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06.26.12

Charles-H. Schulz Speaks About Mandriva, Openoffice.org, and LibreOffice

Posted in IBM, Mandriva, Office Suites, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 10:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: An interview with the Open Source Relations Manager of Mandriva, one who is boasting a pivotal role in the free office suites space

MR. Charles-H. Schulz is prominent in the Free/open source world and he is no stranger to Techrights. 4 years ago we wrote about him in relation to ODF advocacy and a year later we interviewed him. Recently, Charles got an appointment at Mandriva and last week he also got married. We decided to catch up and learn more about Mandriva, Openoffice.org, and LibreOffice.

Techrights: Please explain to us your role in Mandriva.

Charles-H. Schulz: My official title is “Open Source Relations Manager”. My role is to help with the general open source strategy of Mandriva SA, and that implies several levels of involvement, either with the community or with the corporate level as well.

How does one go about transitioning from a corporate-centric model into a community-based one?

The answer is both simple and complex at the same time. Let’s define the terms here for the sake of clarity. A corporate centric model of open source governance, or better, a corporate centric model of FOSS project is a model where one corporation defines the project, is supposed to reap the benefits out of it, has a weak governance structure, and where most of the contributors are individuals who contribute to the project are individuals who are employed by the said corporation or by its affiliates.

“It’s a model that allows for a diversity of stakeholders to get involved at various levels of the project, from the contributor to the leadership.”A community-centric model is not a model where there are no corporations around. It’s a model that allows for a diversity of stakeholders to get involved at various levels of the project, from the contributor to the leadership. It is also a model where the governance structure tends to be more defined, because the project is actually much more independent and does not rest on one sponsor for most of its resources and contributors.

So how do we transition from the former to the latter is by assessing what the main sponsor can offer, and by setting up a governance structure that allows a diversity of contributors to get involved. The resources question here is crucial. What do we need? How many servers? What’s the migration process? And of course, what’s the governance, and how do we make the new project truly independent from the former sponsor (regardless of the friendly or unfriendly relationship with this sponsor)?

I think the keyword here is “contributor”. If you have enough contributors outside the main sponsor who are coming from diverse affiliations, then you have a sustainable project.

That’s the kind of questions we have been studying on the 19th of June in Paris together with the Mandriva Linux community representatives. I think the results are very encouraging, and that we manage to make sense of what we want to do, how we are going to do it and why we do it; now we are entering the actual phase of work, and we’ll try to keep this committee work effective while trying to involve the community at large on specific areas.

What office suite does Mandriva use by default and why?

Mandriva uses LibreOffice by default. And if you ask why, it’s simply because it’s the best free office suite ever.

You have had experience ushering a community from one project (OpenOffice.org) to another (LibreOffice) amid times of uncertainty and great risk. Are these are parallels to this case?

I think there are, although here we have the main sponsor, Mandriva SA, who is very open about the reasons why it can no longer sustain a Linux distribution project on its own, and therefore is working directly with the community to make an independent project emerge. That’s the main difference. There are parallels though that tend to be more subtle: What we’re trying to achieve, just like with the transition from Openoffice.org to LibreOffice, is a culture shift from “it will get done by someone else” to “we must do it”. In other words, there is the same demand and urge to set up a fully meritocratic system.

How is collaboration between OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice coming along?

You mean between Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice? Because Openoffice.org is dead, and it had several children. The collaboration is limited on practical terms because of the licensing differences, but we are rebasing our code on the latest Apache OpenOffice in order to be able to have a cleaner licensed base. Right now, we must still deal with the LGPL v3, and while it’s a great licence it cannot change over time; so we have embarked in a relicensing effort towards MPL v2 and GPL v3+ and we are looking forward the interesting switch at Apache OpenOffice from the Openoffice.org codebase to the Symphony codebase; there will certainly be some code we might be able to reuse. Although, when you come to think of it, it’s funny to enter the Apache Incubation Process with one software you’re inheriting, and to use a different software you’ve also inherited just after the incubation process is completed :-)

Mandriva was once one of the most used (if not the most used) distributions of GNU/Linux. Where would you position the distribution on those terms in 2012?

