January 6th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Over at ConsortiumInfo.org, Andy Updegrove reports on the positive state of Massachusetts’ ODF policy:
“I’m happy to report that the official who has direct authority over the implementation of the open format policy, Massachusetts Secretary of Administration and Finance Thomas H. Trimarco, met with ITD General Counsel Linda Hamel earlier today, and unequivocally assured her that Peter Quinn’s departure “will result in no change to the Administration’s position on the ODF standard.”
Meanwhile, Groklaw counterattacks David Coursey’s opinion of the Mass. ODF situation, calling his article “mean-spirited” and “FUD.”
PJ’s counterattack contains a great list of 8 specifications that should be considered necessary for a standard to be truly open, but what I like best is her conclusion:
“And do you know why it’s inevitable that the world is going to increasingly turn to Free and Open Source software? Because no one muscles you to use it. It’s based on old-fashioned values of trust and honesty and fairness. Who doesn’t want those things? No. Really. Think about it. Who likes to be told they have to use a product or they’ll be punished? That is so wildly offensive on so many levels it truly amazes me that Coursey can even think it could work out in the end for any company. It’s contrary to human nature.
Incidents like the libel of Peter Quinn cost Microsoft business. Here’s why: There’s something in the human heart that utterly despises a bully.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Two on ODF in Massachusetts
January 4th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Pablo Lorenzzoni writes that Brazil’s “Computers for All” initiative is already a huge success. His blog post is in English, but the links are Portuguese, so I cannot share any more detail than his synopsis:
“We’ve ended up 2005 in a pretty good shape: fisl7.0 promises to be the best of all, fisl6.0’s videos were finally put online, the process that was leading to the buying of more than 5 thousand Windows/Office licenses by the National Congress was halted, the standards for the Brazilian digital tv is going open source, and, finally, the best of all: the “computer for all” project is a huge success.
All of the above are great, but this last one I point out for it’s the largest digital inclusion project I know: It puts a pretty good computer (by brazilian standards) inside the home of anybody that can pay ~ R$ 60,00 (around US$ 25,00) a month for two years, with internet access and running a branded GNU/Linux. The reports have been great (e.g. one of the sellers sold 13 thousand units in a month while expecting to sell 5 thousand). I think this project is a major score!”
Congratulations to Brazil’s people and its leaders!
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Brazil’s “Computers for All”
December 29th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Groklaw reports on Peter Quinn’s resignation, and the state of Massachusetts’ declaration that it will continue with its plan to implement ODF. Quinn apparently had enough of the political circus surrounding his very sound technical decision.
Groklaw’s piece concludes, “If the friends of Microsoft in the Commonwealth thought they were helping Microsoft by attacking Peter Quinn, I’d say they miscalculated. The Peter Quinn story makes Microsoft look bad, and the Commonwealth even worse. Haven’t you heard, fellows? This is the Internet age. Every dirty trick gets to be known and reported, with the light firmly shining on it, not by mainstream media folks perhaps, some of whom will print any old dirt you send them without even verifying if it’s true or not, but by bloggers, by citizen journalists. And there are millions of us.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Groklaw: “Romney’s Office: We Are Firm and Expect No Changes”
December 28th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
eWeek’s Peter Galli writes Sun Pushes for Greater Adoption of OpenDocument Format.
“Sun executives were unified in their call for all global governments, agencies as well as private enterprises, to adopt the ODF standard and, when asked why more in the public and private sector were not doing so, they said they were all closely watching the situation in Massachusetts.”
It seems crazy and inscrutable to me that anyone would oppose this move to the ODF standard, but a small number of people (most seem to have ties to Microsoft), actually do. Certainly, there is work in the short term to make this transition happen, but after that job is done, ODF will provide immense benefits all around.
A possible analogy is the world wide web, with its open HTML standard, compared to AOL’s information network that only permitted people and organizations to share their information with prior gatekeeper approval. Note how AOL’s network was surpassed and mostly swallowed by the growth of the web. AOL survived because it embraced this change, but there was a time when it seemed uncertain they would.
“Piper Cole, Sun’s vice president for global government and community affairs, said it is very important that government take a role in what is happening on the document standards front because they are strategic customers who can use their buying power to dictate that a multivendor baseline is created for file formats—just as Massachusetts has done.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on eWeek: “Sun Pushes for Greater Adoption of OpenDocument Format”
December 20th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Justin Podur of ZNet writes Free Software as a Social Movement, an interview with Richard Stallman.
