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Last updated: November 04, 2010 06:00 PM CET
October 31, 2010
Kazunari Hirano : Yamagata prefectural government decides to adopt OpenOffice.org
Yamagata Shimbun on Oct. 30th (web version on Oct. 31st) reported, "It was revealed on Oct. 29th that Yamagata prefectural government decided on a plan to adopt OpenOffice.org as next PC office software for fiscal 2011 due to the fact that support for MS Office XP will end in July, 2011."
They have about 2,600 Office XP insatalled PCs. If they want to upgrade them to new version, it costs 30,000 - 32,000 yen per PC. They also have Office 2003, Office 2007, Office 2010, which would have to be upgraded. It would cost a lot.
They have a total of about 5,600 PCs in their government office and local agencies. All these PCs will get OpenOffice.org installed.
OpenOffice.org will completely replace MS Office in July 2011.
Yamagata prefectural government will be the first prefecutral government adopting OpenOffice.org among 47 prefectural governments in Japan.
by khparametric at October 31, 2010 01:15 PM CET
October 30, 2010
Louis Suarez-Potts : Apple's Java and OOo 3....
The latest update (3) to Apple's Java causes problems with the Mac OS X version of OOo 3.x. A patch to be included in newer versions of the OOo app fixes things but in the meanwhile, you can download and install the libraries. The developers in Hamburg have put up wonderfully clear instructions and the link to the patch.
Here it is:
by oulipo (noreply@blogger.com) at October 30, 2010 04:53 AM CEST
October 28, 2010
Friedel Wolff : Latest Pootle news
Just a few loose news items from the recent past about Pootle.
- An interview with Dwayne about Pootle
- We extended the Pootle documentation quite a bit. Please help us to identify areas needing work, and feel free to help with writing!
- Julen is working on an AJAX interface for online translation with Pootle. I'm already very excited about this. We are working towards good unity between the way Pootle and Virtaal work.
- We started with a section on our wiki about Pootle's design. It has already been extended with new ideas and planning, a lot of it part of Igor Afanasyev's exciting new work on Pootle's interface. I hope to write more about this.
- Alaa is finishing some work on a release with small improvements over 2.1.1. Hopefully we can release Pootle 2.1.2 tomorrow.
- There are so many new Pootle installations, we can barely keep track of them! We are so excited to see all the different things people are doing with it.
Pootle 2.2 will be fantastic!
by Friedel at October 28, 2010 12:56 PM CET
October 24, 2010
Andreas Mantke : Starting commits with git push
I had a little fight wit git push in the last days. Today i won this fight with the help of the LibreOffice Community and get my first commits pushed to the repository. There are some more easy tasks remaining for the next days.
by andreasma at October 24, 2010 08:48 PM CET
Louis Suarez-Potts : Gulf Times – Qatar’s top-selling English daily newspaper - Qatar
by oulipo (noreply@blogger.com) at October 24, 2010 12:44 AM CEST
October 23, 2010
Friedel Wolff : Quote of the week: why you can't fix everything
How often do we hear that we should fix and report bugs in all projects and then all the world's problems will dissappear? "Patches welcome" and all that jazz. Of course it isn't wrong, and we probably say similar things in our project. This e-mail from van Khaled Hosny made me smile:
Life is short and you can not afford to go after every tool you don't like and try to fix it.
How true! His e-mail was of course also a compliment for GNOME's Damned Lies.
by Friedel at October 23, 2010 08:48 AM CET
October 15, 2010
Louis Suarez-Potts : Having One's Cake....
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.
by oulipo (noreply@blogger.com) at October 15, 2010 12:38 PM CEST
Louis Suarez-Potts : But did they spell our name right?
Seems to me that rather than spending all this money on foolishness, why not just contribute the cash to a worthwhile enterprise effort?
OOo's put the willies up Microsoft • The Register
by oulipo (noreply@blogger.com) at October 15, 2010 09:53 AM CEST
October 10, 2010
Kazunari Hirano : Green LibreOffice Flowers
Green Pepper flowers.
Did you read Christoph Noack's blog "Why green?" ?
The Document Foundation (TDF) flowers.
LibreOffice flowers pure white, pure open source :)
by khparametric at October 10, 2010 11:31 AM CET
Kazunari Hirano : PR: 入力を極めるバトルステージ。ツダリンピック開催！
by rssad.jp at October 10, 2010 11:31 AM CET
October 07, 2010
Louis Suarez-Potts : Scandaloso
So, I was prepared to speak at this huge conference. It's a significant one, or has been, in the past. But it just got canceled. That, after so many of us have bought our tickets and made our hotel arrangements. Huge amounts of money will be lost, along with even more important opportunities.
What a scandal, what a shambles, what an embarrassment.
by oulipo (noreply@blogger.com) at October 07, 2010 11:23 AM CEST
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