iPad to Launch in Canada (and Other Countries) on April 24th? - Mac Rumors

Okay, to say that I want an iPad is to be redundant, even though upon realizing this want I have to retrospectively figure out *why* I should want it, *what* I'd use it for, and so on. Indeed, even though I've long advocated the need precisely for something like this--even a tad smaller (say 12cm long)--as the iPhone sucks when it comes to being a productivity tool--try typing on it and weep in frustration--still, I have to wonder. What do I need it for? I mean, I can buy a *far* cheaper netbook, esp. later on this year, when faster ARM chip netbooks will come out and probably dive under 200 USD/CAD. They'll run Linux, they'll run OpenOffice.org, Mozilla apps, even perhaps use Google's Chrome OS. All cool, all free, all therefore cheaper--all granting freedom not hindering it-- than Apple's sugared, costly, yoke.

But such is the power of desire, and especially the mimetic(izing) desire of others that I'll have to struggle against my self. Pity that Apple's OS and apps are not also free (as in freedom): there'd be no difficult choice.

iPad to Launch in Canada (and Other Countries) on April 24th? - Mac Rumors

ODF Alliance Weblog - Edmonton

Edmonton's Chris Moore, CIO, is interviewed here by David LeDuc, the new lead of the ODF Alliance. (Marino Marcich, who led the Alliance from its inception, has a good article in opensource.com.)

Edmonton is a crucial city, one whose political and economic importance to Canada outweighs its size. So, whereas Vancouver made open-source sounds last year but seems to have little to show for all its bruiting, Edmonton is being decisive. I think we can thank Chris Moore: any transition from the status quo requires, I have learned, a driver. Absent that, we have committees upon committees, or nothing doing. And that's what has probably happened to Ontario's own ODF ambitions. But let's see. I'm still working on that.

ODF Alliance Weblog

OpenOffice market share worksheet

Drew Jensen, a stalwart OpenOffice.org community contributor, pointed us to this worksheet describing office suite market share. It should probably be posted, too, to Major OpenOffice.org Deployments - OpenOffice.org Wiki and also to our Market Share wiki, http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Market_Share_Analysis

But independent of that, it’s pretty fascinating, and revealing. But this is just a start. I want to ensure that by this time next year, or even by the end of this, our tenth year, we can point to vast, national uptake around the world.

http://ooo.baseanswers.com/ooo-market-share-ltr-logo.pdf

Five questions about building community with Chris Blizzard of Mozilla | opensource.com

Chris is usually smart and in my own discussions with him at various conferences, events, have found his take on community and what it entails interesting. A Mozilla community differs from an OpenOffice.org one, and though there are clear similarities across all community projects, the crucial distinctions in code architecture, sponsoring contributors, and originating milieu structure both the development and the state of a community at any given time.

Lately, I've been focusing less on the relative importance of license, independence, or actual social and cultural milieu and more on the brute fact of code architecture. As Linus Torvalds and others have pointed out, open source works best in a modularized environment, where what a coder does is limited to the module. That's not the case with OpenOffice.org.

Five questions about building community with Chris Blizzard of Mozilla | opensource.com

Patents Roundup: Several Defeats for Bad Types of Patents, Apple Risks Embargo, and Microsoft Lobbies Europe Intensely | Techrights

Further on *some* patents' collapse--and the possible shift in tide away from pernicious patenting......

Patents Roundup: Several Defeats for Bad Types of Patents, Apple Risks Embargo, and Microsoft Lobbies Europe Intensely | Techrights

Bringing US privacy law into the cloud computing era

Bringing US privacy law into the cloud computing era

Worth reading. The problem of privacy--the legal problem--is a vexed one, at least in US legal history. An interesting divider: is the desire for privacy the same as the desire for security against intrusion? That is, when we say we want something private, do we really mean that we just don't want someone to intrude the boundaries of that something?

Novell (not SCO) owns UNIX, says jury • The Register

Novell (not SCO) owns UNIX, says jury • The Register

At long last. This has been a tedious but by no means unimportant battle, and I'm glad of the resolution. Oddly, or perhaps it indicates an institutional shift in the scope of patents, the win by Novell comes hot on the heels of the Judge Robert Sweet's invalidation of patents held by Myriad Genetics on breast cancer genes BRCA1 and 2 in a suit filed by the ACLU. (See the useful NYTimes article on the issue; see also NPR's short and very lucid account by Richard Knox.)

Patents issued without heed for social consequences are pernicious. They stymie a host of socially useful activity and production, and to defend them on the very narrow grounds that greed is good for society runs profoundly against what I see as a new awakening to the social contract holding us together.

| Danishka's Diary: OpenOffice 3.2 QA Workshop 2010 - Sri Lanka

ඩනිෂ්කගේ දින පොත | Danishka's Diary: OpenOffice 3.2 QA Workshop 2010 - Sri Lanka

The QA workshop that Danishka records is of note if only because it speaks to the continuing involvement by Sri Lanka in developing OOo for its use. The people involved are supported by the national government's Information adn Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA), which has been formulating eGov. policy and otherwise taking steps to take advantage of the commercial and educational--and most important, cultural--potential and advantages of the Web.

The ICTA site makes for interesting reading. For instance, the site points out that local industry needs 100-0150K competent workers. I'd guess in fact they need more, and soon: Global climate change is affecting all traditional occupations, forcing a migration to the Web. And many, if not the vast majority, of those migrating to it have never worked with computers. This points to several things, the most salient being, to me, the huge importance of developing better user interfaces, ones that are predicated on real inclusive design, also known as universal design.