“What we will end up seeing in 2012 and onwards, is a great community powered distribution that’s separate from the company itself; and the company offering a range of Linux-powered products and platforms for the enterprise and the education market.”Let’s face it, the Mandriva Linux distribution was for years the most widely used distribution around. It’s not the case anymore. Several changes happen in the GNU/Linux distribution market and Mandriva never really caught them. It’s not so much that the distribution became outdated: if anything, using Mandriva today, or its fork, Mageia, shows just as advanced, beautiful and user-friendly the distribution is. But the alignment between a sound corporate strategy and the community side of things was never really thought of until now. What we will end up seeing in 2012 and onwards, is a great community powered distribution that’s separate from the company itself; and the company offering a range of Linux-powered products and platforms for the enterprise and the education market. So if anything, you’ll see more of Mandriva as a corporate distribution, and more of the Mandriva Linux community as a community distribution; there is no fork here, but a friendly and productive relationship with no exclusive reliance on each other.

Congratulations on the wedding. Have you gotten the wife using GNU/Linux yet?

Charles-H. Schulz and wifeOh, when I met Melissa she was already using the Gimp on Windows. She’s a very creative individual, and a few months after the beginning of our relationship, her old laptop broke. I introduced her to GNU/Linux; she used various distributions: Ubuntu for a long time, but also Mandriva, and now she’s a very happy Fedora user. I should also add that she created all of our wedding decorations, from the menus to the walls,
with the Gimp; she’s a poweruser of the Gimp and there are several community members, including me, who approached her asking whether she’d be interested in providing video tutorials for the project. █

Links 26/6/2012: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is Coming

Posted in News Roundup at 9:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Virgin Atlantic IT director: airlines should work together on open source apps

    Virgin Atlantic’s IT director, David Bulman, has called upon the airline industry to work collaboratively on open source applications that create an emerging standard for re-use and allow passengers to avoid downloading multiple tools.

  • SourceForge submits Allura to Apache’s Incubator

    SourceForge has announced that Allura, the software that powers the popular project hosting service, has been submitted to the Apache Software Foundation Incubator for consideration, the first step in the process of becoming a top-level Apache project. With this move, the organisation says that it hopes “to draw an even wider community of developers who can advance the feature set and tailor the framework to their needs.”

  • SourceForge Sumits Allura To Apache Incubator
  • Giving the code away

    Why do corporations give away code under free and open source licences? What benefits do they derive and what are the pitfalls that can doom these code give-aways? And how do they make a real community grow around these projects? Richard Hillesley looks at the difficulties and rewards to giving away code.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 13 – a review of sorts

        By now, even your grandmother is using Firefox 13, so belated is my little review here. But it’s only been about two weeks since it was birthed, and I have let everyone else get the first-story first-click glory. Now, I will give you a very reasonable tour of the latest release.

        Is it important enough to merit a separate article, you may ask? Well, the significance and scope of change is definitely less than what it used to be in the era of longer-term major number editions, but the particular version comes with some useful tricks. Firefox 13 is a gradual upgrade, worth its own little space in the blogosphere. Follow me.

      • Mozilla Firefox 13 Is Drawing Some Criticism

        If you’ve been using Firefox 13, you may have noticed how a particular new feature can expose your private browsing history. Specifically, the browser presents a thumbnail tab view of recently visited sites generated by taking snapshots as you surf from site to site. These thumbnails are aggregated on a page that effectively calls out all the sites you’ve visited. This feature even applies to SSL-protected sites, according to some users, and should be addressed by Mozilla. There are signs that the uptake of Firefox 13 is also going slower than planned.

  • SaaS

    • Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos Evolves His Cloud Approach

      Eucalyptus continues to update its private cloud software — delivering version 3.1 today. And CEO Marten Mickos continues to refine his management style at the open source company. So how has Mickos adjusted his approach at Eucalyptus vs. his previous role as CEO of MySQL, the open source database now owned by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL)? Here’s the update.

