin seems to be the one spinning, not Oracle. He too seems interested in hurting OpenOffice.org, so it’s not just Microsoft which does it very publicly right now. If it hurts Microsoft, it means we need more of the same. It’s an indication of weakness. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FSF, GNU/Linux, Mono, Novell, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Oracle, SUN at 2:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The FSF-endorsed, community-run office suite gains momentum and there are reasons to believe that it can make Oracle relinquish control at some stage
A COUPLE of days ago we helped introduce LibreOffice, which contrary to what some Mono/Novell trolls are saying, is not a rebranded Go-OO. The idea is similar in the sense that copyright assignment gets changed, but here there are a lot of vendors involved and the steering committee is diverse.
A lot has changed since Novell first tried to fork OpenOffice.org and take control away from its rightful owner. Besides, a lot has changed in the stewardship because Sun was a trustworthy steward whereas Oracle disregards freedom. Its CEO recently sent E-mail to a journalist calling him a scumbag. That’s not the type of person a community can look up to.
“Libre” appears to be a focus of the new office suite, whereas Go-OO added some Microsoft elements like Mono bindings and OOXML. Responding to the worries that there is too much overlap between what was once known as Go-OO and LibreOffice, Charles-H. Schultz clarifies as follows:
I had a chance to ask Charles-H. Schultz, on the steering committee of The Document Foundation some questions I had swirling in my mind after their announcement today of LibreOffice, and he was kind enough to take time on a really busy day to answer.
I wanted to know about Mono and OOXML and all the things you are wondering about too. I had become quite worried about OpenOffice.org and Go-OO, and naturally that was on my mind, given who is involved in LibreOffice. The answers are reassuring. The Document Foundation is serious about avoiding non-free elements, and they are on the same page about that. I guess that’s how they got Richard Stallman to bless the project, now that I think of it, along with so many others. And I wanted to ask him how we all can help out.
[...]
Question 2: What about Mono? What about OOXML?
Schultz: Well, that’s quite easy. Mono was never really inside OOo or Go-OO to start with. What was inside Go-OO was the possibility of Mono integration, and even that sort of exists inside the “vanilla OOo”. So we made sure that didn’t add to this.
As for OOXML, well, we didn’t take the Go-OO approach and did not include the patches developed with the “aid” of Microsoft. All in all, LibreOffice is clean, very clean, and we look forward stay that way. But enough talking on OOXML, a standard that does not exist. Let’s rather focus on ODF, an existing open standard we support and promote.
We discussed this in IRC last night. I said that I had gone to the IRC channel of LibreOffice only to find that at least half of the operators are Novell staff. “Meeks has been pushing for this for a long time,” wrote Saul, “and it seems like he found a way to get his way and fork it.” Well, Novell seems like it has just weeks/months left to exist (in its current form) and as for Meeks, “he might probably be ready to go elsewhere,” told us a source. There is a slight worry that if VMB_ware got hold of LibreOffice, then it would be like Microsoft executives controlling part of Microsoft’s opposition, like they do with Zimbra. But anyway, this is too speculative and even far fetched at this stage.
One of the forces behind LibreOffice, Leif Lodahl, is thrilled to see the good reception the project has gotten:
I saw discussions on freenode about how to compile localized version. I saw Twitter run more than 800 tweets per hour and I have heard about Catalan hackers talk with Spanish journalists. The last thing – I have heard – doasn’t happen every day.
Zonker wrote about it and so did Matt Asay who says that “LibreOffice [is] An Idea Whose Time Has Come (and Gone)”. Well, coming from the person who almost replaced that free/libre office suite with Fog Computing (Google) at Canonical, this is not too shocking, but regarding Apple and Oracle, Matt Asay has just posted the following decent article:
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It’s getting harder to be a monopoly these days. Microsoft owned the desktop for decades, milking its Windows platforms every step of the way. Apple, on the other hand, hadn’t even managed four years of iOS dominance before Google’s Android staked a serious claim to the mobile market.
This isn’t because Microsoft is somehow smarter than Apple, but rather because the underlying dynamics of the technology industry have fundamentally changed. In brief, the technology world is increasingly embracing “write” communities, as Jono Bacon calls them, not simply “read” communities. Open source may have kickstarted this trend, but open APIs and open data are taking it to new heights.
