Thousands of NHS staff stripped of Microsoft Office | Enterprise | News | PC Pro

Thousands of NHS staff stripped of Microsoft Office | Enterprise | News | PC Pro

Licensing issues at heart, here. And the problem is not simply one of binding license, though that is crucial, but of a confusion over the very notion of many licensed goods and what you can do with them. Hint: they are not yours. But not all licenses are the same. The sliver lining here: OpenOffice.org.

Peter Korn's Weblog

Peter Korn's Weblog

Peter is Oracle's accessibility principal (OT, I so prefer the French term, "responsable") and the Aegis conference---the first international one--to be held 6-9 October in Sevilla, is important. Accessibility issues shape the ways in which public (and many private) enterprises can and do purchase software, among other things. Designing things "inclusively," so that *all* may use them, especially the aged, is of fundamental importance. And it is something that OOo clearly recognizes, as does the Oasis ODF group.

ODF 1.2 Interop Demo: Budapest

From Carol Geyer, Senior Director of Communications and Development
and the Oasis representative helping us put the interop demo on:

What: OASIS ODF 1.2 Interoperability Demonstration

Where: OpenOffice.org Conference 2010

Central European University

Budapest, Hungary

When: 2 September 2010

Six independent implementations of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) will be

orchestrated in a real-world scenario to demonstrate the value of an

independent, open document file format. Hosted by OASIS, the international

open standards consortium, the ODF 1.2 Interop will showcase applications

processing ODF documents on the desktop, in the cloud and on mobile devices.

A variety of open source and commercial software will be featured, including

IBM Lotus Symphony, KOffice, lpOD (ODF Python Library), Oracle ODF Toolkit

for Java, OpenOffice, and Novell Go-OO.

Real documents from the Louvre Labst will be used in the demonstration,

ranging from simple internal service messages and notes to master thesis and

complex spreadsheets with diagrams displaying scientific data.

Free press passes will be available. For details, contact Carol Geyer

(carol.geyer@oasis-open.org)

-

ODF 1.2 Begins Final 60-day Public Review

ODF 1.2 Begins Final 60-day Public Review

Rob's summary is characteristically excellent. But I'd like to add: ODF 1.2 marks a milestone, to be sure, but also point of departure. What comes next? Meanwhile, at OOoCon, on 2 September, in Budapest, we'll be conducting a demonstration of ODF 1.2. The idea is to have a narrative that scopes the power and flexibility of the format and that lift it from being only an office suite. As I've long argued and insisted, even, the tools of production, like OOo, give users remarkable power to do things that exceed the narrow imagination constituting the "office". But acting on our imagination and making sure that others (including ourselves, later) can act on our acts is hardly trivial. It never has been.

PT: "Nearly all school children getting familiar with open source' —

PT: "Nearly all school children getting familiar with open source' —

In 2008 I visited Portugal for a conference in Lisbon and to advocate the use and development of OOo there. I met with government ministers, including those involved in education and culture. The issue was that the Magellan system that was to be installed in education netbooks boot either into Windows or Linux, and OOo was only being put on the Linux partition. This, I thought, was worse than crazy: it effectively placed one of the most valuable tools a student would have--OpenOffice.org, in Portuguese--in a domain that he or she would very likely access only seldom if at all.

I insisted that OOo be included in the Windows partition, too, alongside what was already to be put there, MSFT's Office. Of course, nothing was done. But no surprise: The logic of what gets installed has nothing to with what is best for the country, citizen, people. It has to do with money and appearance. So, in this case, I have no doubt that in exchange for this installation, the responsible politicians and technocrats received generous investments in their area. Not a bribe, but, honestly, what's the difference?

Call it systemic corruption. Laws are put in place to enable the legal promotion of "special interests," and in a situation or context like this, one does not need at all any kind of under the table arrangement. One need only to exploit the laws and situation in place.

OpenOffice gets Ubuntu-media friendly • The Register

OpenOffice gets Ubuntu-media friendly • The Register

Of course, I think this is quite cool and even important.

And so should you.