Accounting for Vendor Lock-in

July 12, 2012

I am not an accountant.   However, as a Graham and Dodd value investor over the years, I’ve picked up some of the fundamental principles.   A key one is the Matching Principle, that revenues and expenses should be booked in a way that clarifies the underlying business performance, rather than based purely on the timing of [...]

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Perspectives on Apache OpenOffice 3.4 download numbers

June 22, 2012

You may have read, on the Apache OpenOffice blog, news that the project has had 5 million downloads in the first 6 weeks since the release of version 3.4.  And as the above chart shows, the download rate has increased in the past two weeks, as we’ve started to roll out the upgrade notifications to [...]

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+1 for Apache OpenOffice 3.4

May 8, 2012

Read more in the official announcement.  You can download Apache OpenOffice 3.4 now, from http://download.openoffice.org/    Tell your friends.  And welcome home.

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Gorilla Free Software Marketing, Chapter 8: Community Metrics

April 1, 2012

The Importance of Metrics Revolutionary movements require revolutionary progress.  However, at the start of a Movement, such progress may not be immediately evident to those whose views of progress have been tainted by commercial software, where progress is measured by feature enhancements, quality improvements and user satisfaction.  These are false idols and the shallow view [...]

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Ending the Symphony Fork

February 1, 2012

What is a fork? A fork is a form of software reuse.  I like your software module.  It meets some or many of my needs, but I need some additional features. When I want to reuse existing functionality from another software product, I generally have four choices: If your module is nicely designed and extensible, [...]

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First release of the Apache ODF Toolkit

January 26, 2012

The Apache ODF Toolkit 0.5 (incubating) release is now available for download.  Detailed change notes are also posted.  The ODF Toolkit is a Java library for reading, writing and creating ODF documents.  It is entirely in Java and does not require that you install a desktop editor like OpenOffice.  It operates directly on the file [...]

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Shakespeare to Tim Tebow: Top Hourly Wikipedia Pages for 2011

December 19, 2011

I had grand plans.  This was supposed to be a cool looking visualization.  Over 2011 I downloaded nearly a terabyte of raw Wikipedia page access stats.  And recently I had a python script running for 3 weeks around the clock crunching the data.   This was going to be cool.  But I ran out of time [...]

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ODF 1.2: Approved as an OASIS Standard

September 30, 2011

To quote the immortal words of Otis B. Driftwood,  “Let joy be unconfined. Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons, and necking in the parlor”. The day has finally arrived.  Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 has been approved.  It is now an OASIS Standard. If you are regular reader of this [...]

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An Invitation to the Apache ODF Toolkit

August 15, 2011

Perhaps overlooked in all the excitement generated by the move of OpenOffice.org to Apache was the fact that a parallel move is occurring with the ODF Toolkit.  A few weeks ago we submitted a proposal to Apache to start a new project based on the Java components that were until then hosted by the ODF [...]

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ODF Plugfest, Berlin

August 9, 2011

I attended the 6th ODF Plugfest took place in Berlin a few weeks ago, hosted by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) and the Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi).    It followed the pattern of previous events,  a two-day event,  with the first day dedicated to technical interop activities among implementors, followed [...]

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