Speaking at the Second ODF Workshop in Pretoria, South Africa, Carlos Gonzalez of the National Center of Information Technologies, announced that the Venezuelan government had formally adopted ODF as a standard for the “processing, exchange and storage of documents”.
Venezuela joins a number of other countries who have adopted this open standard, along with Brazil, Uruguay, South Africa, Belgium - overall, fourteen national and eight provincial governments.
Many countries, provinces and cities have adopted ODF, because it is about competition on a fair playing field, and just like HTML, it will bring lots of new competitors, ideas, processes and products into a market that has long been stymied by the decadence of a monopoly.
ODF is currently implemented by office solutions such as OpenOffice, KOffice, Google Docs, Zoho, IBM Lotus Symphony and Corel Wordperfect. In May 2008, Microsoft announced that Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007 would add native support for the Open Document Format.
(Via SolidOffice).
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microsoft, odf, openoffice, software
Sometimes someone at Microsoft releases an interview which is worth reading.
Two small excerpts:
For example, it is harder and harder to continue to define the world of software as a world divided between open source companies and proprietary companies. The truth is that today we’re all mixed source companies. Every company that traditionally comes from an open source background has over time moved to the middle after realizing that in addition to the open source foundation, they also need proprietary offerings that will differentiate their services from others and therefore will enable them to build a viable business.
So at the same time, companies that you could have associated traditionally with a pure proprietary software development model, including Microsoft, you see them today cooperating with open source development projects, even shipping open source code as part of their breadth of their offerings. Over time this distinction, which was mostly an ideological and very emotional distinction, the reality of business is causing all companies to converge to the point where, as I said, in a few years this distinction will be without meaning and we will all be mixed source companies.
Of course, there are areas where the opinions of Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel for Intellectual Property and Licensing, are still questionable, but they have made some strides in the right direction.
It would be nice to know which are his opinions about the OSP (Open Specification Promise).
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microsoft, open source, osp
During the second day of availability of OpenOffice.org 3.0, the suite has been downloaded 620.000 times at worldwide level (all languages, all flavours) and 50.000 times in Italy (the Italian version). This brings the total for the first two days, respectively, to 1.010.000 and 82.000.
The average OOo download is quite sizeable at 142MB. Therefore, during the two days, the total Internet traffic generated has been 150.3TB at worldwide level (58TB on the 13th and and 92.3TB on the 14th) and 12.2TB in Italy (4.8TB on the 13th and 7.4TB on the 14th).
Firefox, during the Guiness World Record set for the availability of Firefox 3, has been downloaded 8 million times at worldwide level and 320.000 times in Italy. With an average download of 7.8MB, the volume of Internet traffic generated has been 65.4TB at worldwide level and 2.6TB in Italy.
While Firefox downloads have been certified, OpenOffice.org download have not been certified. This means that the OOo counter does not represent the real figure but just a fair percentage of it as several language projects do not rely completely on it, and there are servers that mirror “unofficially” the real ones.
If you have had some problems while trying to download OpenOffice.org 3.0 during the last two days, now you understand the reason. Although my calculations are not “scientific” (my degrees are in geography and journalism), they are extremely close to the reality (as usual, I have underestimated OOo data and rounded them to the lower thousand).
OpenOffice.org 3.0 has been an incredible success, which has gone beyond every optimistic forecast. Although we have not set a Guinness, we have probably established a world record for the amount of Internet traffic generated in a day.
It is probably time, for the industry analysts, to give OpenOffice.org the market share it deserves. Of course, it’s a difficult task, because the adoption patterns of free software are different from those of proprietary software (which, most of the times, comes preinstalled on the PC).
Free software is downloaded when the PC is already at the user premises, and therefore is difficult to calculate which is the percentage of adoptions over the total of downloads (and Linux distributions, and covermounts CDs, and copies made from friends, and…).
Let’s have a Guinness, now, to celebrate.
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associazione plio, downloads, it history, linux, macos x, microsoft, open source, openoffice, windows, guinness, floss
The Italian OOo Conference will happen next Friday, October 3, in Bolzano, one of the geographical areas where open source software is most widely adopted, with solutions in place in the Italian schools - the region is officially bilingual: German and Italian - and in several offices of the public administration.
It is going to be an exciting event, not only because we will celebrate a number of milestones - OOo 3.0, four million downloads, the growth of the association - but also because we will have two very special guests: Charles Henry Schulz, head of the Native Language Project, and Pier Paolo Boccadamo, Director of Platform Strategies at Microsoft Italia (with Giacomo Segantini).
Italy is definitely going to be the country where Microsoft meets the OOo Community.
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microsoft, openoffice, ooo conference, associazione plio
Google Chrome first EULA was flawed, to say the least, as Google “acquired” - divine rights? - the copyright of all the contents generated - in a way or another - through the browser. Article 11, the faulty one, contained four points, each one carefully crafted in a fantastic “legalese” language in some secluded office in Mountain View.
It took one day, after a few posts, comments and articles, to change the EULA. Article 11 has been completely rewritten, and now contains only one point written in a transparent “legalese”.
11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.
Hats off to Google.
Just one question: if Google, a corporation listed on the NASDAQ, with shareholders and all the related blah blah, has been able to amend the EULA in one day, why Microsoft has not been able to amend the OSP (Open Specification Promise) in almost a lifetime?
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microsoft, eula, osp, google
