“There’s free software and then there’s open source”, he suggested, noting that the company gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, “there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with”.
Open source, he said, creates a license “so that nobody can improve the software”.
He is Bill Gates, reported by Wired.
If open source software doesn’t improve, then I would like to understand why the beta of IE8 emulates the behaviour of Firefox, and not vice versa.
Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, while speaking today at the annual conference of the company Most Valuable Professional, has given some perspective about the relationship between Microsoft and open source, as reported by Todd Bishop. What I see as a dangerous problem, especially when you look at interoperability between applications and file formats (especially ODF and OOXML), is the fact that Microsoft ignores the open source community.
If we look at OpenOffice.org, the three markets where the open source office suite is competing most successfully with Microsoft Office are probably Germany, France and Italy, followed by other European markets like Spain and the Netherlands. In Italy, where I have the updated numbers, we are hitting today - maybe while I’m writing this post - one million downloads since January 1st, 2008 (over 350.000 since the announcement of OOo 2.4 in late March). Although we don’t have Microsoft figures for Office 2007, we estimate a maximum of 1.8 million licenses sold in 2008.
I already know the reply: “You can’t compare licenses with downloads…”. Of course, gentlemen, but do you really think that one million downloads in slightly over one hundred days (at an average of over 9,200 downloads per day) still equals to a few thousands users? Do you really think that a small bunch of people, just the same small bunch of people, can get all these downloads? Come on, we’ve other stuff to do. Please, be realistic. We’re eating your pie, quickly. We’re hungry.
I don’t know the figures for Germany and France, but I’m quite sure that they are even better than those for Italy. The results in these markets are mainly due to the daily activity of the local community, while Microsoft - with the exception of Italy, where Associazione PLIO is recognized and respected - apparently ignores the reality. I am sure, for instance, that Microsoft’s Document Interoperability Initiative would greatly benefit from the involvement of the open source community.
Technorati Tags:
ooxml, open source, openoffice, microsoft, odf
It looks like at Sun they enjoy April Fool’s day, starting from the CEO Jonathan Schwartz.
Technorati Tags:
open source
Some key findings:
- Approximately 81 percent of respondents feel the economy’s turbulence is “good” for open source software
- Respondents revealed that the top three factors that make open source software attractive include:
- lower acquisition and maintenance costs
- flexibility/access to libraries of community-developed code
- freedom from vendor lock-in
- More than 55 percent of respondents believe that in five years 25-50 percent of purchased software will be open source vs. proprietary
- The Web Publishing/Content Management market is expected to be most vulnerable to disruption by open source in the next five years
- Respondents expect the Security Tools be least vulnerable to disruption by open source in the next five years
The full survey results can be downloaded from here.
The change has been announced last week, but I think it’s important to read Simon Phipp’s comments on its relevance.
This quote sums it up:
OpenOffice.org’s license will change to LGPLv3 as part of a broader set of changes intended to improve the OpenOffice.org community for everyone. Those changes also include a switch to the latest version of the standard Sun contributor agreement, with an addendum specifically tailored to the needs of the OpenOffice.org community. There’s increased latitude for documentation writers to publish their work on OpenOffice.org. And in future, plugins for OpenOffice.org may host their source code directly on the community site without copyright being shared, helping collaboration within the community.
In order to understand the complete picture about software patents and all the related issues I think it’s important to read what Simon has written in may 2007 about patent covenants.
Tags: openoffice, softwareReprinted from the Open Source Initiative web site:
Tags: Open Source, softwareThe Requirement
An “open standard” must not prohibit conforming implementations in open source software.
The Criteria
To comply with the Open Standards Requirement, an “open standard” must satisfy the following criteria. If an “open standard” does not meet these criteria, it will be discriminating against open source developers.
- No Intentional Secrets: The standard MUST NOT withhold any detail necessary for interoperable implementation. As flaws are inevitable, the standard MUST define a process for fixing flaws identified during implementation and interoperability testing and to incorporate said changes into a revised version or superseding version of the standard to be released under terms that do not violate the OSR.
- Availability: The standard MUST be freely and publicly available (e.g., from a stable web site) under royalty-free terms at reasonable and non-discriminatory cost.
- Patents: All patents essential to implementation of the standard MUST be licensed under royalty-free terms for unrestricted use, or be covered by a promise of non-assertion when practiced by open source software.
