Education as a project

For about a year, maybe two, the education project seemed to languish. In fact, since I first thought of the project, in Crete, several years ago (after a fine dinner of goat and resin wine and olives, animated by the conversation of friends, inspiration came easily and fluently), and even after, when I formed it with Sophie Gautier. There was a lot of interest but little public action. I would make contact with all sorts of education officials--professors, administrators--but nothing came of, and I think my co-lead, Sophie, was finding the same; and nothing was appearing on the public project pages or lists. This was our fault. Thus, if at the Symbiosis society of colleges in Pune, India, I may have been warmly received and heard from faculty and students alike keen interest in including OpenOffice.org coding in classrooms, there was, in the end, no evident result. It seemed all a show, or perhaps there was something simply missing I wasn't aware of. Being invited to give yet another presentation or workshop on the same topic is just not enough. What I wanted was for students to start working on OOo and even begin appearing on the public lists, and that was simply not happening.

There are several reasons that come to mind for the lack of continued activity. One is that any community formation, especially one of this nature, where I am asking students and professors to work on complicated code with little obviously in the way of payoff, does not come easily. It's hard enough to form participatory communities among those interested in participating and in participation's outcomes. It's even harder when both what counts as participation and outcome challenge the status quo.

And that challenge to the status quo in the make up of curricula and their basis is from one perspective what I was (and am) asking for. (Although my suggestion is by no means as radical as Eliot's in 1885, when he proposed the free elective system at Harvard.) Curricula are established--accreted--over decades and implicitly represent a culture's very idea of knowledge, practical or abstract. They do not change immediately, at least not those supposedly teaching fundamental, canonical, truths. And how could they? The very notion of a truth is that it's not susceptible to change. So if from one point it seemed I have been asking for professors to relinquish not just control over the class's pedagogy, replacing her with the community, but also the very content to be taught, it's no wonder that there has been little traction.

But, no, I was and am not asking for a big change, just a small one with big effect, and one that, for that matter, trades on what is already going on. My notion is not a Toffler-eaque merging of the the academic with the industrial and commercial, or more accurately, the replacement of academic knowledge with trade school skill. That would be a replacement of, say, truth and theory and principle with effect and how to produce that effect: a loss of knowledge and the very substance of innovation and newness, or the logic underlying the effect. (I won't enter into the interested/disinterested debate here, though it is of course relevant, especially as large companies increasingly determine the coursework in areas that are costly to maintain, such as the sciences.)

But what then do I mean by including OOo and other Foss code in education? It means to me as much the teaching of software collaboration and open source tactics of communication as the canonical teaching of code using Foss in classic (obligatory) and elective programs. It can also mean the inclusion of Foss in certain vocational college programs, as at Seneca College, in Toronto, where students are instructed on how to work on Firefox extensions as part of their basic instruction in coding and where collaboration is taken very seriously. In short, it means involving students and professors in Foss projects as a means of teaching collaboration and code. The satisfaction to be gained by this is immense, or so I believe, as students will learn not only how to code better but how to work with others in more or less real-world environments. They will not be abandoning the perimeters of the classroom; not at all. They will rather be including, in certain cases, the dynamic of Foss participation.

An example could be writing papers and giving presentations in the humanities. At one point, it used to be thought that the student's presentations--at whatever level--were essentially empty exercises and not at all related to professionalizing the student. That is, what the student learned could be thought of as being useful, but more in the abstract sense of becoming a better citizen and abler at presenting his views. The idea that a presentation given in a classroom could actually be a means of professionalizing the student and making her abler to get a job, say, or otherwise perform in real world situations, has only in the last generation become more present. When I was in graduate school, it simply wasn't clear, for instance, that my presentations were actually a kind of practice, or could be thought of as such, nor that I should be thinking about presenting at real conferences. All that was over the horizon.

But had it been on the horizon.... well, I would have been far better prepared, and I would have had a far better understanding of the process. Would I have lost out on the liberal luxury of learning at my leisure anything I chose? I don't think so. One learns best discursively, by talking and thinking about something with others, by engaging in dialogues and by taking what one thinks seriously. I think I would rather have been more serious about learning in general.

And I think that including Foss in classrooms will have a similar effect of encouraging students to take what they are learning seriously--not as empty exercises in abstract learning but as something that has real effect, both for them and for the world.

Bengaluru and foss.in and airplane movies

Tomorrow is party time! Well, at least its OOo Project Day time, at foss.in. I've posted the presentations and urge everyone to attend who can--the talks, workshops promise to be immensely interesting. If you cannot attend--and despite India's valiant efforts to change this, the majority of people won't be able to, I recommend my colleague's Frank Peters and Jürgen Schmidt's presentations; mine can be ignored, though it does tell newbies how and gives incredibly useful links...

Sankarshan's is special (I can't speak to the others unsent because I have not seen them.) I met Sankarshan several years ago, at LinuxAsia, in Delhi, when I was developing the idea of regional mentors and thought that he should be one; I still do. But he especially impressed me and many others at LinuxAsia with a brilliant presentation on community management issues. In his talk, he detailed the problems that befall a real project in India: the attrition of members, the problem of keeping things going, communication; and also the successes: foss matters not just for computer savvy elites (those who actually attend our talks) but for farmers and others who are taking to computerized systems in order not just to compete but to survive in this neoliberal world. And foss, with its emphasis on the commons (is that a universal concept in agriculture?) works best. Or would one rather the Monsanto model, locking users into proprietary dependencies for that which they need?

So I'm looking forward to Sankarshan's talk, and the others, and trying my best to fully understand Jürgen's,for what he lays out is both important for new developers (and old) and also stimulating. I'd like, in fact, to video Jürgen's presentation and make it wide available, if he's in agreement, as we need such material for all.

As to Bengaluru: I arrived late last night (early today), around 02:30 and slept about three hours. The flight was long--about 20 hours, altogether, though pleasant, however much I didn't sleep. I spent the time working, but.... At some point I ran out of battery power and tried changing batteries but was foiled by a jammed battery and so watched the latest Bourne movie (not as good as prior [or as Die Hard or Live Free] but has tidbits of political relevance, with episodes damning waterboarding, Bush's totalitarian ambitions, and so on) and part of Ratatouille, which is decidedly not as entertaining (or at least not in the same way) as Flushed Away, and for interesting reasons.

Briefly (and how can I speak of Bengaluru when I have only ventured out for a short walk today and am ensconced in a colonial palace with the reminders of colonial past, its dream, nightmare, memory all around? A lovely hotel, a whiplash of history), Rat foregrounds the commitment of identity cartoons assume and put under erasure. For that reason, it's very smart. Oh, it's also smart because Pixar has gone beyond technology here: we no longer watch the film as geeks marvelling at what computers can do but at what artists can imagine. So, just as Disney at their prime pictured the imagined forest of Bambi or Snow White lushly, as if every leaf was the adamic first and not something already seen, a meaningless brusstroke subtended to the action before us, so to does Rat picture the world: it's glorious to gaze upon, it's a world of sense not simply sound and fury.

And the rats are rats. I heard an interview with the director and one of his concerns was to represent rats as rats, not humans more or less rat looking. He succeeded. (Once, as a student, I unrolled my futon late at night and a little family of roof rats panicked out, fleeing for the window; I fled down the stairs. But this little family looked just like those pictured in the film.) And that's where the movie was interesting. For in foregrounding the ratness of the rat, its correspondingly difficult to take the same naive pleasure that one takes in Flushed, which is really about humans dislocated to an exotic but all the same familiar environment. There is no real ratness, no perceptual snag to arrest the grace of mimetic transfer. But there is in Rat: one is reminded of the rat and of ratness. Of course this is the point of the film, and when the airplane landed, that point was being explicitly enunciated. But that point alters the equation of entertainment (mimetic transfer) to a more Brechtian position, and for a cartoon of this nature, that's quite interesting.

foss.in

foss.in is in just a couple of weeks and if you have not registered yet you really ought to now. Why? OpenOffice.org will be holding a Project Day, either 4 or 5 December (somewhat annoyingly scarily, it's still uncertain), and it represents a major opportunity for developers and would-be developers to learn more about OpenOffice.org coding, the project, and what the future holds

OOo is popular: in India, millions use it and the government has gone on record endorsing it, as have many large companies (actual use varies, of course). And Indians also produce code for OOo. Much of that work is localization, but not all. Nevertheless, if OpenOffice.org is really to flourish in India and elswhere--and to sustain that flourish--local developers are needed. This more than just establishing a community; it also entails cultivating the ecosystem that can produce foss developers, and OOo developers in particular. And that means ultimately focusing on strategies that educate as well as employ foss developers: the work of government policy as well as the putative invisible hand.

