September 10th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
According to the Open Malaysia blog, Sweden has chosen ODF as its national document standard format:
“See the report by Peter Krantz, and the SIS page (in English) that describes SS-ISO/IEC 26300:2008… Great stuff. Congratulations, Sweden!”
Boycott Novell chips in with some more info about Sweden’s adoption and Brazil’s continually strengthening ODF support.
Sweden is another important country to adopt ODF, bringing it another step closer to global acceptance.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on ODF Becomes Swedish Standard
August 13th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Open Malaysia Blog announces a major OpenOffice migration: the Malaysian state of Pahang will move all its computers to OpenOffice.
“The driving force for this migration seems to be cost of proprietary software and the fear of unlicensed software. OpenOffice.org is the obvious solution to these two pressing problems (thanks, BSA!) What is good is that they have chosen ODF by default, and they are not changing the file format to the binary proprietary ones.
“What is interesting is that the public sector in Malaysia is moving towards FOSS independently from any government directive or mandate, so no amount of whining would derail our government from choosing and making their choice. Its a simple business decision, and the market has decided.”
Nowhere could I find how many computers will be involved or other details, but this is yet another promising development in Malaysia, which seems to be growing into an open source stronghold year by year.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Malaysian State of Pahang Adopts OpenOffice.org
August 7th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Trolltech Labs Blog announces a new ODF writer module shipping with Qt 4.5. This will make it much easier for applications built on the Qt toolkit to write ODF, as a peer of plain text, HTML and PDF.
Thomas Zander writes, “For end users the biggest advantage of the uptake of ODF is that more and more applications will standardize on this one format and thus applications will be much more interoperable. OpenOffice and KOffice are the early adopters here, I expect that many more applications will start to generate or consume ODF in some form or other. For example to export an abstract dataset to a nicely formatted document ready for printing, or the web.”
Zander also shares the idea that ODF will make a better format for emails than HTML does, since it provides more, and more explicit, layout options. I wonder what email client will first adopt this? It seems natural to first write a plugin for Thunderbird, and then if it gains traction, it could become a core part of that and other email applications.
Back to the heart of the matter, Zander explains what the new Qt module does:
“To speed up ODF recognition, Qt 4.5 will ship with an ODF writer. Qt’s text module turns into a one-stop document generation API where you can use QTextCursor to create your document via a nice API and you can then export the created QTextDocument to ODF, ready to be opened by any opendocument implementation. Naturally exporting to plain text and html are still supported, as is printing to PDF… Support for writing ODF in Qt sets a trend that we believe in the OpenDocument Format and we think its useful to have for our customers, the open source community and all end-users out there.”
Broad-brush conclusion: lots of effort is being put into ways to read and write ODF files, meaning the format continues to build momentum and will become an ever-better solution for communication with people around the world.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on ODF in KDE’s Qt
August 6th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Wall Street Journal’s online MarketWatch announces a new IBM effort to promote open source desktops running its Notes and Symphony packages in “IBM, Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat to Deliver Microsoft-Free Desktops Worldwide“.
From the article, “Citing shifting market forces and the growing demand for economical alternatives to costly Windows and Office-based computers, the four leaders sense an ideal set of circumstances allowing Linux-based desktops to proliferate in the coming year. Linux is far more profitable for a PC vendor and the operating system is better equipped to work with lower cost hardware than new Microsoft technology.”
Greater profitability for PC vendors should be a significant factor for them to promote Linux-based computers, while the technical advantages of the open source platform, on cheap as well as expensive hardware, has long been clear already.
Further, every new Lotus Symphony user is compatible with the ODF standard, which means interoperability with OpenOffice.org and the entire constellation of other compatible applications. The more adoption IBM and the Linux vendors achieve here, the better for everyone.
Posted in GNU/Linux, ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on IBM Partners With Linux Distros to Deliver Notes, Symphony
July 17th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Open Malaysia Blog wrote a good post last month covering Neelie Kroes’ discussion of open standards as a smart business decision, and its relevance to Malaysia.
Yoon Kit writes, “It’s apparent that Malaysian agencies like MAMPU are also doing the right thing in adopting true open standards like ODF as their document file format, despite the fact that Microsoft Malaysia is constantly lobbying and interfering with MAMPU’s decisions. The reaction from Microsoft’s lobbying is certainly interesting. I think people are getting tired of their underhanded tactics, and false cries of “competition” and “fairness”.”
The post led to an interesting discussion/debate in his comments that is worth reading as well. (I like that Yoon Kit stands by his positions and thoroughly defends each of his remarks when challenged!)
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on Open Malaysia Blog on EU Competition
July 10th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
HTML validation services have long been available for web developers to guarantee the sites they create follow the latest W3C standards. This has made it easier for web browser creators, site developers and web visitors to all keep coordinated and offer the best experience across the web. If something isn’t working, running the pages through an HTML validator helps to pinpoint whether the problem is in the code or browser, and then it can be fixed by the appropriate party.
In the same way, the open standard ODF format now has an online ODF validator service.