- No Agreements: There MUST NOT be any requirement for execution of a license agreement, NDA, grant, click-through, or any other form of paperwork to deploy conforming implementations of the standard.
- No OSR-Incompatible Dependencies: Implementation of the standard MUST NOT require any other technology that fails to meet the criteria of this Requirement.
Technorati Tags: open standard
Any idea about the author of this sentence?
The world is different today than it was 10 years ago, and so are we. Here on the city campus, MacBook Pros aren’t unheard of, and people with knowledge of Linux are in demand. Some of those MacBooks are running Vista, administrators are running PHP and ASP.NET on the same machine, and we’re seeing adoption of open source in and on top of a range of our technologies. As the world has changed, so have we, to the benefit of the company and our customers.
I have met this gentleman in the US a couple of weeks ago, at the Open Source ThinkTank. Still clueless? Then read the entire post: Why I’m excited about Yahoo!
Today, we have decided to follow yesterday’s Microsoft announcement with an open letter to the company. This is my translation into English of the text (unfortunately, some of the extra care put in each word gets lost, but the meaning is there).
Welcome, Microsoft.
Following yesterday’s announcement, we are ready to co-operate at the promotion of open formats in order to support this new endeavour in the area of office suites. We are ready to co-operate, but we will criticize you for every uncertain or false step.
Inside interoperability there isn’t any space left for tricks: interoperability means that you have chosen to be on the same side of the users.
We believe in your good faith more than the European Commission does, as they have told the world that this is the fourth time that Microsoft makes an announcement about interoperability, without any impact - until today - on the company strategy.
We sincerely hope that this time, for a number of reasons - including our proactive opposition to the fast track standardization of Office 2007 file formats, which will go on until all the necessary changes will be made, the chances that mere words are going to translate into facts are higher than in the past.
At the same time, we invite all the companies that support the ODF format together with us - and those that belong to the OpenOffice.org community: Sun, IBM, Novell & Red Flag - to work for a full interoperability, as the technical and legal obstacles are going to disappear soon.
Users should be able to exchange transparently Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org documents, in both directions.
The software industry, which is not based just in Redmond, must demonstrate a true commitment to make ODF a more widespread format.
If this will happen, users will win, and the market - i.e., all of us - will win.
Associazione PLIO (Italian National Linguistic Project OpenOffice.org)
We know that many inside the community have a different opinion. Of course, we have carefully evaluated the pros and the cons of such a statement, and are quite sure that this is the right attitude for this specific time in the history of computing.
Tags: office suite, Open Document Format, open document format, openoffice, softwareAccording to Alfresco Open Source Barometer (you may find more here and here) OpenOffice.org is alive and well (and almost kicking Microsoft Office on the back in some countries, like Germany and France).
Glyn Moody writes:
One of the most interesting additions to the survey this year is a question about which office suite people use. Overall, OpenOffice.org chalks up a very respectable 24% to Microsoft Office’s 66%. This is a much higher penetration than I would have guessed for open source on the desktop, and suggests that among those adopting open source programs OpenOffice.org is doing really well – pretty much at the Firefox level of success. Sadly, the same cannot be said of the UK, which manages only 18% compared to France’s 28% and Germany’s 34% (the latter probably boosted, again, by the historical roots of OpenOffice.org in the German StarOffice suite, later sold to Sun).
I’ve asked Ian Howells of Alfresco some additional information about Italy. Of course, as soon as I will get them, I will write at least a post, but most probably a press release for the Italian press.
Tags: office suite, Open Source, openofficeI’m in Napa for the Open Source ThinkTank. It’s a big event for the names attending but it’s a small event for the numbers as there are only 129 people from all over the world (actually, I should say from all over the States, plus a few from Europe).
I want to understand if the concept of marketing for the open source environment that I have developed over the last three years working as a volunteer for OpenOffice.org is a sustainable one. In Italy, the results have been just incredible.
In the next couple of days I will have the opportunity to exchange ideas with some of the most brilliant minds in this industry. I have a couple of meetings set with Andy Astor, CEO of Enterprise DB, and Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, but I am looking forward to meet - amongst the others - Matt Asay of Alfresco and Raven Zachary of The 451 Group.
Technorati Tags: open source thinktank, marketing open source
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Tags: marketing, Open Source, openoffice