April 2010

The Naming of Standards

April 28, 2010

I am occasionally asked, what is the correct name of the ODF standard?  Is it “OpenDocument Format”?  Or is it “Open Document Format”, with a space between “Open” and “Document”? I’d like (hopefully) to clear this up. The naming decision happened back in 2004.  At that point Sun had contributed their specification for the OpenOffice [...]

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IBM Software Consumability Survey

April 28, 2010

We (IBM’s Software Group) are doing a survey of user perceptions of the “consumability” of our products.  “What is consumability?” you might well ask.  It is a new word for an old idea.  It describes the end-to-end customer experience, the consistency and cohesion of our products and solutions, from acquisition, prototyping, through integration, deployment, maintenance [...]

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Weekly Links #7

April 24, 2010

lpOD — languages & platforms OpenDocument – lpOD 0.9.1 “Granada” is released – View “lpOD 0.9.1 “Granada” is released lpOD 0.9.1 has just been released, together with its documentation. You can download lpOD 0.9.1 here.” tags: ODF Workshop on Document Freedom – Presentations | Open Technologies Resource Center “OTRC organized one day workshop regarding Free [...]

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Why I like Oracle’s $90 ODF Plugin

April 21, 2010

There has been a flurry of news articles about Oracle’s price change on their (formerly Sun’s) ODF Plugin for MS Office.  What was previously free (as in beer), at least for individual use, is now sold for $90 and with a minimum quantity of 100.  The broad coverage (ZDNet, BusinessWeek, CNET,  NBC, IDG, etc.)  of [...]

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Yet Another Browser Choice Fail

April 18, 2010

A few weeks ago I wrote about Microsoft’s “browser choice” ballot page in Europe, which in its debut used a flawed algorithm when attempting to perform a “random shuffle” of the browser choices, a feature specifically called for in their agreement with the EU.  This bug was fixed soon after it was reported.  But I [...]

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Weekly Links #6

April 10, 2010

Group:OpenDocument/Reject – LibrePlanet “Can you please resend your attachment in OpenDocument format? I refuse to accept Microsoft Word documents or Microsoft Excel documents, because using proprietary formats is bad for freedom and bad for the web. Please visit http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/opendocument to get started with OpenDocument today” tags: ODF And the Winners are… | The Nokia Guide [...]

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ODF Performance Tip #1: Don’t re-compress images

April 7, 2010

ODFDOM is an open source (Apache 2.0) Java library for reading, writing and modifying ODF documents.  It runs standalone, not requiring OpenOffice.org or any other editor to be installed.  It operates directly on the ODF document itself. One of the things we’re focusing on in the next release of (the 0.9 release) is optimizing the [...]

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Weekly Links #5

April 3, 2010

Making the Grade With the Open Document Format “HOSEF conducts a monthly ‘Open Source Pizza’ so that people can learn more about what is happening with Free and Open Source Software. Thіѕ presentation is about the adoption of the Open Document Format by the University of Hawaii’s College of Education.” tags: ODF ODFDOM for Java: [...]

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Fifth Anniversary of ODF is May 1st

April 2, 2010

We’ll be hitting a significant date next month.  It was on May 1st, 2005 that Open Document Format (ODF) 1.0 was approved by OASIS. I hope we can all take time to reflect on far we’ve gone, with the specification itself,  with the quality and diversity of implementations and with world-wide adoption. As we read [...]

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Introducing ISO ODF 1.1

April 1, 2010

It was cold and dreary in Stockholm for last week’s meeting of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34.  There is nothing surprising or particularly interesting to report.  That is a sign of a successful meeting.  No drama.  These face-to-face meetings tend to be formulaic rituals.  The real work is done in WG teleconferences and email discussions that occur in [...]

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