Open Sauce Software
Tasty titbits from people using Linux and other open source software in business.
Thursday 22 May 2008, 3:56 PM
Microsoft's ODF support - are people convinced?
Microsoft's sudden decision to support ODF has caught everyone on the hop - and there's still lots of scepticism about it.
"Microsoft latest bullshit", is the response from the OOXML is defective by design blog, which says Microsoft is planning to "embrace extend and extinguish" the ODF format. ODF will always be a second-class citizen in Office, and is only there to keep people buying it, and to increase the number of Office 2007 documents in the world, is the argument there.
That's just paranoia, says Alex Brown. He's the man in charge of turning OOXML into a formal standard, and his job just became a lot less urgent. Indeed, if ISO-OOXML support doesn't arrive till Office 14 it just got put on the backburner, and we might wonder whether it will ever be really required.
"I think for users it's very good news, and for standardisers it's good
news at it takes the heat out of the 'format wars' and re-establishes
battle lines where they should be: product vs product (not format vs
format)," said Brown in an email to ZDnet.
He's not a Microsoft apologist. "Microsoft have over the years gathered a deserved reputation as being one of the worst software companies in the world at respecting standards, particularly for their mainstream desktop software," he says in his blog. "Historically, Microsoft’s standards-spurning Internet Explorer web browser has been viewed as the boat anchor that held back the world wide web, and their Office suite has been notorious for its closed file formats that shifted endlessly according to the whim of Redmond’s developers."
The world has changed now, and such practices are not tolerated he says. Microsoft's promise is pretty much exactly what ODF chair Rob Weir asked for, says Brown.
It will be interesting to see how ODF supporters (as well as the overlapping group of OOXML-bashers) react. My guess is that it will take time to see how serious this support is - but in the meantime, the announcement should help more users decide to use ODF format.
Thursday 22 May 2008, 7:39 AM
Microsoft's U-turn: ODF support and not OOXML?
After all its efforts in support of OOXML, Microsoft has decided Office 2007 will handle ODF documents - and will never support the standardised version of its OOXML format, which it fought so hard for.
The announcement surprised everyone yesterday. ODF 1.1 will be supported in a service pack for Office 2007, and the ISO version of Office 2007's native OOXML won't be supported until Office 14, which has not yet got an announced shipping date. Even more surprisingly, users will apparently get the option to set ODF as the default format for their Office installations.
The most likely explanation for such a major change is simply that ODF is the only format that is currently available as an ISO/IEC standard (OOXML is still being finished) and that, after all, is the aim here.
"Why will Microsoft do this after so many years of refusal? Perhaps because the only way it can deliver a product to government customers that meets an ISO/IEC document format standard is by finally taking the plunge, and supporting 'that other format'," says Andy Updegrove.
It's a bit more complicated than that, because Microsoft is actually supporting ODF 1.1, the current native version in packages like OpenOffice, and not DIS 26300, the ISO/IEC standard based on ODF 1.0. But that's the "safe" version that people will be using, it has more features, and it will be the basis of the next ODF-based ISO standard.
If Microsoft really is making the move to keep government bodies happy, ODF 1.1 should do the job nicely (we've run news stories on the differences between versions of ODF and OOXML).
Oh and there's more. Microsoft is also promising native support for PDF.
Wednesday 14 May 2008, 3:02 PM
Red Hat defends UK's open source record
Is the UK really a laggard in open source? Red Hat denies there is any problem.
"Red Hat does more business in the UK than in any other European country," Malcolm Herbert, senior manager of consulting practice at Red Hat UK, told ZDNet at the Open Source Forum event. "There's no problem with open source take-up in the UK."
There are plenty of people who disagree with him. OpenForum's Graham Taylor, speaking at the same event, is just the latest person to say the UK is crap at open source - it's become a common story from all open source activists.
Alfresco's Open Source Barometer - a study of the community of 35,000 users of the company's content management system - placed the UK equal sixth in the world, after the US, France, Germany and Spain, and equal with Italy.
"That's really abnormal for enterprise software," said Dr Ian Howells, chief executive of Alfresco. "You never see the UK coming sixth in adoption of enterprise software." He did point out however,
that the top five nations in Europe add up to a larger open source market than the US - illustrating the "long tail" of open source.