Foss.in should be fun and interesting. But if you can't make it, there are sure to be other OOo events in the near future. I'll likely be presenting at the upcoming (and renamed) Open Source India Week (OSIW), formerly LinuxAsia, the longstanding and quite well attended Delhi event. I hope while there to present, as well, workshops on entering OOo for developers and businesses.

Meanwhile, see you in Bangalore, either the 4th or 5th of December!

Support and OpenOffice.org

This is a not atypical scenario: Government Blue wants to adopt foss but is uncertain about support, services, training, certification, liability, not to mention the longevity of the foss project in question. So, even though that free technology is gratis and more powerful, extensible and secure, Blue decides to stick with the status quo, as that SQ satisfies the crucial (and wholly nontechnical) requirements that the purchasing department insists upon. From the purchasing department's perspective, this scenario is simply anarchic chaos and very undesirable.

I've noticed this now for several years and have suggested the same remedy: related foss groups can form consortia. The result would be a single vendor who is responsible for all the above. Support can be contracted out, as can the other elements. The crucial point here is that Blue would not be dealing with a single responsible vendor.

Of course, this demands considerable cooperation among groups and individuals who formed small businesses and became independent precisely because they wanted to work alone. But it's necessary, I think.

OpenOffice.org fortunately is addressing this problem, though we still have some ways to go. Well over 350 companies offer professional support and services in many languages and in many lands; and that is not even counting Sun Microsystems, which offers per-call support for OpenOffice.org users. We list support options, free and not, at http://support.openoffice.org/.

We have ways to go. I would love it that when a user downloads OpenOffice.org (and most who download it form the OOo are Windows users), they are presented with support options. And that companies recognize the options available to them: that foss projects like OpenOffice.org are both community and professionally supported.

On Festival Software Livre, Brasilia, October 5-6

To say that Brazil has taken to OpenOffice.org and software livre is an understatement. Claudio Filho, the lead of the Brazilian Language project, and one of the leads of the BrOffice.org group, estimated that there are about 10 million OOo users here. (One must use BrOffice.org instead of OpenOffice.org in Brazil for trademark reasons.)

Like most countries, Brazil remains primarily a consumer of FOSS, not a producer. And although one will save money with free software, one has not changed the relationship to the commodity that free software offers: one is still a consumer and effectively in debt to others for the product. That is something that I and many others would like to change. In my previous trips here, especially the last, in April of this year, I've tried to encourage students, professors and other would-be developers to consider working on OOo. Although I certainly hold out the hope that many would-be new participants would do so at their leisure (and have, say, a day job), I am cognizant that many (most) would likely participate as part of their job. OOo has certainly become easier to work on and one may contribute in any number of ways that have little to do with coding; and , to be sure, we have made it much easier to create extensions. But to work on OOo code requires an allocation of resources. And that implies that OOo be seen as popular enough, powerful enough, and possessed of a future. It has to be seen as worth the investment. Just saving millions of dollars is probably not enough; after all, regressing to typewriters or pens and pencils would also save money, as does not doing anything at all.

(Status quo or regression is tantamount to erecting a fatal wall of isolation. The fact is that the modern world requires the tools that can produce electronic documents and it also requires interoperability. Isolation of any sort is hobbling. At the same time, it's also clear that if a nation is expected to compete globally, its residents need access to the tools of production. They cannot just be limited to the elites nor can we accept the proliferation piracy as any sort of solution to giving all the appearance of access to informatic tools of production. [Pirated copies of proprietary software are still proprietary and have all the encumbrances we have come to expect.])

Brazil and other nations increasingly recognize the problem of being merely consumers and the advantages of becoming producers. Moving from one to the other, let alone moving simply enough to foss, is not trivial. The move to foss saves money; the move to producing foss also saves money, but in cases can also cost. One has to shift educational systems and in some cases encourage markets. Relying on the invisible hand for all this probably doesn't work, at least not at this stage. It doesn't work because in a monopoly environment, there is no invisible hand; there is no real market: that's what a monopoly is all about. The agent enabling this shift has historically been the government: it alone has the ability and the responsibility. For what's at stake here is not the success of one private company or another but a lot more, the commercial health of the nation.

But back to the Festival. Held in the Catholic University (Universidade Católica de Brasilia) just outside Brasilia, and sponsored by an impressive array of local and multinational companies, the event, the second in as many years, spanned two days and included presenters from various ministries as well as national and multinational companies. Its primary organizer, Kleber Fígaro Rozado,the director of Training Tecnologia, invited me. I went down uncertain of the audience; it turned out to be mostly students, which was good, as they were clearly engaged. Even more encouraging, the professors were clearly interested in furthering the connection to fosters users and developers. They want their students to be producers. (Follow up emails have been sent but more needs to be done to ensure that what was sown in October actually bears fruit.)

As is always my fate, I was too occupied with impromptu meetings and discussions to attend all the presentations, which was a pity. But I did catch the Caixa presentation, David Kuhn's of Serpro, Keith Bright's of IBM, and in some ways my favourites, Maddog's.One of the really encouraging things about Caixa's presentation was mention of their contributions to OpenOffice.org. Unlike so many who use without contributing, they recognize that absent their contributions, the fruit may not just whither but never arise. Foss projects need participation, else we are back to commodity dynamics.

I only regret that i had to leave so soon and was unable to enjoy the pleasure of seeing friends. I am glad I was able to renew my acquaintance with Roberto Salomon, now of IBM and one of the leads of the Brazilian language project, and of course, to say hello to Claudio again. I hope to see them again soon, at next year's fisl, an event not to be missed.

FOSS publishing

Last May I had the pleasure of boring people at the LGM event in Montreal, where I met some of the Scribus team and also learned more about FOSS publishing and graphics. As a kind of update, my friend, Mayank Sharma, sent me a link to the magazine he writes for, o3:magazine, and its issue #9 is on open-source publishing. I pitch it here not because Mayank asked me to, but because the magazine touches on creating documents with OpenOffice.org. In particular, Mayank's article on "Collaborative editing with OpenOffice[.org]" is useful and interesting for both editors and writers. I would add that with 2.3, we have improved the component considerably.

Worth a read.

State of the project, the fuller account

In my speech on the State of the Project, which I gave at the recent OOoCon in Barcelona, I promised I'd provide the fuller account here, in this blog. I meant to do it immediately after the conference, but as is the nature of these promises, other things intervened. But, here is the fuller account.

Every year I ask the project leads to tell me (and the community) what their project has done that is interesting, cool, important, and to let us all know who was responsible. FOSS thrives on community recognition. Below is simply the responses, more or less in the order I received them. A few, I have edited.


Joost Andrae, QA Project
Speaking for the QA project one of the highlights were the introduction of Nakata Maho as new QA project lead and Caio Tiago Oliveira de Sousa as co-lead besides myself. The structure of the QA project has been widened by application related sub teams. The QA homepage has been re-worked. The skills of QA team members improved considerably. There were QA related meetings in Germany (eg. in Essen) and the OpenOffice.org team in Germany was present at the CeBIT trade fair. Most important: Various versions of OpenOffice.org got released. The cooperation between native language teams and the QA project intensified.


Charles-H. Schulz, Native Language Confederation.
I think we should mention our struggle for open standards and freedom, the (so far) triumph of ODF worldwide. As for names, I have many: Davide Dozza, Florian Effenberger, Claudio Filho, Pavel Janik, Leif Lodahl, Jeongkyu Kim, Rail Aliev, Alexandro Colorado Michael Brauer, Erwin Tenhumberg, you, my humble self... and I'm forgetting some others.


Frank Schönheit, Base
For Base, the Report Builder is certainly the most important accomplishment over the last year. It provides a dedicated user interface for creating reports, using Pentaho's reporting engine, formerly known as JFreeReport. Ocke Janssen was the brave man :) who implemented this nearly alone.


Jürgen Schmidt, API and Extensions.
Well new API's are developed always when new features are implemented. But often requested in the past and now provided is a new awt TreeControl. Many other new API's were introduced. With OO.org 2.3 for example 223 new UNOIDL types are introduced that allow to program certain parts of the office from macros, extensions or even from remote.

Addons were improved, support of more complex toolbars ....

Service provider interface for embedded objects. I think a really useful and powerful SPI that for example allows Java embedded objects that can be activated outplace.

We did a lot of good stuff in the area of programmability. The SDK example ObjectInspector can help developers to get necessary context info of real objects. It allows to browse through an object hierarchy and can of course generate code snippets in Basic, Java and C++ for smaller parts.

A lot of improvements related to the extensions infra structure. Improved extension manager in the office. Online update for extensions, PackageInformationProvider API to get easy access to local package content and many more ...

