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?