One must remember that Oracle and Apple think alike in many ways and their CEOs are good friends [1, 2, 3].
Here is some nice analysis from Matthew Aslett:
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Which is not to say that LibreOffice will not be a success, but when it comes to forking, creating the fork is clearly just the start. It takes time, and a lot of effort, to generate the momentum for a fork to be truly successful. There is bound to be an initial spike in developer and user interest. Turning that into a meaningful and productive community will be the hard part.
There is a fundamental difference between OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. It’s mostly to do with copyrights.
In quite a timely fashion, Richard Stallman warned about copyright assignment the Oracle way. From the FSF’s Web site:
Companies that develop free software and release it under the GNU GPL sometimes distribute some copies of the code in other ways. If they distribute the exact same code under a different license to certain users that pay for this, typically permitting including the code in proprietary programs, we call it “selling exceptions”. If they distribute some version of the code solely in a proprietary manner, we call that releasing a purely proprietary version of the program.
LibreOffice has a lot to offer to GNU/Linux users and with over 20% market share in some countries, as well as with major deployments all around the world, LibreOffice might soon be used by hundreds of millions of people, especially if Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN) is right and Oracle is about the drop the ball on OpenOffice.org (which seems possible, unless it decides to sue instead):
What I mean by a fork, by the by, is an actual split in the code. For example, Ubuntu can be seen as a fork of Debian. No one doubts that Ubuntu is based on Debian Linux, but it’s also clearly a Linux distribution in its own right. Simply changing out some trademarks and product names, which, for example, is what Oracle did with Red Hat Enterprise Linux when it created Oracle Linux, isn’t the same thing. At this early point, that’s all the Document Foundation has done with OpenOffice.
My expectation is that Oracle will quietly let OpenOffice gather dust, and LibreOffice will become the new open-source office suite of choice. What do you think?
Development on LibreOffice is already active and although it’s not so different from OpenOffice.org (SJVN says it’s not a fork yet, but we disagree), it is quite unique. So give LibreOffice a go and download the latest build. It’s better to rely on GNU/Linux users and vendors than it is to rely on Oracle. Besides, even the FSF endorses LibreOffice. █
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09.28.10
Posted in Fork, GNOME, GNU/Linux, Google, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Oracle at 2:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The Document Foundation and LibreOffice are formally announced, beginning an era of a vendor-independent office suite with ODF support, no copyright assignment requirements, and a clear direction with long-term commitment
The Document Foundation has just been announced and Techrights was briefed about it weeks in advance. Basically, OpenOffice.org is being forked, and that is probably a positive thing, although it may depend on one’s perspective.
Oracle Does Not Understand Software Freedom
Oracle cannot be trusted with and around Free software. Its boss does not understand software freedom. To quote some old interviews:
Remarking on more recent events, Matthew Aslett wrote: “Only a few hours in to #oow10 and already detected a subtle but important change in how Oracle describes its relationship with open source. [...] Out goes “we have no open source strategy” in comes “we are are proprietary company that believes there’s an important role for open source””
Is this a company that can be relied on in the long term? Well, as part of Oracle’s recently-announced transition to Fog Computing it was announced that the company would make better use of JavaFX to incorporate the Web and commitment to Java gets extended, just not quite in the way which preserves freedom. Zonker says that there is more than GPL compliance to stay true to and thus Oracle is failing. To quote: “The GNU General Public License (GPL) and other open source licenses dictate the things you’re allowed to do with code. Simply because the GPL allows parasitic behavior, doesn’t mean that Oracle can’t be called out when it’s not being a good community citizen. Some see the GPL’s reciprocal requirements as restrictive — but even the requirements to give back changes and share code only go so far. Open source licenses leave a lot of room for companies to behave poorly while still complying with the license. Oracle could ship GPL’ed code on DVDs in wallets made out of the finest baby seal pelts housed in ivory boxes, and it wouldn’t be against the GPL. But that doesn’t mean the house that Larry built should get a pass if it chooses to do so.”
On the OpenOffice.org side, new Developer Snapshots recently arrived, e.g. (from GullFOSS):
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Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev OOO330m8 is available for download.