Stallman is very serious about the motivation for, and meaning of, Free Software, which is quite distinct from Open Source. His unyielding approach is refreshing when there is so much compromise and indifference in the world at large.
This is a great read. And one of its outcomes already, is that the socially-conscious site publishing the interview, ZNet, is making plans to move its infrastructure to Free Software! They’re requesting input and assistance through their forums, so hop on over and see what you can do to help!
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Uncategorized | Comments Off on ZNet Interviews Richard Stallman
December 19th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Macworld Magazine reports on Microsoft’s latest machinations in Microsoft: One Open Document Standard Good, Two Better.
In short, Microsoft now claims that competing standards are a desirable situation. This is simply because they refuse to acknowledge the existing standard, ODF, is superior to their own planned offering.
Everyone else in the world seems to think that competing implementations of one standard offers the best way to maximize innovation. The world also seems highly suspicious of Microsoft’s intentions, because every time they have supported an external standard in the past, they have subverted and attempted to wrest control of it. They have not been successful in every attempt, but they continue to try.
Why is Microsoft going so crazy? Because they feel the stakes are very high; in fact, their monopoly may be on the verge of cracking: “Massachusetts is the canary in the mine on this issue,” John Palfrey, clinical professor of law and executive director of the Berkman Center on Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, said during the debate. “If Massachusetts gets this right, others will follow.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Macworld on Microsoft’s Double Standard
December 17th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes ODF: The Better, More Affordable Office Standard for eWeek.
Vaughan-Nichols writes, “If you take a close look, as many people have, it’s clear that ODF, and not Open XML, is the better document standard.”
He also rounds up some good quotes from other sources, including this one:
“Dr. Manon Ress, a director at the CPTech (Consumer Project on Technology), a Washington, DC-based non-profit created about 20 years ago by Ralph Nader, sees ODF as a major consumer issue.
In her blog, Ress wrote, “What’s at stake? If we compare what is going on with the monopoly on word processing to the openness, creativity and innovation in the field of authoring tools for the web, it becomes clear that we could see important changes if ODF becomes the mandated standard.”
Vaughan-Nichols continues, with this interesting endorsement from a number of library consortia:
“In a recent letter to the Massachusetts government, a coalition of American Association of Law Libraries, the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the Medical Library Association and the Special Libraries Association, wrote, “documents in relatively long-term storage such as the hard drives of servers can be read only by programs that have backwards compatibility… documents created in ODF will remain accessible in the future because any programmer will be able to find its open, nonproprietary specifications.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on eWeek: “ODF: The Better, More Affordable Office Standard”
December 4th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Rocketboom posts a great video blog entry in which Amanda interviews random people in Washington Square Park, asking whether they prefer Firefox or Internet Explorer. Yes, it’s a Firefox rout, and those who claim they prefer the competition almost always admit that it’s just because that is what they have used.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Rocketboom Browser Interviews
December 1st, 2005 Benjamin Horst
To try to salvage its opportunity to cause harm in Massachusetts, Microsoft has submitted its new XML file formats to some standards agencies for a rubberstamp. It’s unlikely they’ll succeed, but this announcement of vaporware is a standard trick in their arsenal of FUD: They’re running around town claiming to have an open format and trying to draw attention away from the superior ODF!
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols covers the situation in Microsoft Drops the Office Open Standard Ball, just published on eWeek.
Vaughan-Nichols quotes RMS: “Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation and the author of the GPL, said in July that the current license governing the use of the formats is “designed to prohibit all free software. It covers only code that implements, precisely, the Microsoft formats, which means that a program under this license does not permit modification.” And with the recent announcement, nothing of substance has changed.
Posted in Free Culture, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Exposing Microsoft’s “Open Format” FUD
November 26th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Groklaw publishes Format Comparison Between ODF and MS XML by Alex Hudson, J. David Eisenberg, Bruce D’Arcus and Daniel Carrera of the OpenDocument Fellowship.
The introduction begins,
“There has been a lot of attention to the legal encumbrances in Microsoft’s new MS XML format. In this article we’ll look at the technical side, and try to show you how the design of these formats affect interoperability. After all, that is the purpose of open standards.
OpenDocument benefits from 5 years of development involving many experts from diverse backgrounds (Boeing, National Archives of Australia, Society for Biblical literature, etc.). It was written with the explicit purpose of being interoperable across different platforms. In contrast, MS XML has not gone through a peer-review process, and was written with only one product in mind. This difference shows in the design of the formats.”
Sam Hiser also adds some of his own commentary on his blog.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Groklaw Compares ODF to MS XML