• Europe backs mobile roaming cap
  This is something that is so clearly necessary, both for consumer protection from price gouging and for development of the technology base of society, that the comment by GSMA ("The GSM Association, which represents operators, declared its "disappointment" that the measures were deemed necessary.") clearly marks them out as part of the problem rather than part of the future.
• Groklaw - An Amicus Brief: Issues in the Cyberbullying Case That Affect You
  Very significant development in technology law. We all need to pay close attention to this one as it sets a precedent that puts immense, unbalanced power in the hands of large corporate technology providers which, as the RIAA have shown, WILL be abused. The risk here is that the distastefulness of the case triggering the verdict will put us off engaging; that must not happen.
• Java and Linux - an open marriage in search of success
  The Register struggled hard to find an angle where making the Java platform free software was a bad thing, but ultimately even they had to admit it was a good thing that's getting better, both OpenJDK itself and then everything it allowed to be distributed like Glassfish and NetBeans.
• Glassfish + OSGi + Equinox + Eclipse = Good Job Sun
  We've joined the community, just not the marketing programme.

Over the past twenty years, OpenOffice.org has developed into the leading open-source office productivity suite - easily the equal of commercial offerings. Unlike say Microsoft Office, it was designed from day one as a single unit (MS-Office was bolted together from completely separate products - Excel, Word, etc). This makes it consistent as you move from Calc to Writer to Impress etc - and so easier to learn and use.

However, there is a general feeling among users that there must be a better way of presenting office tools to users. RedFlag have completely reworked the look and feel of OpenOffice for their office software for the Chinese market - RedOffice. IBM have had a go too with their Lotus Symphony. Even Microsoft had a go at this in a more limited way with their much-maligned Ribbon interface.

Now it’s time for the Community OpenOffice.org to have a go. The User Experience Project launched the Renaissance concept at a presentation at the recent OpenOffice.org Conference, and in a blog posting on GullFOSS. Keep an eye on their wiki - this activity may make a dramatic difference to the way millions of people do their daily word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc!

As a very amateur hacker, I know the pleasure that comes from finally nailing an obscure bug. An OpenOffice.org developer, Eike Rathke, has a blog posting about nailing a bug in Calc. A user had reported a case where Calc was taking 24 seconds to do something which a rival product could do in just over a second.

It’s now fixed. Congratulations to the developers, and please continue to report cases like this. The more carefully you explain the bug, the more likely it is to get picked up and fixed. If developers can’t repeat the problem, they can’t fix it!

1. Research
2. Design
3. Evaluation
   

• OpenOffice.org users complain about its cumbersome and outdated graphical user interface (GUI)
• A great deal of functionality is hidden in many overstuffed toolbars, poorly structured menus and complex dialogs
• Functions are thus difficult to access for novice users or too inefficient to use for expert users
• In addition, the GUI offers an antiquated look & feel which is hardly capable to communicate innovation and to create joy of use

Users sometimes rightly complain about the time it takes to load and calculate complex spreadsheet documents. Recently I worked on profiling documents to identify performance bottlenecks. The first outcome is summarized on the specific bottlenecks wiki page. You will like to hear that the Zaske case how I call it, where Excel needed 1.2s and Calc 24s to update results, is solved and Calc now, in a CWS, is on a level with Excel.

The next weeks, except for getting some CWSs ready for QA and pending work done for the ODF formula subcommittee, I'll mainly focus on changing implementation and do further profiling. I'm quite sure there are several opportunities for improvement left..

Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev build DEV300_m36 which installs as OOo-DEV 3.0 (should be 3.1) has been uploaded to the mirror network.

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

Please use the following link
http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html

Packages are available from extended mirror sites from within the ./extended/developer/DEV300_m36 directory:

http://distribution.openoffice.org/mirrors/#mirrors

MD5SUMS:
http://download.openoffice.org/680/md5sums.html

 The news have fallen out of the teleprompters. I couldn’t keep that for much longer. I’m giggling on my chair and nibbling sheets of paper. Outside, people are gathering on the sidewalks. You could almost guess the humming of the press and the accelerating trucks of local news networks everywhere in the country. I’ve seen some people throwing up from joy.

That’s it. There it is . Our moment has come….

OOXML final final version has landed and is now available for download!

Rejoice, oh humanity!

Hail your new master, Steve Ballmer!

(praying voices of Ewok tribes in the background)

Tadadii Tadaduum Tadaa!

Nevermind if many had seen it before, I had even announced it on this blog. Now it’s officially availble, for real. I swear. Just visit the ISO web site. And it’s FREE! Free as in beer! Isn’t that a great way to start the Holiday Season?

Ah, OOXML. We spent almost two years with you. And something tells me we’re not about to end such an interesting relationship. What a story, what an adventure it has been! With some hindsight, I am not disappointed to see OOXML reach the ISO status. My work at the Afnor my contributions to NOOOXML and OpenForum Europe have taught me a lot about people, institutions. I’ve gained some real friends, men and women that are bound by a common experience of a common fight, and one that is all the more beautiful because it was an essentially fair and noble one. I have also seen corruption, greed, little and not so little treasons, servility (especially in those so-called reasonable people) fear, fear in my opponents and fear in myself and my friends. I have seen all this.  Now that OOXML is an ISO standard, it is perhaps time to realize that it’s not just a “dirty standard”, but a standard that has shown the complete irrelevance of ISO in the matters of IT. ISO management will continue to clinge to their obsolescent ideology like old soviet leaders who thought communism was at hand’s reach in 1989 or like U.S. President G.W. Bush who still thinks in 2008 that free market has fundamentally no issue at all. But I digress.

To all those I have worked with on OOXML, I would like to express my deepest and most sincere wishes in this beginning Holiday Season. To all those against whom I have fought, I send my respects. “Mission Accomplished”, folks: Don’t sing it too loud, nobody would believe you.

 Correction/Clarification: OOXML is not readily available on the ISO web site. You have to agree to a license that essentially does make it a closed standard subject to obligations to access the documents. Why am I not surprised?

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