Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Oh the irony of reading about this on a Microsoft site - link
This bit was particularly interesting -

Microsoft Netherlands spokesman Hans Bos noted that its Word documents were still allowed as equal alternatives to ODF for the moment, and added he expects the company will soon receive approval for its Open Office XML to qualify as "open source."

But he said the company was worried about and opposed other aspects of the Dutch policy.

Specifically, he said, the provision that government agencies should prefer open source was overly proscriptive.

Overly proscriptive?! Now hang on a minute....

You Got ME Matthew, I don't how long I spent trying to close that window!!!!!!

Gnome fanatics should read no further. (If they have a point, it escapes me.) The release of KOffice 2.0.0 is expected next year. The developers are aiming for cross-platform use and are challenging the dominance of the (free open source ?) office software with no legal name. KWord, evidently, has already run on Windows.

Yours truly has been (and is continuing to be) instrumental in setting up a site for KOffice users. Help of any kind is welcome.

This development makes me think of all those years reading HOWTOs and editing modelines and want to weep tears of joy:

 

Bruce Byfield at Linux.com has done the world a favour by collating the many and varied hardware compatibility lists into one, highly bookmarkable article.

Like many people, I was saddened to see Eben Moglen leave the board of the Free Software Foundation, but pleased that he would be carrying on his work at the Software Freedom Law Center. If somebody were to ask me (for the record nobody did) who should replace Eben, I would have said without hesitation Benjamin Mako Hill, so I was thrilled when he got the job. One of his key achievements in my view has been kicking off the very important, and long overdue, work on finding a definition of "Free Cultural Works", which will serve the same purpose for other kinds of creative works that the Free Software Definition serves for software. His presense also helps the FSF board continue to meet it's all-important beard quota.

Linux.com has a profile of Benjamin here.

The copyright to CUPS, the printing system used by most free software operating systems (and a number of proprietary ones), has been purchased by Apple Inc., and the former copyright holder and creater of CUPS has been hired by Apple to continue working on it. He has stated that "CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms".

Reaction to this has been mixed, ranging from congratulating Apple on supporting such an important project, to concern about possible ulterior motives, based on Apple's mixed track record on working with the free software community.

Back when OS X was released, I personally thought Apple was seriously moving in the direction of freeing it's software completely. This would have made perfect business sense, as the distinguishing feature of Apple's products at the time was the awesomely cool hardware; giving users the freedom to share and improve the software that Apple provided to run on it would only serve to make the overall product more attractive. Ultimately, of course Apple evolved into as much an entertainment company as a technology company, with a strong motivation to release software that was deliberately defective in ways that prevented you from doing things with it that the entertainment industry didn't like, and which was therefore licensed to users in ways that prevented them from fixing these bugs.

In this light, one comment on cups.org strikes me as intriguing...

Richard Stallman "recently" (don't you hate it when people don't attach a date to material posted on the Web?) delivered one of his regular talks,"Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks", to the University of Waterloo in Canada, who have put the video of the event online. Richard is an inspiring individual; one of only two people on Earth I'd count as a hero. Despite having heard recordings of earlier renditions of this talk, I would still have dashed out of the house to change the world immediately after watching this, were it not for the fact it was around 1am and I was not dressed for world-changing.

Also highly recommended is the video of Eben Moglen, of the Software Freedom Law Centre, talking about "The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3" in June this year. Anybody who's bandwidth-impaired can get copies of these (they are appropriately licenced for free redistribution, of course) from me at the next Club Linux meeting.

Others may be unaware of this topical issue mentioned on a few forums and a mailing list I happened to visit. See NO to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard.

I signed the petition some weeks ago and in the last few days received an email. I believe I'm not breach of any understanding of confidentiality by quoting from it:

Thanks for signing the NoOOXML petition. 143 Aussies signed the petition so far, pretty good showing, though I think over a thousand people signed in Portugal.

A small group, including my troublesome self, is discussing the formation of "The OpenOffice.org Community' Website" along the lines of The Star Office Users' Portal. The site will serve as a portal but also include a forum and other services. The idea for the project emerged out of a very long thread discussing ways of dealing with some shortcomings of the present, main, English forum for OOo users.

The project will require as much support as it can raise.