OOO330 is the development codeline for upcoming OOo 3.3.x releases.
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Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev DEV300m88 is available for download.
DEV300 is the development codeline for upcoming OOo 3.x releases.
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Beyond this release, the future of OpenOffice.org is unknown, whereas the future the LibreOffice is very much certain, thanks to the backing from many committed parties.
Oracle’s Bad Direction for OpenOffice.org
Here is an insight into Oracle’s plan for OpenOffice.org:
As such, it competes against Google Docs and the browser version of Office, Microsoft Office Web Apps.
The narrator in the Oracle Cloud Suite video touts the integration with Oracle Open Office (natch), the open document format (ODF) and is compatible with Microsoft Office. And Oracle Cloud Suite is accessible to the industry’s increasing mobile workforce.
But the International Business Times pieces raises a few questions about how viable the Oracle threat is.
“Oracle preps Google and Microsoft Office challenger,” says another headline:
The Reg understands Cloud Office is a closed-source product developed by Oracle, rather than a part of the OpenOffice Project.
Oracle has promised that Cloud Office uses web standards, but it will also use JavaFX – the currently closed Java scripting language for rich-internet applications and UIs Oracle inherited from Sun Microsystems.
With an imminent OpenOffice.org Hackfest, it is clear that OpenOffice.org is not being abandoned by Oracle, but increasingly it is taken in a proprietary direction where Oracle gains greater control. From Roberto Galoppini’s blog:
Few days ago I shortly mentioned the OpenOffice.org Hackfest, and today I asked my friend Florian Effenberger – OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead – to tell us more about the event, to be held on the 6-7 of November at the Attraktor in Hamburg.
How many will attend now that LibreOffice is where all the action is at?
Fork Announced
So, OpenOffice.org is being forked and here is what people need to know. The press release is appended below and documentfoundation.org contains more information as it has only just come live (9 AM Paris/Berlin time).
First of all, the fork is backed by many vendors, as well as non-commercial entities such as the GNOME Foundation. The licence will be LGPLv3 (and no copyright agreement is required, which is now one of the various pressures Oracle is putting on the community). The details are all at the bottom.
Why is it so necessary? To quote someone from the Steering Committee, the “situation with Oracle inside Openoffice.org is untenable… they don’t even want to commit after the 3.3… they refuse to communicate on roadmap… are getting insolently crazy on trademarks… are shutting down portions of our open development process…”
Asked about OpenSolaris as an analogy, we we told that it’s “a bit like that, but with less hostility… they don’t want to shut it down, they want to have it their way exclusively, so we are forking…. we [as in] Novell, Red Hat, Google, the Brazilian Government, its banks and largest companies, several international OOo associations (forming the backbone of the community), and we’re awaiting some more supporters such as the SFLC, the FSF, the OSI, the FSFE… in fact SFLC, Debian, OSI and FSFE are more or less already acquired… Canonical and Red Hat will ship our own binaries in their next version of Ubuntu and Fedora.”
Asked about the role of Novell, it turned out that they are included in this. There was “no choice”, but “the source code will be OOo vanilla (no go-oo patches) [...] but we’re using the ooo-build system (well, everyone on Linux uses it except Red Hat who made the decision now to switch to us).”
All the infrastructure was made ready about two weeks ago when they were “in the process of registering the trademarks”. Later on it was decided that “the Foundation will be named The Document Foundation [...] the office suite named LibreOffice.”
“Libre” is good in the sense that it conveys something better than just “open source”.
As Glyn Moody put it some days ago, “We [May Be] Entering the Golden Age of Forks”. OpenOffice.org was named by Moody:
Oracle’s high-handed approach to open source is fast making it Public Enemy Number 1 as far as free software is concerned (yes, even relegating Microsoft to second place). This means that people working on the MySQL or OpenOffice.org projects are going to be far warier, and more distrustful of the company’s moves in future.