The extensions repository web site. A really huge step forward to promote extensions for OO.org and allow easy access to new extensions. We now have one and well integrated access point for extensions. Check out the "Get more extensions" link in the extensions manager.

We have released a first version of our OpenOffice.org API plugin for NetBeans. Also a tool for developers to simplify the development with and for OO.org. 4 wizards for client programs, general and specialized components (special service provider interfaces SPI). It support type completion, context sensitive help, ... Version 1.1 should be available next week.

Hand over the Developer's Guide to the documentation. Well we will probably still provide the content but the documentation team has taken over the maintenance. The guide will be published in the wiki (soon) to simplify the contribution. It was often requested by the community and we are now in the situation where we have a suitable solution for the wiki (status will be presented on the conference). And of course the guide was extended with two chapters for extensions and graphical user interfaces.

Many many more stuff.


Matthias Bauer, Writer
I think *the* highlight for the whole project was that ODF officially had become an ISO standard in November (or was it December?) 2006.

The main highlight for the Writer project is the increased community interest and contribution we are seeing and feeling everywhere. Some examples:

• the number of received patches has increased (and we integrate them much faster now ;-))
• on several occasions developers worked together with us to implement new features
• we get a lot of feedback to specifications we have written; some community members also wrote specifications by themselves

Though we have done a lot of work in Writer in the last year I don't see a single particular highlight that should be mentioned. We have been very busy (and still are), but not doing "cool" things. Well, there will always be people that have to do the dirty work. :-)

Thinking a little bit more about it I think that perhaps it is worth mentioning that the Writer team now tries to address highly requested features as much as possible. We had two great Google Summer Of Code projects in areas that belong to those that needed improvements most (notes, text language selection).


Éric Bachard, Philipp Lohmann, Mac Porting Project
About Mac OS X porting project:

• 6 new Domain Developers joined the Macport and thus, the OpenOffice.org community
• Sun MicroSystems provided us 2 dedicated developers at full time
• 2000 cvs commits, a lot of cws, and an Aqua version of OpenOffice.org better at every milestone.

After the fantastic effort the Community and Sun did, the Mac OS X porting project is proud to announce the Aqua version is scheduled for 3.0, and - we hope -, will become a new major port.

Joerg Sievers confirmed we did the first steps in the QA process, and serious things, to integrate the Mac OS X Aqua version will start after OOoCon Barcelona.


Kai Ahrens, Graphics
For the Graphics area, the new Chart implementation (Chart2) is surely a real benefit and of interest for many many people, especially the fact that we now have a solid base on which further improvements are possible, which wasn't the case before.

For the other graphics applicalications like Draw and Impress, there's been a lot of work ongoing regarding modularization of core and UI components to easily develop extensions. Those extensions are currently under development and expected to be released, at least as a prerelease, within the next months.

The currently developed PDF-Import as well as PDF/A support are also highlights among many others.


Christian Lippka, Graphics
In addition to what Kai said about the graphics team, I like to point out that SUN released
its direct x canvas for windows as open source. See Thorstens blog here

http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/windows_display_driver_woes_what

Also the work on modularization will soon spin of some very useful download able extensions. The first
that is soon to come is a minimizer component that can hugely reduce the size of presentation documents by
rescaling images, replacing ole objects and removing hidden slides and many more. Expect a blog entry
about this soon.


Carsten Driesner, Framework
I think the framework project implemented many new features to support a better extension integration into OpenOffice.org.

• Dialog and localization support for extensions
• Merging of items into toolbars and menus
• Support for complex toolbar controls (e.g. comboboxes, editfields, ...) for extensions
• Easy to use message boxes
• Flexible and extensible paths to support:
• Gallery items, Templates and Autotext within extensions


Rafaella Braconi, l10n
The highlights of the last year for the Localization project are:

• contribution: more and more teams are providing translations and are updating the localization of their version on a regular basis. The collaboration on localization efforts between Sun and the native-language teams has enormously increased not only in terms of number of teams contributing but also in terms of volume provided.
• teams expertise: the skills of the team members have improved considerably both in terms of translation quality delivered and in terms of tools and process knowledge.
• project structure: the l10n project has a new co-lead focusing on i18n, Eike Rathke, the irreplaceable and indispensable guidance and support of Pavel Janík and a new lead (myself).


Niklas Nebel, Calc
Some highlights from Calc:

• We started to concentrate usability activities (see http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/improving_calc_usability, http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Calc/To-Dos/Usability lists some issues that have already been resolved).
• There was a successful "Summer of Code" project to integrate R with Calc (http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/R_and_Calc).
• Ongoing: Compatibility improvements (GETPIVOTDATA, array constants, JIS/ASC, ...).
• ...and (John McC addes,) surely a 12857% speed improvement is worth a mention :-)
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/another_12857_speed_improvement



Frank Peters, Documentation
Documentation is in the middle of a major restructuring since I took over as the co-lead 4 months ago. We started to move to the OOo wiki consolidating the available information sources. Sun open sourced all StarOffice documentation bits inm 2007 to be included in the community set. The Administration Guide is already on the wiki, the Dev Guide with 900+ wiki pages will very soon follow.

For the first time, community members contributed large parts of the help content for the new chart module, first and foremost the German community with Regina Hentschel.

And, there was the successful Template and Clipart contest, sponsored by Worldlabel. And thanks to Jean Weber, who has worked on migrating many docs to the wiki.

Last not least you may consider paying tribute to the longtime documentation project lead Gerry Singleton who unexpectedly passed away in May.


These updates represent but a fraction of the interesting work that has been done this last year. OpenOffice.org has well over a hundred projects and probably more regional efforts. Let me know what you've been doing and I'll add you to this list.

OOoCon Impressions

My reaction after just the first morning in Barcelona, where we held this year's OOoCon was: I want to stay here, live here. And judging from others' reactions, I was not alone. We had reason for our desire: This year's event was held in the grandly gorgeous Universitat de Barcelona, a building and location that offered what we wanted--pleasant rooms, a lovely interior garden, and outside, across the street, cafés and restaurants where we could mingle. Softcatalà, the organizers, did a fine job of making sure we had rooms and excellent food. I can well imagine how much work they had to do, especially given the commencement of classes.

How did the several hundred attendees like this event? From all reports, they greatly enjoyed it. Each of these conferences serves to build community, to undo the differences that distance imposes. Most of us only see each other this one time and learn to communicate via email, IRC, IM--wholly inadequate media for resolving misunderstandings or quickly coming to understandings. This is especially so given that OOo is such an international community with many, many languages spoken, though English remains the language for development and general communication. But for those for whom English is not just the second but fourth language, meeting in person and seeing the real smile not the smiley makes a difference.

My regret: I could attend only a few panels, and I evidently missed a lot of the really good ones. My excuse? I was pressed into meeting after meeting and listened to vendors show their ideas. I don't think I am in wrong to say that this year saw more vendors with clever solutions attend with briefcases in hand. Startups like what we offer, to be sure, and not only startups. Look at IBM, with 1M downloads of its derived product Symphony in just the first week or so: OOo has achieved what is utterly remarkable, a recognizable position in the market, and all without meaningful marketing money being spent. Why is this so remarkable? Well, to sell a commodity like an office suite, some companies must spend astronomical sums, hundreds of millions of dollars each year. We spend nothing. But we have a community, not a consumer base, and that makes all the difference between our incandescent rise and the others' steady descent. The cost of vendor lockin is too high, and freedom is, well, free.

Update on the native Mac Port

Ran in to Éric B, and he politely corrected me on last blog, in which I described the latest Mac port to Aqua as being purely cocoa'd. It's not: just some elements. That said, it is still quite nice and really amazingly fast. Nice work!

Of course, now is the time to make it pure cocoa, so if you want to join.....

Fun at OOoCon with the new Aqua Port

Haven't slept much since I arrived here in Barcelona for OOoCon 2007 and feel I should get biological but I have to write that not only did I do my morning presentation using the new native-Aqua port but also my afternoon one--and had no, none port-related glitches. It worked brilliantly.

Chapeau to Éric Bachard, Philipp Lohmann, and everyone else who has worked furiously and tirelessly to make the native port possible these last few months (!). I, along with the rest of the millions of Mac users thank you--but I am ahead of myself: the port is still Alpha.

I'm downloading now the very latest one that Éric posted to his ftp site and I believe it's purely Cocoa, not Carbon, plus it fixes lots of issues.

Again, this is a native port: no X11, just the very fast OOo application running natively on Mac OS X Aqua.

The IBM Agreement

The IBM agreement announced today represents a milestone in OpenOffice.org's trajectory. It's not just that IBM is implicitly confirming OpenOffice.org's mission--others have done that, not least of which we can number Redflag--but that it is also throwing its weight behind OpenOffice.org's ODF implementation, as well as furthering it with its accessibility technology.

