As soon as Oracle announced they were offering OpenOffice.org to The Apache Software Foundation, there went up a collective sigh of relief from the FOSS community. Some, no doubt, would have preferred the project to be turned over to the folks at The Document Foundation, whose members had worked with the code for the better part of a decade and who’d already done a bang-up job improving OOo with their fork LibreOffice, but you don’t always get what you want, and Apache is an open source organization not lacking in credibility. At least now OpenOffice is out of the hands of Larry Ellison, who is a friend to open source the same way that a fox is a friend to a chicken.
FOSS Force
Friday FOSS Week in Review
Lots of interesting news this week as we reboot Friday FOSS Week in Review – so let’s get going.
IBM Lines-up Behind OpenOffice.org
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Is it really a news story that IBM has decided to support OpenOffice.org? Considering the fact that Oracle’s move to push the project over to Apache was at Big Blue’s prodding, I’d say not. Still, at least now the players are clearly defined. In addition to lending moral support and giving Larry Ellison a shoulder to cry on, IBM is also donating the code from IBM Lotus Symphony.
Quite a few years ago, a popular Linux site began displaying ads from Microsoft on their home page. Big ones, at a prominent location above the fold. Some were fancy Flash ads, attention getters, mainly for branding purposes. Others were FUD, “independent” TCO studies bought and paid for by Redmond that “proved” it was cheaper to hand MS a wheelbarrow of money to run a Windows server than to run a free Linux server.
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The first time I saw a Windows ad on this FOSS site, I chuckled. I figured that if I ran a FOSS site and Microsoft came to me and offered multiple thousands of dollars for a medium rectangle ad, I’d be more than happy to redesign my page to accommodate them. You see, I believe the First Amendment’s a two way street, that if I expect free speech for myself, I have to be willing to give it to others.
Not long ago, penguinistas were bemoaning the fact that the purchase of a new computer almost always came with a built-in “Microsoft tax,” since all major OEMs wouldn’t sell a computer without Windows pre-installed. Now that things have changed and it’s relatively easy to purchase a new PC or laptop either with no operating system installed or already preloaded with Linux, that issue should be far behind us.
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Guess again.
OMG, I’m reading eWeek again. Spencer F. Katt has returned!
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For years, as soon as my copy of eWeek arrived by mail, I’d immediately flip to the last page inside the cover and read Mr. Katt’s column. After that, I’d turn to the software reviews and see what sort of programs the eWeek folks were putting to the test. This weekly ritual, always a high point of my week, crashed and burned sometime around January of 2009 when the magazine’s editor reported that beginning the following week, Spencer F. Katt would be no more. He was going away into the happy (or not) land of retirement.
Storm Bear Williams comes into the the FOSS Force office and plops onto one of two big, overstuffed chairs in our conversation pit. After a howdy, he says “I couldn’t find any microcassettes, so I got this.” He hands me a new, still in the box, Sony hand held digital audio recorder with a built-in microphone, good for 500 minutes.
He’s come for an interview. When I’d set up the appointment, I told him I was running low on microcassettes and asked if he could pick up a couple, just in case I needed them. When he discovered microcassettes are now obsolete and pretty much unavailable, he went ahead and sprang for something to get the job done.
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A cynic might think this was only to curry favor, but I’ve known Storm for over twenty years, so I know better. For one thing, he doesn’t like to disappoint. For another, he’s pragmatic and always the businessman. He didn’t want the interview to go south just because it couldn’t be recorded.
Yesterday I wrote about how WordPress has evolved into a first rate platform that can be easily customized. One of the ways that WordPress is customized to meet the unique needs of a site is through the use of plugins that add functionality. Most of these functions are visual and offer visitors a richer experience while on your site. Others are never even seen by the visitor and only indirectly affect his or her experience.
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During site design, it can be easy to become so blinded by the the former group, the plugins that add lots of gee-whiz bells-and-whistles, that we ignore the later group that does the grunt work to increase our site’s performance. However, judicious use of these behind-the-scenes plugins can make our WordPress sites more secure and help reduce server loads, making for a safer and quicker site and a better experience for our visitors.
Probably the most boring open source story recently has also been the one getting the most ink. The problem with with the Apache/OpenOffice saga is that the real story already happened, it’s history.
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Oracle’s “gift” of OpenOffice.org to Apache, and the change of license from copyleft to permissive, is merely an epilogue referring back to a prologue: Oracle’s sudden ownership of the open source office suite as a mere byproduct of their acquisition of Sun.