Let’s get this ball rolling and the word spread as far as possible. In order for LibreOffice to succeed in a major way, people all around the world need to be aware of it. █
OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document Foundation
The community of volunteers developing and promoting OpenOffice.org sets up an independent Foundation to drive the further growth of the project
The Internet, September 28, 2010 – The community of volunteers who develop and promote OpenOffice.org, the leading free office software, announce a major change in the project’s structure. After ten years’ successful growth with Sun Microsystems as founding and principle sponsor, the project launches an independent foundation called “The Document Foundation”, to fulfil the promise of independence written in the original charter.
The Foundation will be the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where individuals and organisations can contribute to and benefit from the availability of a truly free office suite. It will generate increased competition and choice for the benefit of customers and drive innovation in the office suite market. From now on, the OpenOffice.org community will be known as “The Document Foundation”.
Oracle, who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has been invited to become a member of the new Foundation, and donate the brand the community has grown during the past ten years. Pending this decision, the brand “LibreOffice” has been chosen for the software going forward.
The Document Foundation is the result of a collective effort by leading independent members of the former OpenOffice.org community, including several project leads and key members of the Community Council. It will be led initially by a Steering Committee of developers and national language projects managers. The Foundation aims to lower the barrier of adoption for both users and developers, to make LibreOffice the most accessible office suite ever.
The Foundation has chosen the LibreOffice brand as an alternative to OpenOffice.org, and will coordinate and oversee the development of the software, which is available in beta version at the placeholder site: http://www.libreoffice.org. Developers are invited to join the project and contribute to the code in the new friendly and open environment, to shape the future of office productivity suites alongside contributors who translate, test, document, support, and promote the software.
Speaking for the group of volunteers, Sophie Gautier – a veteran of the community and the former maintainer of the French speaking language project – has declared: “We believe that the Foundation is a key step for the evolution of the free office suite, as it liberates the development of the code and the evolution of the project from the constraints represented by the commercial interests of a single company. Free software advocates around the world have the extraordinary opportunity of joining the group of founding members today, to write a completely new chapter in the history of FLOSS”.
FSF President Richard Stallman welcomed LibreOffice release and it’s stated policy of only recommending free software. “I’m very pleased that the Document Foundation will not recommend nonfree add-ons, since they are the main freedom problem of the current OpenOffice.org. I hope that the LibreOffice developers and the Oracle-employed developers of OpenOffice will be able to cooperate on development of the
body of the code”.
“The Document Foundation supports the Open Document Format, and is keen to work at OASIS to the next evolution of the ISO standard”, says Charles Schulz, member of the Community Council and lead of the Native Language Confederation. “The Document Foundation brings to the table the point of view of developers, supporters and users, and this might accelerate the adoption process of ODF at government and enterprise level”.
Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager at Google, Inc., has commented: “The creation of The Document Foundation is a great step forward in encouraging further development of open source office suites. Having a level playing field for all contributors is fundamental in creating a broad and active community around an open source software project. Google is proud to be a supporter of The Document Foundation and participate in the project”.
“Viva la LibreOffice”, said Markus Rex, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Open Platform Solutions at Novell. “We look forward to working with the Document Foundation to help develop a solid open source document software offering. Ultimately, we hope to see LibreOffice do for the office productivity market what Mozilla Firefox has done for browsers”.
Jan Wildeboer, EMEA Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, has commented: “All over the world, users, companies and governments are moving to truly open solutions based on Open Standards. LibreOffice delivers the missing link, and at Red Hat we are proud to join this effort”.
Mark Shuttleworth, founder and major shareholder of Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, has declared: “Office productivity software is a critical component of the free software desktop, and the Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu. The Document Foundation’s stewardship of LibreOffice provides Ubuntu developers an effective forum for collaboration around the code that makes Ubuntu an effective solution for the desktop in office environments”.
“The Open Source Initiative has observed a trend back towards open collaborative communities for open source software”, said Simon Phipps, a Director of the Open Source Initiative. “We welcome The Document
Foundation initiative and look forward to the innovation it is able to drive with a truly open community gathered around a free software commons, in the spirit of the best of open source software”.
Additional information, including the mission, are available on the web site of The Document Foundation: http://www.documentfoundation.org
Biographies and pictures of the founding members of The Document Foundation are available here: http://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/.
There is a specific page for people interested in contributing to the development of the code: http://www.documentfoundation.org/developers/.