That last element is particularly relevant for governments, which righty insist on technology all can use, not just a segment of the population. Governments previously chary of committing to the ODF and OpenOffice.org because they were either unsure of accessibility support or unsure of the project's future and nature, may think twice now, assured that the technology will be there--only better and more flexible than the proprietary alternative.

Built by thousands of contributors working from every region of the globe and backed by some of the world's most powerful and visionary IT companies, OpenOffice.org is hardly any longer a thing of wonder, an alternative suite whose main virtue was that it could do for free what others did for a fee. Rather, it can rightly claim to be the first choice and also the right choice.

Oh, memory

Michael Meeks' blog today, 10 Sept. was pointed out to me by more than one person earlier today. Meeks is a reliable blogger and his entries are useful for keeping up with OOo development. Today, his blog focused on the IBM agreement but took a nice swipe at me. And what he wrote surprised me.

"Louis Suarez Potts famously re-assured IBM (Don) in Koper that no-one in the community thinks not-releasing your OO.o code-changes is anti-social (or words to that effect). As a person who had spent some time hammering Don on this topic the night before, I was appalled."

"Famously"? Wow. No, I do not recall saying what Meeks attributes to me at all. And second, as I pointed out to Meeks, not only do I recall that evening session quite clearly (I had put the session together and moderated it), I actually have a public and published record of saying exactly the opposite: that I and the community wanted then and even before that night two years ago for IBM to contribute its work to the project. That community is quite pleased with today's announcement, as am I. It culminates several years' of waiting and proves very clearly the merits of the project both Meeks and I work on. Expect now a brilliant and I am sure interesting future.

Interesting new extension--Teacher's Pet

Teacher's Pet is a menu pulldown that can be added to OpenOffice.org as an extension. Still in Beta, the menu features many clever and useful scripts as commands that will surely help teachers, students (of all levels) and writers. As far as I know, it's available only in English now.

Download it and see how it works with your OpenOffice.org. The URL: www.teachers-pet.org.

Changes

At the beginning of this month I left CollabNet, which I had been with since October 2000--
since the release of OpenOffice.org code to the public. I am pleased to announce that I've joined Sun Microsystems, whose Hamburg team I've been working with on a daily basis since that same October.

My role as Community Manager will not significantly change, at least not immediately. To the best of my abilities, I'll continue to represent the community, impartially and fairly, to all interested individuals, organizations, companies, governments, and to help manage and articulate community activity so that the entire project benefits. And I'll continue with my efforts to involve the world in developing and using OpenOffice.org, the product and the project, as well as the ODF. My goals will thus not change. In fact, I think they will be strengthened by my new affiliation, as it will give me the vantage point needed to act on behalf of OpenOffice.org and its interests within Sun as well.

How will this affect my relations with other companies, groups, individuals outside of Sun interested in OOo and the community? OOo is a large an inclusive project built by a community, and I will continue to represent that community. In this way, there will be no difference to the way I represented myself when I worked for CollabNet.

From Russia to London

The great thing about the area of London where I am (Hackney/Shoreditch, staying at the very cool Hoxton Hotel on Great Eastern) is that there is a lot of free wifi, including at my hotel and in the many bars, cafés and other venues. (Of course This characteristic was not shared by the airport lounge at Frankfurt, where I spent 6 hours after missing my flight to Moscow (visa issues), but it did have endless quantities of unnourishing but tasty and even inebriating comestibles. I arrived in Moscow at 5:05, and was spirited to my hotel, the Izmailovo, by a taxi driver I got after dickering and who believed that it was *okay* to go 160 km/hour down the freeway. The cost of the thrill ride--1500 rubles--seemed almost worth my life. The hotel was interesting--large, near the folk market (the Vermisage), popular with Russians and the stray tourist, and a lot unlike where I've stayed before; it had slot machines in the lobby, as in Vegas, and I should have played: my lucky day, for I survived the ride and was there, in Moscow.

But I had only a couple of hours or so to get ready for the conference, Moscow Interop, where Brian Behlendorf was also speaking (we were on some of the same panels) and that time could have been better spent ironing my very wrinkeled shirt, drinking coffee, eating (the cafeteria for breakfast offered an amazing smorgasbord of Russian food, and I tried it all), having a shower, shaving. It was already, at 7, about 30--Moscow's been having a freakish heat wave--and humid, too.

Brian and I got together, and with him leading, made our way via the magnificent, triumphant subways to the event. Muscovites don't really believe in air conditioning--they should (and at some point I thought I could make a fortune selling fans)--and the hall where the event was taking place, though auspiciously modern looking was only slightly less hot and only slightly less humid than the blazing moist outdoors. But it was tolerable, and the coffee was good, as was the cake, and there was lots of water. For our first panel, which included Eric Allman of Sendmail, as well as Brian and me, I'd gone only about 26 hours without sleep, but this is (unfortunately) not too unusual for such events; for the event in São Paulo, in April, I also presented right off the plane, and I went probably 30 hours without sleep. It's fairly easy to do, and adrenaline does a good job of keeping one awake.

So, the panel went well, though the questions by the moderator and audience ran all over the gamut. Quite a lot of them focused on OOo and ODF, a few on starting open source projects, and things related to their management: fairly normal, in other words. The second presentation could have been more interesting, but I will chalk it up to translations effects; normally, I wake people up, as tend to be animated. Anyway, the presentation ended, and then it was a series of meetings--the real point of being there, to be the community ombudsman, and see what I could do to resolve issues and focus attention on the RU community, and viewing a brilliant presentation (it merits its own entry) of Gnosis, a very cool implementation of the ODF for presentations--concluding with a dinner with the community members, to which Brian was included. That went quite well, and was rather fun, even without vodka (indeed, no vodka at all this trip!). And by this time, it was more than 40 hours without sleep.

The terrible thing about Moscow, is that the internet in hotels is so horribly expensive. By the time we returned to the Izmailovo, both Brian and I were likely really needing to catch up on things. Not only did I have a pile of things to follow up on, but also had to do my usual work. But internet access cost--get this--1200 rubles (25/dollar) for 600 minutes!! In cash. But I decided to do it anyway: there were too man pressing things.

The return to London the next day was accelerated by the heat: it was too hot to wander around Moscow with a suitcase and though I wanted to meet with some Sun people, they were busy in the morning. So I just headed for the airport an hour early. It too was expensive and lacking in efficient air conditioning, though it was cooler than the 36° outside, on the runway.

Since my return, I've been doing follow up and also further organizing the upcoming OOoCon. Actually, come to think of it, that's what I've been mostly doing: OOoCon. (Plus lots of other things.) OOoCon entails contacting would-be sponsors, such as Google, which promised money last year but has yet to pay up (Zaheda Bhorat of Google was a keynote speaker), and Intel, which is also delinquent. I find it amazing that such extraordinarily rich companies should have such a cavalier attitude... Especially in cases like Google, which in many ways is the largest ODF implementation (via Google Docs and Spreadsheet) and which claims to help open source projects. It would be nice to see concrete evidence of that help.

As well, I've been organizing a strong education push. Both Brian and I know that you don't just find FOSS developers, though that is always possible. But you can help yourself by helping to make them. (Or, you get companies to allocate them.) To this end, I've been working with numerous colleges, universities and the like in Canada, the US, Europe, Russia, India, China, Brazil (wherever I have been and then some) to see about getting OOo and other FOSS projects taught as part of the curriculum, as well as implementing GSoC kind of programs. It's also a lot of work, as it entails, again, an investment. But the payoff is huge. GSoC programs are great--call them fellowships--but they will only ever select a few students, though they will affect the course material, as professors and students seek to maximize their chances. Nevertheless, we need a stronger effort, the inclusion of OOo and other FOSS projects in regular course work. Mozilla (and to a degree, OOo) now have students work on extensions for Firefox and OOo in class, as part of their coursework. It's just a start. We need to move documentation, content, workflows, sample curricula, etc. to environments that are available to all; and we need, too, to have material and mentors to help teach the collaborative techniques that characterize FOSS. I started something like this in 2004, and in 2006, Sophie Gautier and I formed the Education project. But we need to move ahead, both on the OOo and more generally FOSS front.

In Memoriam

I learned Monday morning that my friend G. Roderick Singleton had passed away, felled by a heart attack. I knew Gerry through OpenOffice.org; he was one of the leads of the Documentation Project and a staunch supporter of OpenOffice.org. At his demise, he and I, along with a few others, had just embarked on a new and interesting project.

