“The Unsaid Document Foundation” series is disappointingly considered “fud” from LibreOffice developers, and Michael Meeks saying (again) that I made some good points, calls me a non-developer, probably to infer that I am not the best person to make programming suggestions.
Commercial open source blog readers care little to know about my computer science degree, or how much code I have been writing on a PDP-11 system. Therefore I would rather spend the rest of this blog entry sharing more thoughts about LibreOffice future.
Continue reading ‘The Unsaid Document Foundation (more talkbacks)’
Michael Meeks, famous hacker and LibreOffice advocate, replied to my earlier post giving his perspectives on many different subjects related to LibreOffice development.
Having read his views with great attention - and keeping in mind his long coding experience with OpenOffice.org, as well as his ability to dig deep into complex subjects like copyright assignment – I want to take a chance to go deeper into some points.
Continue reading ‘The Unsaid Document Foundation (talkbacks)’
The will be Document Foundation is out from a month, and it is now time to share some thoughts about past, present and future actions taken around subjects like copyright, the legal and governance structure and the code development process.
Continue reading ‘The Unsaid Document Foundation’
OpenOffice.org went live just ten years ago, on the 13rd of October 2000.Having been a community member for over 8 years, it is a good chance to recap what I have done until now. Continue reading ‘OpenOffice.org 10th Anniversary: 8 Years in Retrospective’
LibreOffice is born, and if it is true that every end is a new begin is too early to tell if this is a good or a bad thing.
Let’s start by looking at the foundations of this brand new Document Foundation.
The Steering committe, created by cooptation by eminent contributors and project lang mantainers, has already made some choices, and until now the ‘community’ behind OpenOffice.org had no chance to join the debate.
The FAQ page itself doesn’t say much about the governance model, while a number of open source thought leaders have been welcoming the news.
How many vendors beyond Novell will eventually join the foundation and put their money (time) where their mouthes are?
Ultimately an open source community is made of developers and users, and also the latter play an important role, especially for end-users applications.
How will users take to these changes?
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. Continue reading ‘More about the OpenOffice.org Hackfest’
odt2braille brings Braille to OpenOffice.org - The EU funded AEGIS project - which formerly helped deliver odt2daisy which allows for the creation of DAISY3 format digital audiobooks from OpenOffice - supported the development of odt2braille, an extension which allows users to translate documents into Braille formats.
Continue reading ‘OpenOffice.org: Braille Extension, Macro Programming Book, Hackfest’
ADUC, an Italian association of consumers, a couple of months ago wrote an article to inform about easy-download bait-and-switch practices charging a fee for open source programs download, and later wrote a petition to the Italian anti-trust authority. 
In the past ADUC obtained succesful resolutions in similar cases, and I look forward to see if they will eventually manage to get Google stop sell google keywords ads to Euro Content ltd (easy download owner), as recently asked to the anti-trust.
Kudos to ADUC to help with this issue, OpenOffice.org users don’t deserve this kind of treatment.
Confindustria Vicenza, the local chapter of the Italian manufacturers’ association, on the 13 of July hosted an event about open source entitled, “Open Source, a 360-degree view: pros and cons, legal implications and hence who can profit from it“.
The event (videos) was aimed to provide the audience with information about legal, organizational and technical impacts of open source adoption, among speakers a lawyer specialized in intellectual property laws (Luca Giacopuzzi), a researcher of the TEDIS center (Antonio Picerni), Confindustria Vicenza’s ICT manager Franco Battistello and myself. Continue reading ‘Italian Industrial Association meets Open Source’
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