The Document Foundation has a Twitter account: http://twitter.com/docufoundation and an Identi.ca account: http://identi.ca/docufoundation.
The announcements mailing list is at: announce+subscribe@documentfoundation.org.
The discussion mailing list is at: discuss+subscribe@documentfoundation.org.
The Document Foundation
The Document Foundation is an independent self-governing democratic Foundation created by leading members of the former OpenOffice.org Community. It continues to build on the Foundation of ten years’ dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org community, and was created in the belief that an independent Foundation is the best fit to the Community’s core values of openness, transparency, and valuing people for their contribution. It is open to any individual who agrees with our core values and contributes to our activities, and welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community.
Media Contacts
Florian Effenberger (Germany)
Mobile: +49 151 14424108
E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org
Olivier Hallot (Brazil)
Mobile: +55.21.88228812
E-mail: olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org
Charles H. Schulz (France)
Mobile: +33 6 98655424
E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org
Italo Vignoli (Italy)
Mobile: +39 348 5653829
E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
APPENDIX
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBERS
Sophie Gautier
Francophone project co-lead, former Project Lead Education Project, former Community Council Member for Native Lang projects category
I’ve been deeply involved in the OpenOffice.org Community since its very beginning in 2000. First I participated to the Documentation Project, then I’ve been the lead of the French-speaking project from 2002 to 2007, then the co-lead in 2009 until now. I’ve represented the Native Language Confederation at the Community Council since its launch until last year. Now I’m managing the French localization of the OOo product and satellite sites and participating to QA, Documentation, User Support and Marketing. In my daily job, I’ve worked as an OpenOffice.org consultant and trainer on my own first, then for the Linagora Group from 2006 to 2010 and I’m currently unemployed.
Thorsten Behrens
GSL Project co-lead, OASIS ODF TC / ECMA TC45 / ISO SC34 WG4 participant
Thorsten was part of OpenOffice.org almost from the start, when he joined the then-Sun-Microsystems development team back in early 2001. He’s a computer scientist by education, and a Free Software enthusiast by heart, a geek from early childhood – and someone who was lucky enough to turn a hobby into an occupation.
During his now nine years of tenure in the project, he’s spent most of his time hacking the code, in areas ranging from build system, platform abstraction libraries, Impress and Writer. Thorsten is currently co-lead of the graphical system layer project, member of the OASIS ODF technical committee, the ECMA TC45, and technical advisor on the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 working group 4.
He’s sponsored by Novell to work full-time on OpenOffice.org.
Florian Effenberger
Marketing Project Lead and German MarCon, Distribution Project Lead
Florian Effenberger has been an open source evangelist for many years. He is lead of the international OpenOffice.org marketing project as well as a member of the management board of the non-profit OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V. He has ten years’ experience of designing enterprise and educational computer networks, including software deployment based on free software. He is also a frequent contributor to a variety of professional magazines worldwide on topics such as free software, open standards and legal matters.
Caolán McNamara
Former Writer Project co-lead and member of the OpenOffice.org Engineering Steering Committee
Caolán is a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, Inc, and has over 10 years experience in developing OpenOffice.org. Starting 2000 in Hamburg as an employee of Sun Microsystems developing StarOffice before its subsequent release under the LGPL as OpenOffice.org later that year. From 2000 to 2005 Caolán specialized in improving the the binary MSWord import/export filters, building on his prior experience developing libwv, libwmf and other free software projects to parse Microsoft binary file formats.
From 2005 to present Caolán has been employed full-time by Red Hat, Inc. to maintain, improve and enhance OpenOffice.org, typically focusing on GNOME desktop integration, font and glyph replacement, Indic text layout, linguistic components, tooling to improve overall code quality, debugging the type of problems no one wants to touch, while retaining an interest in MSOffice compatibility.
Olivier Hallot
BrOffice.org CFO, Community Council Member, Main translator for pt-BR
Graduated Electronic Engineer in 1982, MSc in Digital Signal Processing in 1985 and MBA in Oil&Gas industry in 2001.