Gerry was gruff, grizzled, honest, smart, experienced; never cynical, never inconsiderate. Did the community know that he spent an enormous amount of time caring after his aged and frail parent? We tend to forget that people in the open-source community also have real lives. Gerry's integrity was exemplary, his work inspiring, at least to me. When my wife and I moved to Toronto from Berkeley, he made an effort to introduce me to the local Toronto open-source groups and to make me feel at home; he succeeded. Our schedules, however, made close work difficult, but he tried, all the same, to keep in touch with me, and possessed a quality of patience I hope one day to have.

I will miss him, the community will miss him.

Libre Graphics Meeting

The Libre Graphics Meeting is taking place 4-6 May in Montréal (now). I spoke there Friday, at 09:45. I'm fairly excited about the conference, which touts itself as being, "all about participation. Artists and developers, feel free to bring your laptops and show us what you can (and can't yet) do. Organise a BOF about your favourite project or feature. We're aiming for a bazaar."

The conference's aim was true. Unlike a lot of other conferences, this one was for developers, not marketers or sales people. Louis Desjardins, the lead organizer, arranged it so that people actually spoke to each other, crossed boundaries, learned about what other projects were doing; it was terrific. I'm not a developer, but I was able to establish liaisons with the KOffice (Krita) leads, the Scribus people, and numerous others, all with the aim of bridging differences and collaborating, technologically and socially, so that users and developers can learn about FOSS solutions and use them that much easier.

I pointed out that all compatible FOSS projects can consider working with OOo and exploiting ("leveraging") its immense momentum and popularity. Even having links--friendship or partnership--on our website to these FOSS projects would help not only the projects *and* OOo but also users. The user wanting, say, a desktop publisher, can think about Scribus; she might not have if she hadn't learned of them because us. And that's just one example. And, from my perspective, having ODF implemented by Scribus and other relevant applications seems desirable, though not as compelling as perfecting import functionality. What is important here is ultimately making it easier for users and developers to use and work on the code without the mystery shrouding proprietary applications. One other possibility for collaborating with Scribus: the application is very discriminating regarding fonts; they have to meet specifications that go far beyond what most other applications demand. We discussed, over lunch, the possibility of establishing a library of fonts ("library" in the old sense: a repository) that have been vetted according to Scribus' standards but can also work with other compliant applications, such as OOo. This would not only help Scribus but also, if feasible, OOo. It is worth following up on.

Along these lines, I discussed (or vice versa) open fonts with SIL.org leads Nicolas Spalinger and Dave Crossland. Nicolas was brilliant, and showed me what his project has been doing. OOo already works with them, though given the importance of fonts I'd expect that more collaboration will occur. I asked Nicolas to send me more information about the project, as I am sure it will make an interesting article.

But back to the conference. One of the coolest things about the event (aside from the fact that it was in Montréal, during one of the most beautiful set of spring days I've seen, situated at the peak of the Université de Montréal), was the superb broadsheet published by the conference team. It shows how *good* Scribus is (I assume it was made using it--Louis D. is a project member) but also showcased the seriousness of the effort put into the event.

I only wish I didn't have to leave. The conversations I've had here have been tremendously useful and productive--but of course, that all remains to seen. One thing to talk, another to do.

Updates on MS Protester

Xinhua has more on the protester who demonstrated against Bill Gates's Beijing performance. Evidently, the protester was none other than the esteemed "WangKaiyuan, chief China representative of the Linux Professional Institute (LPI)." According to the article, "Wang was said to be the first to introduce the international free software day to China. Before joining the LPI, he was with CSDN.net and worked for the Open Source Software Promotion Union in 2006."

FOSS is important in China. As the article states, "Industry experts say Linux has taken off in China, largely because of massive government procurement, but the Chinese software firms have yet to see the explosive growth experienced by their Western competitors due to lack of skills and customer credibility."

Let's change that. I'm going to be visiting Beijing later this May in part to discuss how to develop local communities that can work with the international ones. The virtue of FOSS, after all, is that it starts with the premise that all we do is done in the context of horizonless collaboration.

Miscellany - 20 April 2007

Probably like most people I make notes throughout the week about subjects to write on. For good or ill, I never get around to acting on these. But I thought I'd change my habit. So, a miscellany of interesting things for this week.

• There are now more than 800 signatories to the OpenOffice.org Joint Copyright Assignment form (formerly, in a different incarnation, the Copyright Assignment form). Why is this an interesting datum? By signing, each signatory has indicated an intention to contribute code or other work to the project. As with many other open-source projects, we require contributors to jointly assign copyright to the copyright holder of OpenOffice.org, or Sun Microsystems. The author (or original copyright holder) is free to retain copyright over her work, so she (or, as is often the case, the company) can do what she wants with her property. Assigning copyright however allows OOo greater agility. Among the stakeholders who have signed, one can note Novell, Intel, Redflag, Good-Day, Red Hat, and many other large and small companies. You can see who all has signed; the information is public. Signing is not the same as contributing, and contributing is not the same as developing code. Given the nature of OOo's source, most of those (the vast majority) who contribute code, who develop it, are employees of companies which have a stake in the application. But this is the nature of FOSS today: it is by no means the domain of the radical and rebellious individual, though he exists in numbers, but it is a strategy of production and distribution, and one that many companies, large and small, are embracing.

• Earlier this week The Register had a short article and an accompanying poll on what we use on our desktop, "MS Office versus the browser." The poll is now closed, and the data are interesting, and of the 4,800 who responded:

• MS Office 2003 or earlier is used by more than 60%; OpenOffice.org by nearly 20%, and MS Office 2007 by slightly more than 10%. That latter figure surprises me, as I can't really figure out why anyone would use 2k7. Shifting to it, to Vista is not trivial; it requires, in fact, the switcher to suffer more pain than a migration to Linux or Mac OS X, only it's a whole lot more expensive. I am however reassured by the large number of OOo users.

• MS Office 2k7 is not the only languishing MS product: there is also Vista. The Inquirer has a rather good article on MS in China and its more or less desperate attempts to get people to buy Vista. Evidently, it's lowered the price to 3 USD for a bundled edition. The situation is still hopeless, I'd imagine, as pirated versions of XP and earlier versions will prove very effective competitors, I'd imagine, especially as there seems to be a withering lack of compelling reasons to actually *buy* the thing. The author of the article, Charlie Demerjian, argues that MS can't bully effectively anymore, and as there are real and better alternatives out there, it has lost the game. I tend to agree, but am not about to hold my breath while the Titanic of 20th century software sinks. It will take a long while and its sinking cause a lot of damage. Rather, I'd like to force attention on what we can do now, in the anticipated wake, how we can reclaim the desktop, how we can shape it in ways that are more interesting and more open.

• And it is by no means the case that MS is without power. In Florida, there was a State Senate bill that would mandate open standards. It was killed, Robin MIller tells us, by MS "Men in Black":
        "It was just a bit of text advocating open data formats that was slipped into a Florida State Senate bill at the last minute with no fanfare, but within 24 hours three Microsoft-paid lobbyists, all wearing black suits, were pressuring members of the Senate Committee on Governmental Operations (COGO) to remove the words they didn't like from Senate bill 1974."

MS is frighteningly powerful; money buys influence, allows influence to circulate. It costs money to go to the legislature, to hang around there, to be informed, to take people out to lunch, and so on. But, the citizen's vote can level a great deal, and letters by informed citizens are also very powerful. As Robin writes, "And arrayed against Microsoft's financial muscle we have ... you. That is, we have Linux users and open source advocates and public-spirited citizens who know enough about this issue to explain to their representatives why open data formats are important." If you live in Florida, write your state representative. State your desire for a level playing field, for a democratic format, for the reasonable and responsible expenditure of your tax dollars.

• Of course, one can also protest, in the classic political way. In Beijing, the AP reports, a "protester calling for free computer software and open source programming crashed a speech Friday by Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates at one of China's top universities." He was silenced by security and apparently unharmed. But it seems as if Gates is, according to the AP, "very popular on Chinese campuses." This makes me wonder. Do they know what he represents elsewhere in the world? Or is it just the amazing success of the company, abstracted from its context--how it got so wealthy--that evokes the admiration?

Updates on OOo and Wikis

So, shortly after I posted my entry on OpenOffice.org and Wikis, I was happily informed that in fact there are tools that do what I want already in existence and more is being developed. See:

* http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Odt2Wiki

To install the export filter:

* Create the file Odt2Wiki.xslt:
o Go here #Odt2Wiki.xslt
o Select all
o Paste it to a new text file
o Save it as Odt2Wiki.xslt
* Start OpenOffice.org 2.0.
* From Tool choose XML Filter Settings.
* choose New and in General fill the form with the following data:
o Filter name: Odt2Wiki
o Application: OpenOffice.org Writer (.odt)
o Name of file type: Odt2Wiki
o File extention: txt
* Choose Transformation and fill the form with the following data:
o XSLT for Export: put the full path to Odt2Wiki.xslt

(There are also alternatives; see the wiki article for more.)