Michael Brauer, its creator, announces the service on the GullFOSS blog:
“What is it? It is actually a web page where you can check whether an ODF file meets some basic conformance or validation requirements defined by the ODF specification. This service is in particular useful for developers that want to test their implementations, but it may also be used to check if a particular file is a valid ODF file.”
My take is that this will be a very handy tool once Microsoft Office starts producing ODF files, since it will offer an independent service verifying whether those files are valid ODF or have been corrupted in some way. Based on Microsoft’s track record in failing to properly support open standards, we should expect major difficulties with the ODFs they produce. And the ODF validator service will let us pinpoint the cause of the problem. Surely Microsoft will claim that ODF is a broken file format, but users will be able to run the files through this validator and prove that is is MS Office, in fact, that is broken. (All this is conjecture at this point, but past experience suggests we’ll see it come true yet again.)
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | 1 Comment »
June 25th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Combining two of my interests, Kay Ramme of Sun has created “ODF@WWW,” an ODF Wiki. It includes some of the capabilities I had envisioned in my post about an OpenOffice wiki extension, and adds some cool new ideas of Ramme’s own.
Thinking about the rich editing ability of OpenOffice, and the lightweight collaboration of a wiki, Ramme “understood that these two approaches may be married to become an “ODF Wiki”, combing their strengths – simple editing and simple publishing – while eliminating their weaknesses…”
He jumped right into the project: “I installed an Apache webserver, enabled WebDAV, did some (hacky) bash scripting, and got the following.”
It’s a great start, and I am looking forward to what Ramme develops next with this project.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Wiki | Comments Off on ODF Wiki
June 23rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Erwin Tenhumberg is (sadly) leaving Sun and this may be his last blog post there. It looks like he’s following a good opportunity at another company, and he hopes to continue blogging about open source in some form.
Today, he points out a number of ODF and OpenOffice.org successes, such as a download average in 2008 of 1.2 million copies of OOo per week (with recent weeks averaging closer to 2 million). He also writes:
“In addition, Asus, Acer and HP are now shipping laptops with OpenOffice.org pre-installed, and more and more organizations deploy OpenOffice.org in a large scale. Finally, according to Google file type searches like this one and this one, ODF is still clearly the market leading editable XML document file format. Thus, I’m sure ODF and OpenOffice.org have a bright future!”
All this he reports in the context of an “ODF Workshop” Microsoft will hold at its headquarters in the near future. Skepticism is healthy with Microsoft, but if they implement ODF honestly and completely (with none of their “embrace, extend, extinguish” behavior), this really is the victory bell for the ODF format.
Posted in GNU/Linux, ODF, OLPC, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on ODF Victory News Roundup
June 20th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Ironically enough, despite MSOOXML being (controversially) accepted as an ISO standard, most of the media is triangulating on the conclusion that ODF has already won the next generation format war.
Infoworld reaches this conclusion in “Red Hat Summit panel: Who ‘won’ OOXML battle?”
They even find a Microsoft employee saying as much:
“ODF (Open Document Format) has benefited from the two-year battle over the ratification of Microsoft’s rival OOXML (Open Office XML) standard, which is native to its Office 2007 suite, Microsoft’s national technology officer said Thursday during a panel discussion at the Red Hat Summit in Boston.
“ODF has clearly won,” said Stuart McKee, referring to Microsoft’s recent announcement that it would begin natively supporting ODF in Office next year and join the technical committee overseeing the next version of the format”
This could certainly be a ruse on the part of Microsoft, but with several functional ODF suites already available, it will be extremely difficult for MS to support ODF in a broken way and then blame ODF for that failure. (As they’ve done with other standards in the past.)
“Panelist Douglas Johnson, an official involved with corporate standards at Sun Microsystems, said the attention caused by the debate has enabled other office-suite products to be competitive.
“The office-suite market has been ruled by one dominant player after another, but those markets were never governed by good open standards practices,” he said. “What has happened is that this dominant-player market has actually been upset and opened to competition that didn’t exist before.”
A competitive office suite market is a fundamental change that will benefit consumers and competitors going forward. It’s an important step in the ongoing effort to establish digital freedoms world-wide.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on ODF Defeats MSOOXML
June 18th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Lotus Symphony is getting great reviews, including CRN’s “Symphony Sings as Office Clone.”
They found it preferable, in their review, to OpenOffice.org:
“The Test Center found Symphony a snap to use, and switching to Symphony after years of using Microsoft Office was painless. While OpenOffice was a nice alternative, Symphony looks and works much more elegantly while keeping the free price tag.”
A Mac version is not yet available, but is promised later this summer, and Symphony 2.0 (unclear when it is planned for release) will “update the base code engine and also include more OpenOffice.org features, such as an equation editor, database software, and a drawing program.”
Symphony’s arrival on the scene makes a good complement (and friendly competitor) to OpenOffice. It helps legitimize the idea of using ODF as a format for interoperability, and it helps sell ODF to enterprises. It’s also been imaginative in testing new user interface ideas, which will help move the industry forward much more than MS Office 2007’s dubious new choices.
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Lotus Symphony: A Rave Review