I initiated my career as Assocate Researcher for digital signal processing in the IBM Scientific Center in Brasilia, Brazil, for the Oil&Gas industry in seismic data processing and high performance computing. Later I moved to marketing and sales for the same industry all over Latin America. In 1998 I joined Oracle Brazil in sales for the Oil& Gas industry and later as Alliance relationship manager for large hardware manufacturers as well as with the Oracle academic initiative. Since 2002 and on my own, I have participated actively in FLOSS projects notably in OpenOffice.org as one of the translators for
Brazilian Portuguese and volunter CFO of BrOffice.org NGO. I am now senior consultant in OpenOffice.org technology for large corporations on migration projects.
André Schnabel
Coordinator for German localization, former Project Lead QA Project, former Community Council Member for accepted projects category
André is involved in the OpenOffice.org project since 2001. Being a software developer in his professional live he focused his voluntary work for OpenOffice.org on user support, documentation and quality assurance. He has been Co-Lead of the Germanophone project as well as project lead of the Quality Assurance project and member of the Community Council for several years. Today he is maintaining the German localization and working on a translation process based on open standards. André is also founding member and chairman of the board of the German non-profit OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V.
Charles-H. Schulz
NLC Lead, Community Council Member (Lang Representative)
Charles-H. Schulz (The “H” letter standing for his second name “Henri”) is a French technologist, Free Software and Open Standards advocate. As a long time contributor to the OpenOffice.org project he helped grow its community from a few mostly european communities to over a hundred communities and teams of various sizes. In the end of 2009 he was elected at the Community Council of the OpenOffice.org project. He is currently the lead of the Native-Language Confederation and a member of the Community Council. He also contributed to the development and adoption of the OpenDocument Format standard through the company he co-founded, Ars Aperta. Member of several international organizations he helped to create the Digital Standards Group and is part of the OASIS standards consortium, of which he is now one of the directors.
Italo Vignoli
Italian MarCon, President of Associazione PLIO (Italian National Language Project)
Italo Vignoli is president of PLIO, OpenOffice.org Italian National Language Project, a not for profit association that represents the community of volunteers who promote the free office productivity suite. In everyday life, is partner and president of Quorum PR, a public relations agency with a strong bias to the integration of traditional media and social network. He has almost thirty years of experience in marketing and communication of high-tech companies in Italy and at international level, and is responsible for the social networks practice within the Italian Federation of Public Relations.
Since 1984, it is connected to the network with a portable PC and a messaging or e-mail system despite a degree in humanities from the University of Milan, where he has been a researcher on urban geography. He is working as a freelance journalist since 1972, writing about sports, music and IT. He blogs in Italian about libre software at http://www.cwi.it/blogs/sistemaperto/.
MESSAGE FOR ORACLE
Gentlemen – as founders and principle supporters of the OpenOffice.org Community during the past decade, we’re giving you advance notice that we will shortly be announcing the launch of an independent Foundation to take the Community forward into its next decade.
You will be aware that this has been discussed many times over the years. We now feel the time is right to make the move. We believe it will be more powerful if the move is initiated by the Community itself, which is why we are launching this initiative.
We do of course hope that you will be able to move with us on this exciting new journey. As custodians of many OpenOffice.org assets, your continued support will be most warmly appreciated.
Signed on behalf of the group:
Sophie Gautier
Thorsten Behrens
Florian Effenberger
Olivier Hallot
Caolan McNamara
Christoph Noack
Charles-H. Schulz
André Schnabel
Italo Vignoli
MESSAGE FOR THE COMMUNITY
Dear OpenOffice.org community members,
Dear leads of the native-language projects,
Dear project leads,
Today, we would like to introduce you to an idea that has grown very concretely during the past weeks. We ask you to NOT share it with anyone else at this moment. There will be plenty of time to discuss and work on it soon.
Over the past decade, thanks to your great help, support and enthusiasm, OpenOffice.org has grown to a important open source projects.
Now that we are approaching our tenth birthday, it is time to mark a major step in the evolution of OpenOffice.org. For the last ten years, the idea of an independent OpenOffice.org foundation has been existing (see http://www.openoffice.org/white_papers/OOo_project/openofficefoundation.html) but has never been realized.
