2011-06-23

Like in Mexico, Parliaments Must Reject ACTA | La Quadrature du Net

Like in Mexico, Parliaments Must Reject ACTA | La Quadrature du Net

The vote by Mexico's Senate is quite interesting. I will look into who voted, as well as what effect it would have. My guess is that it's a "safe" vote, meaning it will have minimal effect. But it really ought to: ACTA has hidden and even obvious problems, and its likely effect is not to promote culture and cultural discourse--dont' we want those things?--but its opposite.

And yet, now is the time, now more than ever, to have as much discourse and all that comes from it, like entrepreneurs wanting to make money out of ideas whose cleverness can only become manifest in discussion. And it's not not just about software. Never before, it seems to me, have we--people--been faced with such challenges and also possessed of such tools to deal with them; and yet given the fire of Prometheus, we wish to douse it, precisely because it is valuable.

2011-06-20

A Microsoft Horror Story: Newspaper Chain Is Switching 8,500 Employees To Google Apps

A Microsoft Horror Story: Newspaper Chain Is Switching 8,500 Employees To Google Apps

Not surprising.

And now, the McClatchy news team will be able, if they want, I suppose, to save to ODF.

And then save even more money and time and future sweat by opting to use OpenOffice.org.

2011-06-01

Statements on OpenOffice.org Contribution to Apache

Statements on OpenOffice.org Contribution to Apache

Oracle just announced--in classic oracular fashion--its proposal to contribute OOo code to Apache. Lots of questions, such as: who owns the code and trademark? What about the core developers--the ones who happen to live in Hamburg?--and what will be the ongoing status of the existing OpenOffice.org community? It's not small, it is large, it's not inactive, it is doing things. And it now also has lots of really important questions.

So, I invite Jim Jagielski, of Apache, and the proposed polling mentor for OOo during its mentoring process, to engage with us, the OpenOffice.org community. And I also want to lay a simple ground rule: Enough of secrecy.