I'll test this later on today. Obviously, it would be great if it could be packaged as an easy (easier) to install extension (and maybe it's been done), and even cooler if we could then publicize this on major wiki sites....

OOo and Wikis

We all love wikis now. They are the preferred means of collaborating on documents, as they do not require sophisticated tools or knowledge,and you can do work on one just about anywhere there is Internet access. The drawback, of course, is that there is a plethora of wiki implementations and each has its own conventions, and though it takes a few minutes to figure out the basics, it takes longer to create wikis that look good. It’s also--and I guess this is more to the point--inelegant to have such a medley of difference.

Ideally, we could all agree on a standard set of basic conventions, and that would be good, but that only would satisfy one desire. I would still like to have the documents I create using OpenOffice.org, say, transportable (magically) to a wiki. Oh, I don’t mean complex presentations or spreadsheets; I mean fairly simple text documents--but with formatting. I can do a version of this now, by saving such as an HTML document, but why not just have “wiki” option instead? The file would be saved in a particular wiki format or even immediately posted to the desired target, as one can with blogs via our extension now. Logically, this could be an extension.

Of course, it would not give users a real collaborative tool--unless one could also engineer the extension to *read* wikis (all? or just some that comply with a putative standard?). Users could then edit asynchronously or concurrently, and collaboration would be that much more advanced.

So, here is the question: how difficult would it be to create such an extension for OOo? And think of the very useful results!

Brazil--4Linux Pre-fisl, fsl 8.0

The trip to São Paulo was uneventful and actually pleasant .Since Air Canada moved to its new terminal, and since I’ve been able to use the Maple Leave Lounge (due to my huge trove of accumulated miles), travel has gotten more pleasant. But I still can’t really sleep on planes. Fortunately, that usually doesn’t matter: giving speeches and trying to make them interesting and engaging to a crowd that can probably only understand a portion of what I say, is enough to wake anyone.

The 4Linux Pre-Fisl 8.0 event in São Paulo is one such. I gave a presentation on OpenOffice.org later on that day---an hour or so from when I first drafted this--to what seemed to be a packed room, of between 150 and 100 persons. The conference as a whole was booked. Evidently, the organizers had planned for no more than 200; 800 registered, some encouraged by their employer (IBM had a public blog on the subject). This level of interest, employer mandated or not, is encouraging, to put it mildly. It means that several key enterprises are recognizing that the only way to get a cadre of developers able to swim in free software waters is to encourage their development. As such, it’s probably not too different from any other professional development. Call it a coming of age ritual, to tell employees and would-be employees that knowing about free software, Linux, OOo, etc., is a real advantage, not just a gesture of personal (and possibly useful, but probably indifferent) accomplishment, but rather something that can lead directly to a job, middle-class things, security. Free software comes of age when the knowledge itself of how to use it is itself a commodity, something that can be exchanged, ultimately, for money.

But this is not new. Red Hat and other companies have been offering certification for Linux for some time; my observation is belated. But the same cannot quite be said of OpenOffice.org, which is still seen as the free alternative.

I guess I don’t see it quite like that, for that description strikes me always as defining MS Office as the “real” and OOo as the imitation, and it isn’t. It has it’s own powers, its own characteristics. Yes, both do the same things, but OOo can do so much more, virtue of its openness. Being closed is expensive, and some of that expense comes in the form of fighting an always already obsolescence. (Which raises an interesting question; If Apple gains more market share, will it lose its special monopoly status? will it open-source Aqua? There might be reason for it, as an operating system is different than a music player--look only to the iPhone issue and the strong control evidently exercised by Apple, and the consequent delay in release date for 10.5. Resource shortages bite, and bite all the harder for the proprietary. Open source helps resolve the resource bottleneck, though it does not axiomatically solve it; but it opens a window.)

But this entry is supposedly about Brazil. After 4Linux, I walked around the rich, policed, cosmopolitan and utterly modern centre and Jardines section of São Paulo, before settling at a restaurant that had free wi-fi (did they know that was one of the reasons I went in? It was also a pretty good restaurant and had the further virtue of having dark, isolated tables, the better to see my screen by.) Doing work in a café, or pleasant restaurant has its plusses. (Or is that just modern loneliness masquerading as doing work? I mean, I like going to cafes for work because it’s reassuring--fun?--to be in a crowd, to see others around me, to feel that I am part of this, although what “part” means is somewhat in dispute: think of Emerson.)

The great thing about 4Linux was that it was focused and intense and also popular. I got the feeling that things were accomplished, or at least were initiated. And because it was small, it had a different character. I suspect that in the next few years it will grow quickly, as a market is there for such events.

Witness this year’s amazing fisl 8.0. Gusatavo Pacheco, one of the organizers and a key member of BrOffice, the Brazilian OpenOffice.org distribution (sorry, guys, I kept referring to the group by its old name, BrOpenOffice), invited me early, and for the last few months I’ve been looking forward to the event. I had been before, in 2005, and recalled how good and very different the event was. I also believed then, and believe even more now, that fisl is the most important free software event of the year, for the future lies, in development and distribution and use, not with the developed nations but the developing; not with the rich whose wealth maintains the luxury of liberal copyright laws but with those who make that wealth possible.

it was held this year in a large convention centre outside the city, not in the university--not enough room. I don’t know how many thousands were there, but every day it was packed. In part, the impression of a crowd was created by making the exhibition space the central meeting space, and the Sun booth, where I hung out most (when I wasn’t being interviewed or in meetings), was probably the most popular. (Part of that was because great expresso and hot chocolate was offered for free there. Banco do Brasil, which also had a booth, offered the same from the same machine but it wasn’t nearly as popular, so it wasn’t just the pulchritude of the barristas nor the excllence of the coffee: it was the fact that the booth was a cool endroit, with really famous developers hanging out, answering questions and demoing Sun’s latest. People were quite seriously having a good time there.) But the specialness of the event had more to do with the balance of the crowd than anything else. There were students, government officials, businesses; no one faction dominated, and there was no sense, none at all, that the space was a market where people were being sold something. Missing was the awful thumping music that dominates Linux Worlds, the horrific fluorescent alienation we see there, too. Instead, students hung out, spoke passionately about the code and its social implications, and connected. I commented to Simon P.: this is paradise, and I meant that it was a social space devoid of unpleasantness and full, instead, of a sense of friendship and cooperation.

Well done Gustavo! and my thanks to your team.

The only drawback was that I was unable to attend more panels. Alas, I was stuck in meetings, interviews, and on the second day, at UFRGS (I am sure the name is wrong, but I write this offline), a graduate university, where Josh Berkus, Minya Lee, and I lectured/presented on our respective projects. My lecture was fast, to the point and energetic. i pointed out that the most important things we need to do now in OOo (by my lights) is refactor and also extract the ODF functionality, and that it’s not easy, but it is interesting. And that these students, all obviously capable, could do far worse things than dive in. I’m pretty sure it went over well--students, at least, were pretty enthusiastic afterward. But I need to work with their professors, for I want to integrate free software, especially OOo, in university coursework. This has been my agenda for several years now, and it’s finally paying off, with schools in Oregon and Toronto getting on board. (Both have worked with Mozilla, and Seneca has done the most, and it’s impressive.) The potential of this plan is not just to have more users (that will happen) but developers who are familiar both with the architecture and technology, as well as with open source techniques. And, it is also a strategic step for open access. Last thing anyone wants is for the work a student does to be impeded by closed licenses.

My presentation over well, but I was really happy that Erwin Tenhumberg’s on the ODF complemented what I said so well. For i didn’t focus that much on the ODF (it was not my topic, and besides, I did that last year, when I presented via ISDN/video). What I did find interesting is that most of the discussion outside of our lectures had to do with free software, not ODF. People recognized the importance of open standards but were open source was the subject.

This was especially so in the multi-hour BrOffice community meeting I sat in on (and during which I tried to ask questions in Portuguese: my apologies to the speakers of that beautiful language!). The meeting had several highlights, not least of which was Carlos De Menezes’ presentation on the Java-based grammar checker, CoGroo. It works, and is being translated to English, though as he explained, he needs native speakers who are also linguists to work on it. The potential of this checker should not go unstated. Think of Google Docs with a good grammar checker, or of the many mail clients with one. Other presenters (and I apologize for having lost the paper on which your names were recorded) spoke to case studies--Mina Gerais, etc. OOo is moving fast.