We feel now is the time to make the vision from the very beginning of the project a reality. Therefore, a group of long-term community contributors, is about to establish a foundation called
“The Document Foundation”
(http://www.documentfoundation.org from September 28th on)
and will publicly announce these plans on Tuesday, September 28th
Our mission is to facilitate the evolution of the OpenOffice.org community into a new open, independent, and meritocratic organizational structure within the next few months.
We invite you to join us in these efforts. Help us to bring our community and our software to a new level and shape the next logical step of its evolution.
As it is yet uncertain whether we will get the OpenOffice.org trademark from its owner, Oracle Corporation, we plan to establish a new brand for the product, called
“LibreOffice” (http://www.libreoffice.org from September 28th on)
We have invited Oracle, which we owe much respect for all the good things that they have done in the past years, to become a member and partner of our initiative, and we hope they will join us together with the Hamburg development team, so that LibreOffice indeed is a temporary placeholder, which is our true wish.
We have already seen wide support from companies like Google, Novell and Red Hat as well as our friends from the Brazilian BrOffice.org community. Others are in favour of our plans and might actively join our initiative soon.
As of today, about 25 well-known and long-term contributors to the OpenOffice.org community are part of our initiative. We have formed an interim Steering Committee to drive things forward.
We currently work hard to put all the needed infrastructure at your disposal, to be able to quickly communicate with the community.
All this and maybe more will be announced on
Tuesday, September 28th
You are invited to join our
* official mailing list by subscribing at discuss+subscribe@lists.documentfoundation.org
* IRC channel at #documentfoundation on irc.freenode.net (irc://irc.freenode.net/#documentfoundation)
* initiative by signing the manifesto at http://www.documentfoundation.org
All the above addresses will be available from September 28th on.
We are here for any questions and suggestions that you will have. We hope for your support in this next major step and are sure that you will as be thrilled by this new project as we are, which is in fact the continuity of our community.
Yours truly,
the members of the Steering Committee and founders of the Document Foundation
Sophie Gautier, sophie.gautier@documentfoundation.org
Thorsten Behrens, thorsten.behrens@documentfoundation.org
Florian Effenberger, floeff@documentfoundation.org
Olivier Hallot, olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org
Caolán McNamara, caolan.mcnamara@documentfoundation.org
André Schnabel, andre.schnabel@documentfoundation.org
Charles Schulz, charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org
Italo Vignoli, italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
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09.11.10
Posted in Free/Libre Software, IBM, ISO, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 2:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about ODF, SC34 which is a farce, and some of the latest heckling from Microsoft proponents who masquerade as pro-openness or impartial
DESPITE interference from Microsoft intruders [1, 2], the OpenOffice.org conference in Hungary went pretty well based on numerous reports. People in attendance learned about the need for Open Document Format (ODF) and there are other pro-ODF articles in the press these days. The Guardian, for instance, is still making waves.
A good piece from the Guardian’s Charles Arthur yesterday, reporting teacher and Windsor & Maidenhead councillor Liam Maxwell’s analysis, of how much councils could save by switching to Open Document Format, as used in OpenOffice.org: some £200M if all councils did this for all their staff. There was some background to this, about the problems encountered by Windsor and Maidenhead, on Computer Weekly’s site on Wedensday.
The key stumbling block for councils, as for schools, appears to be compatibility with others systems, most notably those supplied by Capita. Liam calls for the Cabinet Office to strengthen its present position on open source and open standards by mandating ODF as a standards across the public sector, were this to happen I don’t doubt that we’d see Capita quickly make SIMS and their other products compatible with OpenOffice.org, making it far easier for schools and councils to choose their office suite from all those available, rather than forcing them to pay for MS Office, bundled with ‘features’ which many will rarely if ever use. Charles seems to think that such a requirement is far more likely with Francis Maude at the Cabinet Office than it had ever been under the previous administration, even in Tom Watson’s day.
Microsoft is not done throwing wrenches at ODF.
Bart Hanssens recently stated that “odf 1.2cd05 60-day review ended, comments received” (these comments are part of the openness of this system). Rob Weir, who works alongside Hanssens on ODF, found himself having to confront Microsoft minions again. Microsoft’s booster and insider Alex Brown, who was the BRM convenor for OOXML while he smeared ODF, is not being left alone by Weir, who writes about another scandalous SC34 (see coverage from SC34 in 2008 and SC34 in 2009): “If you are looking for OOXML defects to fix, how about going back to 100′s of NB issues you gaveled away at the BRM?”