    • Eucalyptus moves back to full open source

      CEO of cloud software company Eucalyptus, Marten Mickos, has announced that the next release of Eucalyptus will exist only as one edition, ending the company’s open source/enterprise versions which gave it open core styled product differentiation. Eucalyptus 3.1 will bring the company’s full range of technologies into one version and the source code will be available through Github. All new development activity will occur on Github too, with defect and feature tracking made publicly available making it easier for any community member to follow the progress of an issue.

    • First commercial OpenStack VDI solution debuts
    • Great Open Source Cloud Debate Rages

      The role of open source firms has been to consolidate a set of rapidly occurring changes in a class of commercial software, frequently adding their own updates to the code and then commoditizing them in the marketplace. The Apache Web server did that. The JBoss Application Server under Marc Fleury’s team of developers did it.

  • Databases

    • MemSQL – 80,000 queries per second

      Two former Facebook developers have created a new database that they say is the world’s fastest and a video to demonstrate its superiority compared to MySQL.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • JavaFX 2.2 to allow native package creation

      Oracle says it intends to enable the next version of its JavaFX Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology to be natively packaged for various platforms. The process will be enabled by an application which can package exe and msi (for Windows), dmg (for Mac OS X) and rpm and zip (for Linux systems).

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.8 Compiler – Is It Faster Yet?

      GCC 4.7 was released a few months back, but have changes in the trunk code-base — for what will eventually become GCC 4.8 — resulted in any major performance changes yet?

      GCC 4.8 will likely not be released until early 2013, but it’s worth seeing if there’s any performance changes early on in case the change is a regression or other issue. Plus GCC 4.8 will be competing with what will likely be LLVM/Clang 3.2 or LLVM/Clang 3.3.

  • Project Releases

    • Wireshark 1.8.0 can capture from multiple interfaces at once

      Support for capturing from multiple interfaces at the same time is one of the most notable improvements in the major update to the Wireshark network protocol analyser. Version 1.8.0 of the open source, cross-platform tool – used for network troubleshooting, analysis, development and education – also includes support for GeoIP IPv6 databases, and now allows users to add, edit and save packet and capture file annotations.

  • Public Services/Government

    • French government awards two million support contract for open source

      A two million euro, three to four year framework contract for providing open source support was awarded to open source specialist Alter Way, system integrator Capgemini and Java specialist Zenika by Disic, the central IT department for the French government. The three will provide support for no less than 350 open source tools used by 15 of the 22 ministries in France.

  • Open Hardware

    • Machine Speak: Robot Baby Learns Words

      “It is unclear why iCub should do any better than a nonphysical counterpart — i.e., a software program designed to engage in conversation with a human trainer and learn from him to speak in a manner similar to language acquisition by infants,” noted Ai Research President Yaki Dunietz. “It will be interesting to see how a bot who also possesses a physical body learns to speak better than a bodiless one.”

      [...]

      DeeChee is designed on the open source iCub platform, which is available for anyone to create similar robots for a variety of types of research, including language acquisition.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Hardware

  • Security

    • Joomla 2.5.5 security updates arrives with added features – Update
    • Trojan.Milicenso: Another Reason to Avoid That Other OS
    • Trojan.Milicenso: A Paper Salesman’s Dream Come True

      Trojan.Milicenso may arrive on a compromised computer by various means, such as malicious email attachments or visiting websites hosting malicious scripts. The latter often unintentionally occurs when a user clicks a link in an unsolicited email. We have also encountered quite a large number of samples that appear to be packaged as a fake codec.

    • Sourcefire Pushes Open Source ClamAV Forward

      It’s been five years since IPS vendor Sourcefire acquired ClamAV’s intellectual property and personnel resources. Since then, the open source antivirus project has prospered under Sourcefire’s guidance and is now complemented by commercial antivirus tools for consumer and enterprise marketsbased that are based on ClamAV.

    • How useful is antivirus software?

      It goes without saying that antivirus software can’t catch everything. But, does it catch 10% or 90% of the malware targeted at Windows users?