OpenOffice.org Is MIA In Bing, But It’s Not Censorship

OpenOffice.org Is MIA In Bing, But It’s Not Censorship

The analysis is fair and good, and does relate to overactive crawlers. And yes, we are communicating in a quite friendly way with Microsoft about this. I don't think it's a conspiracy, fun as that would be.

Is Microsoft Bing Trying To Kill Open Office? | Katonda

Shocked! Shocked!

Is Microsoft Bing Trying To Kill Open Office? | Katonda

Document Freedom Day

31 March 2010 is Document Freedom Day. As the site states, "Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for document liberation. It will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Open Document Formats and Open Standards in general." OpenOffice.org has proudly joined many others in celebrating and promoting this day, and this year is no exception.

Honor the day, spread the word, use OpenDocument Format (ODF). Already tens of millions around the world are, on a variety of implementations, and more every day are using it. It's an open standard: it can be implemented by proprietary or free applications like OpenOffice.org, and just about any suitable application can implement it. And if the one you use does not, and does not even support it, then find out why. For the vendor & maker is limiting your freedom and locking you into that vendor's product.

2010 JavaOne Call for Papers

We used to spend a fair amount of time debunking the myth that OpenOffice.org was written in Java. It's not. But we use a lot of extensions, now--a monolithic architecture, such as ours, our Mozilla's encourages that--and extensions can be written Java. And there are hundreds of thousands (or at least thousands) of Java developers out there. News: they can make money off of clever extensions. See http://extensions.openoffice.org.

So submit a paper. It's right after OOoCon this year, which is in the spectacularly beautiful city of Budapest.... JavaOne is in San Francisco, which is okay.

2010 JavaOne Call for Papers

Main Page - Document Freedom Day

Document Freedom Day is more than a celebration of the OpenDocument Format (ODF). It's a recognition that unencumbered document formats enable the sort of communication we take for granted--and have, since medieval times, prior to the European discovery of the printing press.

Main Page - Document Freedom Day

Hundreds of Thousands Take Part in National Day of Action to Defend Public Education

As someone who has hugely benefited from public education offered by the US--and as someone who has also witnessed its erosion since Reagan's regime--it's infinitely depressing to see the state of things today in California. That state, where I received both my undergraduate and graduate degrees (a short stint at Columbia U. for an MFA doesn't count much) used to be considered around the world as offering the best public higher education, with UC Berkeley being the crown. It was also the most democratic: In the early 70s, the expectation as that *everyone* was not just entitled but also able to pursue a post-secondary degree.

The result was, I daresay, extraordinary wealth--social, economic, cultural, you name it. Silicon Valley is just one brilliant instance of the magnetic effect California's education policies had. Nationally, policies that promoted education first and foremost and made that education effectively free (and free from binding social constraints that hobbled so many others around the world) made the US system the best the world has ever known.

Yet all that, all that wealth, potential and actual, is at risk. Public education takes money; it takes political prioritization, it takes commitment to a notion of intellectual freedom that is essential. It--the intellectual freedom, the money, the commitment--must be disinterested, that is beholden to no agenda, ideological or otherwise. And it must be free. And whether this free-ness is granted by the state via subsidies (as it was in my case: scholarships), or in some other ways, it must be always an option all who pay taxes can consider.

Perhaps not so oddly, open source plays a role here. Or should. And increasingly, if I and others succeed in our efforts, will.

Hundreds of Thousands Take Part in National Day of Action to Defend Public Education

Toyota Owners Report Problems in Japan to No Avail - NYTimes.com

The article below, on Japan's (the gov't's, esp.) take on consumer safety, with the Toyota acceleration issue being the lens, reminds me of a conversation I had with some Germans several years ago in California. "What about food safety?," one asked. "Surely the government ensures that what we eat is safe!" "Uhm, no," I told her. "Actually, as far as I know, in the US, it's caveat emptor. If problems become evident, then the government may act. But with the exception of drugs dispensed under the procedures governing prescriptions, it's pretty much a purely voluntary effort on the part of the maker and distributor. And an obligation of the buyer to be aware." She was skeptical, and I may have been wrong in some details, like what is governed and subject to scrutiny; what is the responsibility of government. But this was during the Bush II years (dark times) and laissez faire in all things, along with the programmatic defunding and de-legitimization of government was at its peak.

The mood by those in power was that gov't. was only as good as it was not, and it's only legitimate function was defense of the people.

Toyota Owners Report Problems in Japan to No Avail - NYTimes.com

marketing: Download Statistics

From time to time I'm asked about download stats. I used to keep a fairly constant (weekly) log at stats.openoffice.org, but technology changes and right now, the best public source is off the OOo Marketing Project page, which John McC and Florian E. maintain using data from our bouncer and MirrorBrain systems. See: http://marketing.openoffice.org/marketing_bouncer.html. All the data here presented need to be taken with some understanding of what's being shown, both to forgive duplicates and also to allow for the distribution of OOo via CDROM, DVD, USB key, etc. These modes are not trivial, if you consider that a large entity, say Île-de-France (Paris and environs), or the municipality of Bologna, may distribute in the end hundreds of thousands via USB key. And we don't track that. As well, most of these data reflect Windows downloads, as Linux distributors package a version of OOo with their plastic, and again, we don't track those distributions. Same for free-download sites such as CNET, etc.

(See also our Major Deployments page: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments

So there are subtractions and additions here, but the numbers displayed give a good measure of OOo's continually rising popularity.

Document Freedom Day 2010 - Free your documents, save your information!

A link worth attention.

Document Freedom Day 2010 - Free your documents, save your information!