Weir is then met by opposition from Brown’s longtime right-winger, the ODF-hostile Jesper Lund Stocholm [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. He is a known Microsoft booster and Weir’s responses to him go like this:
- “Are you saying that there are zero issues remaining from the OOXML ballot that should be addressed? Really? Zero?”
- “So if I understand correctly, you are asking NB’s to resubmit defect reports for issues not resolved at the BRM?”
- “It wasn’t clear. I assumed WG4 would look at the defects already submitted during BRM. You are saying they are not.”
- “You should send note to all NBs telling them that they need to resubmit relevant defect reports from the OOXML ballot”
- “With ODF we do it differently. Our defect log includes all ballot comments received for ODF 1.0. No need to resubmit”
- “I understand how to submit comments. But I wasn’t aware that the previously submitted comments were being ignored.”
- “Deferred ballot comments are either in WG4′s defect index or not. Simple question. What is the answer?”
- “Earlier Alex suggested lack of interest explained the lack of comments. Maybe NBs think they have already submitted? I did.”
“NB issues should be solved,” says the FFII to this booster (the FFII’s member also participated in squashing OOXML).
Watch Jesper Lund Stocholm belittling OpenOffice.org by implying that it’s a ripoff of Microsoft Office. Typical.
Weir finally responds to Brown by writing: “I’m not suggesting a new process. Just asking status of those defects. Sounds like they need to be resubmitted, right?”
“BRM comment processing rates can range from 0.5-1000 comments/hour,” says Weir to Mary McRae from OASIS (maintainer of ODF).
Not surprisingly, throughout this conversation the two Microsoft boosters (Microsoft is fronting with them) tried to defend Microsoft by attacking its competition. For instance, they turn to dismissing and attacking ODF, simply because they cannot defend their dirty handling of their proprietary OOXML. The conversations can be found in Twitter, so they don’t need additional exposure here.
Bart Hanssens adds: “The ironic thing is that Ecma never made public the public comments they received on OOXML. But for ODF this is an open book.”
On and on it went for a couple of days and at the end Weir gave up feeding those Microsoft minions. Microsoft rarely speaks directly about such issues, it just sends out MVPs or something else that may seem impartial to an outsider. Weir then posted a rant about ISO, which is captured by the vendor called Microsoft as far as document formats are concerned. To quote part of this rant:
We saw during the OOXML ballot, and especially at the BRM, how this totally fell apart. It was raised several times that Microsoft was dominating the committees, sometimes representing more than 50% of the people in the room. But ISO leadership dodged the issue, saying there was nothing they could do about it, based on their rules. This may be true. But that is just acknowledgment that their rules are not able to prevent domination problems.
And on Balance, ANSI says:
The standards development process should have a balance of interests. Participants from diverse interest categories shall be sought with the objective of achieving balance.
Like committees containing almost exclusively Microsoft Business Partners? Fail. In fact you can go up and down the list and ISO fails to meet these minimum requirements.
ISO got poisoned some years ago, at least the parts of ISO which Microsoft had to ‘stuff’ with workers who are in Microsoft’s pocket. We did give examples at the time. Other Microsoft minions are harassing the FFII right now, but the FFII is not alone among their victims. Microsoft Florian, for example, is labelling Eben Moglen “Fidel” (as in Castro) and calling him that many times. How low has Microsoft sunk in its battles against the SFLC/FSF? Microsoft’s MVP Miguel de Icaza is also attacking the FFII right now. Anyone who still believes that this man exists in the GNU/Linux world in order to serve an agenda not of Microsoft need look no further than some of this man’s most recent actions. He apparently still trolls ODF too. The FFII wrote to him: “Feel free to submit ODF1.2 bug reports to @rcweir and Oasis, 5 days to go.” There is increased friendship and collaboration between the Mono camp and Microsoft Florian, both of which attack the FFII, trying hard to cause trouble. Microsoft Florian maintains his rude habit of mass-mailing people to achieve his goals. █
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