October 13 saw our birthday. Ten years is a long time and even longer when you think about it. Each day—pff. A long moment of waking, eating, exercising, loving, talking, eating, sleeping, and then again. Pause and the weekend passes with all you haven't done and look forward to the new week to come. Repeat? Hardly, each week, month, quarter differs, marked by forgotten memories recalled at odd moments, marked by the wonderful persistence of others, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, met at conferences and domestic places.
And code: evolutionary, progressing, slowly catching up with the notions of the future born of too much science fiction—but getting there, now, ten years in.
In my birthday message I couldn't describe what a profound personal and cultural and even political change we, the OOo community, have really made. Prior to our intervention on this global stage there was no cry for open standards in edocuments that had gotten any traction; there was only the acceptance of "just like a standard" because it was universally (!!) used. There was, in short, massive misunderstanding and the acceptance that the opaque status quo, where you can only accept the commodity because there is no choice.
There was no or little sense that the decisions to adopt, which is to say, buy, this or that software for desktops (numbering in the tens of millions) was anything like a political decision, and thus subject to public scrutiny and standards of accountability. Now there is. I first raised this logic sometime in 2003, 2004, at conferences, where I urged people to understand that their tax dollars were at stake when software was bought for government use, and that there were quite reasonable alternatives, both to the application and to the format.
It was a kind of "political" argument but of such a nature as irreducible to any political agenda, unless one should foolishly argue that patronage, corruption, and opacity constitute a kind of political stance. They don't. They constitute a phase in civilization that we strive to emerge from, however imperfectly, however much we slide back.
But OOo gives us the tools to step more boldly into the light. It's not a matter of insisting that one use X over Y. It's a matter of insisting that the purchasing actions be accountable, that they be defensible according to the terms we accept.
Those terms include:
- Wise use of public money:
- Spend tax revenue (and associated interest income) on tools that do the job not on brands that cost more and do more than is needed.
- Ensure that there is room for growth, both with the application and with the format used. This is another way of saying,
- NO VENDOR LOCK IN
- Comment: Vendor lockin means that it's really hard, if not financially and technologically impossible, to move away from a vendor's system, as millions of documents, and the applications required to work with them, cannot be easily transferred or ported over to another system. It's a catastrophe, and it has configured much of our software universe. But not only that. We see it with the internal combustion engine, we see it with structures of power distribution, we see it in many places: what we did long ago has consequences today—global warming comes to mind—and changing things to a more desired way is immensely, immensely difficult. But not impossible. We, modern civilization, got rid of the utterly needless lead in gasoline. We got rid of asbestos in many places. And so on. When the need is clear, the concerted effort is possible, the result achievable. I see this now with software. There has seldom been a time in human culture when the informational drama has been so stark.
- That's because there has never been a time when there were so many children needing schooling, when there were so many adults needing re-training (because their traditional ways of life have been demolished by, say, climate change), when so many are moving to cities and thus away from rural areas, and in cities, they need not just to know how to read and write but how to do that on a computer.
- And they need to be able to exchange their ideas, their readings, writings; and do the other things that demand knowledge of and access to software enabling these communications.
- And that software has to be free software, or at least based on it. Else, what are we asking of the world? That they pay a private tax to do what has, since the modern period (post Renaissance) a nearly free activity? (Paper costs money, as do pencils; but very little, and one can always find a means of writing for free. It is in a nation's interest to have a literate population: they earn more money, make for a commercial urban world, and enrich the overall nation.)
- Free software enabling the capture of thoughts and their communication is requisite for a future that is a future and not a dreary dive into the past. It is needed so that children can be taught, so that adults can communicate without cost and fear, so that new things designed to address the dramatic spectacles of our present and future lives can come into being.
- And OpenOffice.org is the key to that. Whether as we see it now, as an integrated application, or as a set of useful tools drawn from the "Cloud" is beside the point. It's the free technology unbounded by platform, license, imagination that is key, and that uses an open standard, the ODF, that frees you to choose what works for you—not for the vendor.
So, happy birthday, OpenOffice.org, and thanks to all for the support, contributions and community. We really have changed the world, we really are changing it. This first decade—Well, it was our childhood. We are reaching now, in the second decade, the next phase, and it's a phase we all look forward to. I'm proud to be a part of OpenOffice.org, to be part of the global community and to have had a small part in changing the world for the better. How many can say the same? But isn't that the point? Join us and make the difference needed.
