Slashdot on File Formats

Slashdot reports on Microsoft Office’s removal of support for certain older file formats.

This is a perfect example of one of the most important reasons to use open data formats: proprietary software makers can cease support for closed formats any time they wish! Only if a file is saved in an open format can it be considered accessible in the future, since it will remain legally and technically possible to build new tools, if it comes to that, to access the archived data.

Posted in Free Culture | Comments Off on Slashdot on File Formats

Ubuntu at the Library

A cool librarian from Vermont, Jessamyn West, demonstrates how easy it is to install Ubuntu on donated computers for use in her town’s library. The two new Ubuntu machines have doubled the library’s public computers, and brought Linux to 50% marketshare over the course of an hour!

(This was posted in the beginning of the year, but I only got a chance to see the video recently.)

Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux | Comments Off on Ubuntu at the Library

Norway Mandates Open Formats

Virtuelvis translates a Norwegian government announcement that from January 1, 2009, it will require government offices to use ODF, PDF and HTML for publishing documents online.

“Goverment, state and regional agencies, authorities and services may also publish in other formats, but they must always publish in one of these formats. The decree is retroactive, and by 2014 all documents published prior to this decree must have been converted and made available in one of the three formats.”

Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on Norway Mandates Open Formats

New York State Looking for ODF or MSOOXML Comments

The New York State Office for Technology has put forth a request for public comment on the issue of data storage formats, particularly ODF vs MSOOXML:

“All stakeholders are encouraged to submit responses to all or parts of the RFPC, irrespective of whether they currently do business with or intend to participate in future procurements by CIO/OFT and/or the State of New York.”

Responses are due by December 28.

The RFPC consists of two parts and asks many detailed questions. I suspect this means New York State takes the issue very seriously, so I imagine they’ll see through the smoke blown by a monopolist, to understand that adopting ODF is of great importance to NYS and its citizens.

This could turn out to be big!

Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on New York State Looking for ODF or MSOOXML Comments

KDE on ODF

Our friends in the KDE project were the first to fully adopt ODF in their office suite, KOffice, putting to rest our opponent’s claims that ODF was designed only for OpenOffice.org.

Now KDE has come out with a strong statement of support for ODF and against the dishonest Microsoft effort to rubberstamp its MSOOXML file format as an ISO standard. (Note: to date, Microsoft has failed in that project.)

ITWire quotes the original release in part:

“The standardisation process of OfficeOpenXML has turned sour, not in the least because Microsoft couldn’t resist the temptation to cheat. Right now we’re seeing evidence of a concerted campaign at discrediting OpenDocument vis-a-vis OfficeOpen XML. That’s unfortunate, to say the least. If OfficeOpen XML becomes an ISO standard, we will, in all likelihood, still not spend time on supporting it. The standard is enormous, very complex and to a large extent so badly specified that a full implementation is probably even harder than implementing the old Microsoft binary file formats. Add to that patent encumbrances and problems with copyrighted elements — and our conclusion is that we prefer to concentrate on making KOffice a great set of applications that are satisfying to use and satisfying to develop.”

Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on KDE on ODF

Mozilla Annual Report

Mozilla is undoubtedly a pillar of the open source world, not only because of the importance of Firefox, Thunderbird, and its other products, but also as a model for organizing open source software development and the promotion of open standards that benefit everyone participating in an open marketplace.

Mitchell Baker posted (in October) financial and operational highlights of Mozilla’s latest year of operations. With revenues of $66 million, mostly from the Google searchbar, it was a very good year!

The post includes tons of other really interesting info about Mozilla’s role in the marketplace, its  download statistics and web infrastructure, impact on the future of the internet itself, and much more.

Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Mozilla Annual Report

Updegrove Chronicles ODF vs MSOOXML

Andy Updegrove has begun work on a book chronicling the current struggle between the ODF and MSOOXML file formats.

As far as format wars go, this is turning into one of the biggest and most important that has occurred in years. Thus, Updegrove intends to keep track of the events so they may be analyzed by others in the future.

Chapter two was posted recently, inserting more historical context on the players involved.

The draft chapters posted so far have also generated a healthy conversation in the comments section, with a mix of theoretical discussions, editing, and other feedback. Writing the book itself is going to be an interesting process to follow along.

Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on Updegrove Chronicles ODF vs MSOOXML

OLPC Advances in India

There have been a number of pieces of good news for the global OLPC community in the past few weeks, including the success of the Give One Get One program, the first order of 100,000 units from Uruguay, and an order of 40,000 plus options on 210,000 more from Peru.

On top of all this, a group has formed to promote and distribute the OLPC XO in India:

“We have received excellent response from at least a dozen state governments in India and we expect that large scale implementation will start from March or April next year, with an initial import of 20,000 to 25,000 laptops. And after that, subsequent imports could far exceed that number” said Joshi.

“Backing OLPC India is one of India’s largest mobile telecom companies Reliance Communications (RCOM) which has tied up with the global OLPC alliance, the OLPC Foundation, to promote e-learning for children. According to RCOM, along with OLPC Foundation, it has assumed the task of evangelizing the concept in the country by working with government agencies, non-government organization (NGOs), content developers, translators, teaching communities and project managers to create a successful ecosystems, and help proliferation of OLPC in India.”

Posted in Free Culture, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on OLPC Advances in India

Mozilla and Firefox Market Share

John writes a detailed post on the methodology used by Mozilla to estimate Firefox’s global market share.

Here is a direct quote of his summary points, but the full article is worth a careful reading:

• We think there are at least 125,000,000 Firefox users in the world right now, give or take. That represents a doubling since Firefox 2 was released a little over a year ago, and significant growth in every country.
• At Mozilla we view market share as an important quantitative metric that can help us ask smarter questions and build better products, but it’s only one of many
• We have systems here that tell us approximate number of daily users, and use that information to inform much of what we do.

By all measures, Mozilla (and especially Firefox) is an open source success story. They are also pioneering new metrics to measure the penetration of open source tools into business and user markets. This good data will help to further increase the market share of those very open source tools being measured, by helping guide us to more effective ways to promote them.

Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Mozilla and Firefox Market Share

Obama on ODF?

Andy Updegrove picks up on a possible statement of support for ODF from Barack Obama.

Updegrove writes,

“Out of the campaign cacophony of the last week emerged a handful of words from Senator and Democratic party hopeful Barack Obama that could not fail to catch my attention. He used them during the presidential debate held in Las Vegas, and they also appear in the “Innovation Agenda” that Obama had released a few days before. He announced this agenda in a speech he delivered on November 14 at an aptly selected venue: the Google campus in Mountain View, California. One of the pledges he made in the course of that speech reads in part as follows:

To seize this moment, we have to use technology to open up our democracy. It’s no coincidence that one of the most secretive Administrations in history has favored special interests and pursued policies that could not stand up to sunlight. As President, I’ll change that. I’ll put government data online in universally accessible formats. [emphasis added]

“A presidential candidate that is including “universally accessible formats” in his platform? How did that come about?”

No doubt, there are plenty of possible interpretations here, but the statement could be positive for ODF users. If the US Federal government started to adopt ODF, it would catalyze the states and other municipal governments that have tried to act but been halted by wealthy lobbyists.

With other governments around the world rapidly moving to ODF, it’s also becoming a competitive necessity to follow suit. The last one to adopt a new standard will have some catching up to do, and hopefully the US government will recognize that and make its move before too much longer.

Posted in Free Culture, ODF | 2 Comments »