      In a recent user group presentation, malware expert David Perry, of Comodo, said there are between 200,000 and 300,000 new viruses discovered every day (here “virus” is a generic term encompassing dozens of types of malware). They are built from kits and most circulate in the wild for a very short time, perhaps only a day. In other words, by the time they are detected, they’re often out of circulation.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • New GM industry push in the UK

      BBC Radio 4 reported in its headlines this morning that the Agriculture Biotechnology Council had published a new report “Going for Growth”, which calls for GM to be put at the heart of agricultural development in the UK. The BBC failed to point out that the misleadingly named ABC is actually a GM industry lobby group that represents BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont (Pioneer), Monsanto and Syngenta.

Apple’s Patent Cases Against Android Continue Falling Apart, Oracle Tries Again

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 3:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Montmartre

Summary: Motorola the latest to shake off Apple’s lawsuits over Android; CPTN conspiracy still unable to block or tax the Linux-based platform

THE Motorola case has been particularly interesting because both Apple and Microsoft had attacked Motorola (totally unprovoked) in the courtroom, then pretended to be victims. Motorola is not a good company to sue over patents because Motorola has its own big arsenal. Microsoft and Apple find this out he hard way.

Apple’s case against Motorola is pretty much lost, just like the one it filed (and lost) against Samsung:

In US federal court this evening, Judge Richard Posner just ruled that the case of Apple v. Motorola will be dismissed in its entirety. The case, in which Apple alleged Motorola was in violation of four of its patents and Motorola was left with one claim in return (the patent counts had originally been higher on both sides), had been in litigation since 2010, most recently with a hearing in Chicago this past Wednesday.

Here is Motorola’s statement:

Motorola said in a statement, “We are pleased that Judge Posner formally dismissed the case against Motorola Mobility. Apple’s litigation campaign began with their attempt to assert 15 patents against us. As it relates to Apple’s violation of our patents, we will continue our efforts to defend our own innovation.”

Apple got served and this serves to show that Steve Jobs' megalomania over it was baseless and silly. The allegations of “theft” don’t pass muster, do they?

Pathetic Apple is blocking the competition (using fabricated evidence) because it knows of no other way to compete in the long run. Linux is better and cheaper, even if GNU is not included in it (Android).

The FSF is meanwhile being blocked by Microsoft [1, 2] and Pogson says:

t’s time the world stood up to M$ and classified M$’s OS as the malware that it is.

Android is still under attack because according to Pamela Jones, “Oracle is asking to have a hearing on its motion for judgment as a matter of law. They’ve asked for July 26 at 8 AM, so unless the judge rules on the filings alone, which is unlikely, we’ll certainly be hoping some of you can be there. [...] So this will be an advance peek at the appeal to come and if it’s successful at the issues Oracle hopes to be able to try before a second jury…” (source)

Android is still free, both libre and gratis. Without this freedom, the platform would not have taken off. Manufacturers trust Android because of the terms of ownership. In the coming week I’ll be formally be taking my Android app Free/open source, under the terms of the GPL (although some dependants are BSD-licensed, so I need to compartmentalise it). It does incorporate some algorithms which were patented by others, so although it is free there is no guarantee that some troll won’t sue. Next month I’ll be catching up with patent news and post more on the subject. In order to code in peace we must put an end to software patents. █

Vista 8 Will Drive More OEMs to GNU/Linux

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Vista 8 at 1:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Vista 8 logo
Graphics by Will

Summary: A transition in computing trends to drive Linux growth

MICROSOFT’S Vista 8 is not liked even by some Windows fans and SJVN argues that this will open the door to Linux:

Microsoft has alienated its hardware partners and will soon be rolling out a version of Windows that many people already dislike. Will the Linux desktop finally get its shot for the big-time?

Robert Pogson adds:

Another benefit of GNU/Linux for OEMs is that they can more or less rapidly move to ARM to increase margins and increase specific performance ( MIPS/watt, noise, weight, cost, size etc.). Consumers love innovation and GNU/Linux or Android/Linux on ARM give a lot of flexibility to distinguish an OEM from competitors. OEMs do relish competition because they have good people and can compete fairly. They don’t need Wintel dictating to them and they don’t need to be limited by what Wintel wants.

There’s a shift in form factors and operating system. Bad time for Wintel. █

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