I write this last paragraph sitting in Terminal 1 of Gaurulhos Int’l. airport. It’s not a nice airport, though at least it is not steaming hot. But it has a ghastly oversupply of fluorescent lighting, very indifferent restaurants (including a giant McDonalds) and not enough space. I’d be in the executive lounge, if they’d let me in, but I can’t go there until I check in,and I can’t check in until 3 hours before my flight takes off. I still have an hour.

Toward Informatic Autonomy

Toward Informatic Autonomy
fisl 8.0, Porto Alegre, Brazil, April 2007

Louis Suárez-Potts, PhD
Copyright (c) Louis Suárez-Potts
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License





Introduction
I want to talk about where OpenOffice.org is and where we are going; to give you a report on the project and open an invitation. But I also want to speak to the logic of free software collaboration and reconsider the stakes at play. And I want to listen to what you have to say. I don't want to just say what I think you should do—we've all heard lectures like that and once is enough.

For in many ways, the future not only of OpenOffice.org but of a lot of free software lies with you, working as leaders in a partnership with other nations. It lies with meeting the challenges of coordination, education, development, distribution; challenges of poverty and infrastructure and bureaucratic and political resistance; all challenges that you are meeting now. The story of intellectual property and of the world's wealth is a story that we are all now rewriting. No one nation or region can any longer rightly claim dominance. Is it too much to assert that empire is in twilight? I don't think so.

But this twilight period is fragile—countering hegemonic power always is, as that power has deep resources and vast momentum; it can, for instance, buy its way back. But we know all this, and we know, too, that resistance is infinitely creative and resourceful, but only if able to use tactics and techniques that allow for the free exchange of ideas.

Resistance to hegemonic power means doing what benefits your community—your local community most. For us, it means in this case using free software and it means building free software. And that is my cue to start discussing OpenOffice.org more directly.

The state of the project
OpenOffice.org has never been strong or better, and is growing daily, as a project, a product, a community, throughout the world. We owe this growth—this world changing growth—to you: those who, like Carlos Dantas de Menezes, who created the enormously useful grammar checker CoGrOO for Brazilian Portuguese, and the Brazilian OpenOffice.org team, who have localized the application and distributed it, and ensured that millions here in Brazil, in the favelas in the cities, everywhere, can use it in their language, for free.

This achievement, of people working together all over the world, with local efforts collaborating with international ones, has enormous ramifications for how we live today and tomorrow. OpenOffice.org gives users the power to produce not just office documents, and thus the power to enter the 21st century as equals—but just about anything else: it's a productivity suite with no horizons. Because the application uses the OpenDocument format, or the ODF, as it is more popularly known, as it is default file format, and because the ODF is an open standard, maintained by an international consortium and not by any one company, and because it is infinitely adaptable, flexible, and powerful, for all these reasons, OpenOffice.org is a tool that gives users extraordinary power.

It gives you the power to produce a vast range of work that you can share or save or edit using other applications, without the anxiety that your friends must have the same application or that you must renew your own end user license with the company that created the application you used. The ODF, the file format, has been implemented by numerous applications already, meaning that a file crated using OpenOffice.org or StarOffice or IBM Workplace or KOffice can be edited using any other implementation. With the ODF, with OpenOffice.org, there is no vendor lockin. And because the ODF can be implemented by both proprietary and free software, it gives corporations and governments relief. They can continue with purchasing patterns established in the last twenty years, where they buy support and training and the application all from the same vendor, while still benefiting from the virtues of free software—flexibility as well as little to no cost. This is why city, provincial, and federal governments in Latin America, in Europe, Asia, Africa; in Australia and Canada, and even the US, have been mandating the ODF. It gives power to people in a way that is friendly to commerce at home and abroad.
It gives you the power to truly own your work. But this power is diluted if users must create their work using the language of empire, English, and not their own; unnecessary dependencies are imposed. So: OpenOffice.org in your language is rightly seen as a crucial step toward informatic autonomy and economic power. I mean by this term, "informatic autonomy" being able to control the documents, files, or more generally, the intellectual property, you create, as well as the tools that create them, like OpenOffice.org. Its opposition is naturally, "informatic dependency," which means being dependent on the vendor for your intellectual property. With informatic dependency, for all the work you do, you are primarily a consumer.

The disadvantages of being only consumers of the tools for participating fully in the informatic economy, the economy of the 21st century and the key to other development, are enough to give one pause. The most obvious risk is losing control over one's intellectual property. But the risks pile up. With little control over the means of producing intellectual property, one must depend on those who have control—the vendor; and inevitably, Brazil, Latin America—and also India and other developing state—could become informatic backwaters, clients to extraordinarily rich and powerful vendors whose only real concern is their profit. So much for freedom.

No one wants this future. We all want a Brazil, and a world, that has taken FOSS seriously, as a consumer and producer. But it demands formidable investment, and not just by volunteers, but also by government and businesses. It requires government to think not just a year, two, or even five but decades in advance and to make investments in education and training that may have no clear immediate benefit but which will pay off with a professional cadre able to act on Brazil's promise as a leader in Latin America and the world.


Breaking dependencies
When I was in India last January, I presented to students at several institutions on how to participate in OpenOffice.org and also how to start an open-source project. (I'd be delighted to make my slides on the topic available.) I also presented to government and business executives on OpenOffice.org. Although the actual particulars and emphasis of the messages differed according to audience—I wasn't about to speak on how to develop OpenOffice.org to the President's IT policy people—the basic message stayed the same::

• That OpenOffice.org can address user needs with greater security, ease of use, and of course enormous cost savings; and
• That sustaining OpenOffice.org is extraordinarily important.

India, a land of 1.1 billion people and less than half the size of Brazil, has a large technologically sophisticated class. Yet for all the technological training I saw, and for all the emphasis on grasping the 21st century by the horns, the default approach to free software was as a user, not producer. "Free" software was primarily interesting because it cost nothing, not because it gives the user the ability, even the responsibility, to be a producer, as well. India is not alone. For most of the world, free software is just a free commodity. The logic of informatic dependency has not been fully broken, and the power that free software represents has not been fully appreciated.

This situation is changing, but from what I could see in India, many of the efforts are still young and in need of coordination. Important federal bureaucrats remain unpersuaded that free software is the answer, let alone a logical place for scarce resources. Many still believe that it makes more sense to pay Microsoft yet more millions—millions!--than to build a local economy based on knowledge and skill that can not only sustain itself but expand. Yet I am optimistic, for at the heart of the desire to work on free software is the realization that not only is the freedom to think and act creatively and collaboratively vastly enjoyable and rewarding but that what has been produced, the software itself, works, and beautifully.

Look at Firefox or at OpenOffice.org: these are but two desktop applications that work better than their proprietary equivalents, have fewer security holes, are extensible, and are free—to be worked on, to be customized, to be changed, to be used.

I used to use Safari. But Safari is not as standardized as Firefox and it does not read Web files as well as Firefox nor save them in the now standard way, and it also looks boring, compared to Firefox. With Firefox, I can change its look, I can add extensions, I can do things with it that are different. I can even add an extension that allows me to read OpenDocument format files. As a consequence, I no longer use Safari.

Firefox is persuasive because it is better, not because it is free, for Safari is also free, as it is included in Mac OS X. OpenOffice.org presents a similar argument. For the vast majority of users, OpenOffice.org is simply better. They can alter its appearance, they can add an ever-growing number of extensions, they can integrate it with other applications, and they can work more efficiently knowing that if they choose to save their documents in the ODF format, they will stay readable as digital documents far longer than any proprietary format. And with somewhere more than 50 million users throughout the world, the community of users is enormous and possessed of an formidable momentum. I fully expect and would make it a challenge, to have 75 million users by the end of this year. That would represent a very sizable portion of the estimated overall office suite market. And those users who have chosen to use OpenOffice.org would have done so in all likelihood because it is better.

Knowing that there is such a market and knowing that people choose software because it works better than the competitor's and is freely available, should be enough for governments and businesses to make rational decisions. Yet many politicians and bureaucrats persist in choosing Microsoft. Why? Well, for one, when threatened with market loss, Microsoft spends money—a lot of it. They lower the price (and alter the product) to accommodate the poorer countries. They spend money on costly localization efforts; they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising campaigns. And, besides, many are habituated to Office. As with cigarettes, or other addictive drugs, which we all know are really bad for us, rationality does not come into play when habit and money speak.

It's time to break that habit and invest where it matters: on education, on projects that give freedom, as well as further the local IT ecosystem, and refrain from throwing good money after bad, or on those that wrap yet more chains around us. What we all want is informatic autonomy, not dependence.


Achieving informatic autonomy
How do we achieve this autonomy? Put another way, how best to invest? I can't answer that, of course, though I do like making suggestions—it comes from being trained as an academic--and later this next month, in Montreal, Moscow and Beijing, I'll be doing a lot of suggesting.