"Why are we a third world nation?" asked Howells. "We are putting ourselves at a disadvantage. Why does our government not give better value to our citizens?".
That last comment illustrates the motive Herbert sees. People are "talking up" the UK's failures in open source deployment, to get government attention, because national threats and disasters are the only language that politicians understand: "It's just political, led by commentators dealing with the government," he said.
Friday 9 May 2008, 3:26 PM
IPv6 hype suggests real problems
IPv6 is getting the kind of support that, in my experience, usually goes with a failed standard.
ICANN is trying to scare us into adopting it, saying that "the people using new network applications are using IPv6". As far as I know that isn't true - there are backbones that can do IPv6, and at the moment all our IPv4 traffic is tunnelling through them. That's not the same thing at all.
The Wikipedia entry for IPv6 doesn't show any significant use yet - and believe me, if there were any, IPv6 people would be shouting about it there and elsewhere.
But, for veterans of standards efforts, here's a news story that really suggests doom: Heise reports that the EU Commission is promoting IPv6.
Yes, EU web sites will be available in IPv6 form by 2010. That should really boost traffic on the new protocol... by a minuscule amount. And "twenty-five per cent of all European users should have the opportunity to use IPv6 by the end of 2010" the Commission promises, a bit meaninglessly.
"This is intended to set an example and to be a call, especially to large scale providers, to do the same," says the Heise story. "But it is critical that both the Commission and the US government make it a prerequisite in their calls for tenders for network services and hardware to support IPv6."
I remember when the EU promoted another protocol in similar terms. It was the network industry's greatest and most famous failure: the ISO OSI protocols.
Update: From the comments, I realise this post might come across as an anti-IPv6 troll. To clarify: IPv4 will run out of addresses, and IPv6 is the answer. I'm not clear about the promotion of it at the moment though.
Wednesday 7 May 2008, 12:59 PM
Could Novell kill OpenSolaris?
Sun's just opened its developer conference with the long-delayed launch of OpenSolaris, the open source version of its Solaris operating system. But after all this time, will it live?
It's taken Sun since 2005 to turn OpenSolaris into a proper release, which Sun intends will stand alongside Solaris as a community operating system - like Fedora is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
But some say the OS is doomed. "OpenSolaris Arrives Just to Die", says Practical Technology, pointing out that Linux has come on in leaps and bands over the last three years, and is now happily filling an expanding role for general purpose open source operating systems.
More scarily, as a Unix-based operating system, Solaris could be vulnerable to IP lawsuits, warns the site. Sun launched OpenSolaris with the blessing of SCO (then apparently owner of Unix) on the basis that its original deal with former owner AT&T gave it the right to open source a Unix-based Solaris.
Now, with SCO down, Novell is definitely the owner of the Unix intellectual property - and, as a Linux vendor, it might not want competition from OpenSolaris.
Practical Technology has sifted Groklaw's transcript of the Novell v Sco trial (now all finished bar the verdict), and come up with the following:
"Fundamentally, it simply would have been contrary to Novell’s business interests to enable something like [OpenSolaris],” Greg Jones, Novell’s VP of Technology Law said in court, after earlier stating, “it simply would not have been in Novell’s commercial interests."
In 2002, Novell was already planning to go into Linux, and would not have done anything to help out a competitor, he said. "Sun and OpenSolaris’ real trouble is that after Novell finishes grinding SCO into the ground, they’ll be next on Novell’s list," warns Practical Technology.
But OS News says Novell would never commit such a public relations blunder. Suing Linux vendors got SCO nothing but trouble. It could do the same to Novell - and alienate its substantial Linux user base by showing hostility to another open source product.
All this leaves aside the question whether OpenSolaris is actually a threat to Linux operating systems. A first look from ZDNet US' Jason Perlow rates it highly as a competitor to Unbuntu on the desktop, so it could at the very least be an alternative - but it's not supported commercially.
Users comparing the two will have to factor in the costs of an upgrade to a supported version of either, and make a judgement of the likely future plans of Sun and whichever Linux vendor they go with.
Our blogger at JavaOne, Adrian Bridgewater, picked up some distrust of "company-controlled open-source projects", so maybe Novell should keep its powder dry.
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