Trips: China, Japan

9 June sees us fly to London, where Tina will do research on India and Victorian England. A lot of Victorian Indian material is sequestered in the British libraries/museums; not a surprise. We'll probably still make a trip to India for more research, esp. in Jaipur. But for now, it's London, and this is good: I love London. While there, we'll be seeing the new production of Phèdre with Helen Mirren, and probably a lot of other shows. I just wish it were all cheaper. For us poverly Canadians, the pound weighs nearly twice our loonie, so going out for, say, pizza, means that that humble pie has suddenly transformed itself into a lordly dish. Good thing about the current recession, though: things are litte brighter for the willing traveller, and our hotel, the Hoxton, in Shoreditch, is très cool and even better than that, given the rates we were able to get.

23 June: I fly to Tokyo via Beijing to meet with IPA representatives to discuss contributing to OpenOffice.org. Japan has long been a promise and a problem. Good-Day, Inc., of Osaka has contributed substntially for almost as long as OOo has been around. Indeed, much of the localization effort (to Japanese) is due to their team, and I thank Maeda-san and his company, along with Nakata Maho, for their unstintinting contributions to developing the code into a qualified appication suitable for enterprise use.

But Good-Day is fairly alone in this endeavour. To be sure, there are many individuals and small groups who have made and who make OOo a player in Japan. But there are not enough, and that's a shame. It's a shame because the alternative--proprietary licensed material--places public and private corporations in a terrible bind of dependng their own quotidian activity on the health and interest of a very remote company. Their choice, I suppose. But is it of the people who elected the representatives to government? I wonder. I also wonder whether the recession--which, incidentally, has highlighted the economic consequences of dependency like no other lesson could--will change the view on forging sustainable and local works, such as OpenOffice.org in Japanese, for the Japanese market, supported by Japanese companies, and so on. To me, the choice seems plain. And if there are deficiencies in OOo for the market, then let's work on them. I would guess that it would be cheaper to resolve these than continue to pay, for god knows how long, the effective tax levied by proprietary companies for code that is as essential as ink and paper to the daily running of civil life.

So, I am optimistic about this meeting and hope that it opens the door to many others, with IPA, other government groups, and with more Japanese companies, some of them already deploying OOo and profiting from it. But these I shall not name here do not contribute back to the project. They thus weaken it.

China, and in particular Redflag 2000, have strongly supported OOo development. Indeed, the government (or at least a facet of it) has gone on record endorsing and pushing Foss. Redflag, which hosted the superb OOoCon last November in Beijing, where the company is located, has placed a lot of developers on the task of developing the code for the market. But, it too, is somewhat alone, an odd point, given the situation, but one I expect will change in the very near future. Of course, investing in OOo or any large Foss project, is a lot like (read: identitical to) investing in a company: you don't do it unless you have some assurance of its economic and intellectual viability. Judding Foss projects has proved notoriously difficult in this regard. What ruler do you use? Hits per page? Downloads? Bugfixes? All are suspect, as none is nicely equivalent to the usual business metrics, which can be translated to: Money in hand. So it sounds good--but that's not enough---to say that OOo has been downloaded about 200M times and that tens of millions use it and some even on a daily basis. Show me not the code but the money here, for the question inevitably comes down to, How do you survive, as a project?

Of course, the answer to that is easy, and oddly has nothing to do with altruism. It has rather everything to do with self intererst and the calculus of markets and enterprise politics. And it has to do with the interest value of the shown code to individuals and groups. OOo, as I realized on my first day back in October 2000, is immensely interesting and potentially disruptive in a way few other applications are or can be. For it is a set of tools that give users and developers the wherewithal to produce a range of documents, not just "office" ones, and the open standard(s) it uses further grant an open window to the range of Web apps that other suites cannot take advantage of.

But back to China. The immediate reason for the trip is COPU's annual event, this year in Beijing at the end of June. The event is both theatrical and, in part for that reason, qutie important. As well, it gives us participants a chance to meet ex camera with those we would probably miss. And that alone is worth the ticket.