Also, here. Let's look at the two areas: use and development. For large-scale users, such as businesses and governments, the primary obstacle, besides the one having to do with negotiating with a multitude of open-source projects and dealing with free software licenses, like the GPL, has to do with finding support and training. It's a myth that there is no support for free software; there is, and it's often offered by huge, multinational companies, as well as by small, local businesses.

Okay, I often hear, so there is support. But our MS Office macros don't work on OpenOffice.org. And there are other minor but infinitely infuriating problems, like subtle changes in bullet points, which make many of our migrated presentations look silly.

I answer: With OpenOffice.org 2.2, which we released just a couple of weeks ago, there is not only greater compatibility with existing MS Office files but increased support for just those things that you need. We are also working on improving macro support. Still, there will surely be problems—working with the black hole of proprietary software does not make it easy. But it is still cheaper to hire a developer or two to fix those minor problems ad hoc than to renew a multi-year license with Microsoft.

But what about Office 2007? It uses a different file format, OOXML, and is pretending to be an open standard. Certainly, Microsoft would love it if it became one like the ODF, which is the ISO standard, though that seems doubtful. The format's schema—how it is defined—is forbiddingly complex and excruciatingly detailed (and at over 6,000 pages, long), contains many contradictions and has seemingly succeeded in making it nearly impossible for any other application to fully implement it. But the big question is, How well does OpenOffice.org work with Office 2007? Let's assume that some people, somewhere, are actually using it—a big assumption, for if they create files in it, their colleagues will have to have it, too, at least in order to view the full file, and from what I read and hear, not nearly as many are adopting it as had been imagined by Microsoft.

At the moment, there are various translators that allow users to work with some Office 2007 files, and soon there will be a native translator that will give OpenOffice.org users superior capabilities. In short, one can have a hybrid environment, meaning, in fact, that there are even fewer reasons not to migrate to OpenOffice.org. In such a hybrid environment, some could be using MS Office, others OpenOffice.org and its derivatives—or other applications that implement the ODF.

Yet I see this period as transitional. What is important is that files created and distributed be freely available to all, and not just to a few who can afford the extraordinary costs of some proprietary software, and that the tools for content production be open.
Besides the political reasons I sketched above, there is also the pragmatic reason openness is good: better products. Remember the example of Firefox vs. Safari? Well, OpenOffice.org is, as I mentioned, extensible, too. And even more: it can move beyond the limits of its legacy, in a way that is close to impossible for others.

I mean by this that the office suite embodies its legacy of being designed for computers isolated from each other and needing integrated applications utilizing a common file format and interface. It is a continuation of the days before the Internet, before deep connectivity, before Google, before mashups. It is a holdover from the 20th century.

And it's still useful. Most of us do not have huge Internet pipes and infinite bandwidth, and for complex documents, such as certain spreadsheets, where each cell may house a formula, having a complete and feature-rich suite on your desktop is necessary.
But for the other elements, the current exciting state of Internet applications allows us to create what's effectively our own suites ad hoc. What is crucial here, of course, is again, the file format (interfaces have more or less converged). It counts for nothing if you create documents limited by their format. That's why OpenOffice.org is even more relevant. It gives you the power to take the ODF-generating element and move beyond the suite. We're serious about this, and have created the ODF Toolkit project (odftoolkit.openoffice.org), whose express aim is to disentangle ODF generating code from OpenOffice.org. Any logical application could utilize this free code.
An obvious example: Say you are writing an email. This happens to me a lot. At some point, the email becomes an essay, or a blog. Now, if you are using an HTML capable client, you can add HTML formatting. But it's not clear you could then cut and paste it into your application and expect formatting to be accurately preserved. In fact, it would probably look awful. But imagine now that you are using a client that can save the file as an ODF document. Formatting is preserved; what is more it can be further edited, as any ODF document, in any number of applications. I find these possibilities exciting. For by using a common file format, we eliminate the needless obstacles that 20th century technology threw at us. We return, in a way, to the pure simplicity of pencil and paper, where we could focus on creating.
OpenOffice.org gives you an unencumbered future. But getting there requires having the engineers who know how to code and work in a free-source project. It's not a question of "finding" them and then hiring them. I wish it were that simple. It's more a question of educating them.

Autonomy and education
How do we do this? How do we educate all the developers we need?
The basic logic is to open secondary and college curricula to open-source projects and to involve those projects with schools and colleges and other educational institutions. A couple of years ago, Sophie Gautier, lead of the Francophone Project on OpenOffice.org, and I created an Education project. The point was to coordinate student and educational activity related to OpenOffice.org, and it derived from work she was doing and I had been doing. I had even created a process that allowed professors and students to collaborate on OpenOffice.org and get grades. Then, around that time, Google initiated the Google Summer of Code, which prompted the project to refine its to-dos, so as to make them easier for students to do within a semester or summer.

Coincidentally, Mozilla, with greater resources than we could pull together, was doing something similar, and working with the US university Oregon State University, and the Canadian college, Seneca College, based in Toronto, where I, and Mike Shaver of Mozilla, happen to live. I had not known this, but many of the extensions we use with Firefox have been qualified or even created by the students at these colleges, who have taken to working on the extensions with enthusiasm and joy. With reason: how often did we have the opportunity, as students, to do things that really mattered? If your experience was anything like mine, most of the work I did as a student was duplicating what others had done, so that I could learn a lesson. But sometimes I think I mainly learned boredom. Not so these students, for there is nothing boring about working on open source code that millions, tens of millions will use, enjoy, and which exists not in a environment of commercial distance, but in (and for) a community.

OpenOffice.org is now also working with these same colleges and several others. As our extensions project is more clearly defined, more students and professors will participate, that is certain. But it's not just extensions. Students at both colleges, but especially at Seneca, which is leading in integrating curricula with open-source projects, students are also doing core coding. They are not being exploited; hardly. They are rather learning how to code in C++, how to solve problems in real environments, and to solve them in ways that others can utilize their solutions; they are learning how to architect complex code; and how to work with others. They are learning invaluable things that will get them jobs.

The Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where the tech-heavy city of Hyderabad is located, has understood this, and has arranged coursework with IBM to further educate students in free software. The point is not just to get the students jobs, but more important, to shift teaching coding so that it includes free software projects like Mozilla, OpenOffice.org and many others. Free software is clearly the way of the future, and it's also personally rewarding. Indeed, the lectures I presented there and elsewhere underscored the pleasures and payoffs of working with others on real subjects with actual importance.

But it's glib and ignorant to speak of including OpenOffice.org and other projects' code without fully understanding the educational situation in Brazil, so my points are to be taken more generally, that a new model of teaching code is possible with the involvement of free-software projects. Even with that caveat, there are considerable resource and logistical issues that need to be addressed.
Naturally, I cannot address them here. I can say that there are ways of articulating the relation among students, professors, and the free software project community so that no one is shocked or intimidated. And we have learned that for those students who wish to engage the community directly, they benefit by having a mentor who can show her or him what to do and how to do it.

OpenOffice.org has many community members who are willing to be mentors, and our project is justly famed for providing all community members with a friendly and constructive environment. Students who have worked in the project on code have described their experience as the best in their life—and I'm not making that up.

There are no obstacles to starting this year. We could start with extensions, which are much easier to create, as OpenOffice.org is written in C++. Or, if the students are sufficiently advanced, and I'm sure that many here are, we have listed a variety of interesting and important tasks. The issue is shaping curricula so that those tasks can be worked on, so that the work done indicates that the student has truly learned what she was supposed to learn. And I have no doubt we can help there.

The payoff for such a collaboration is huge. It is not just making a better productivity suite for all nor transforming what even counts as a suite, so that it goes beyond its legacy limitations—and even beyond Google Docs—but in giving Brazil and Latin America and elsewhere informatic autonomy and shaping them as the leaders of 21st century informatics.

Where to go for information
Below are some useful links that should help you get started. I've also included my contact information and am happy to receive messages in English, Spanish and even Brazilian Portuguese.

• Wiki main page:
• http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Main_Page
• Firefox extension:
• http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Firefox_OpenOffice.org_extension
• Getting the source:
• http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Getting_It
• Building it:
• http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Building
• Tips:
• http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Tips
• Hacker tutorials:
• http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Tutorials
• Writing error-free code:
• http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Writing_warning-free_code
• Commit rights (how this works...)
• http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Commit_Rights
• Contributing patches:
• http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Contributing_Patches
• Architecture:
• http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Architecture
• UNO
• http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Uno
• Directories:
• http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Source_code_directories
• Meeting the team on IRC:
• http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/IRC_Communication

Contact information
Louis Suárez-Potts

• louis@openoffice.org
• louis@collab.net

Location: Toronto