PlexNex

Shuttleworth & Co. on OpenSeason

Ashlee Vance hosts a fun & informative chat with Mark Shuttleworth on OpenSeason. Also attending: Matt Asay & Dave Rosenberg.

Audio (MP3) over an hour. Run in the background while you waste time on Facebook.

Microsoft Breaks the Plugins

Tiffany Maleshefski at eWeek Labs is giving the Plugins the once-over-twice and she kindly put up the slides of her experience with Sun's faulty attempt.

Observe the trouble Sun Microsystems' engineers are having getting their ODF plugin to work in MS Office. See the presentations here...

Sun is having trouble because Microsoft is breaking interoperability deliberately through hi-jinks with the Dynamic-Link Libraries ("dll") in Windows.

From Sun's Malte Timmermann's blog...

Q: Why doesn't it support Office 2007?

A: Well, basically, it does, but there is an issue in Word's 2007 Filter API handling. You can save to ODF, but when you try to open ODF, Word ignores the installed filters and tries to open with it's own filters. Of course Word can't, so you get an error message "The Office Open XML file <name> cannot be opened because there are problems with the content". This even happens if you explicitly select the ODF filter! I hope Microsoft will fix this issue with the next service pack. If not, we will work around this bug by doing the same kind of integration like in PowerPoint and Excel.

As marbux says, "Welcome to dll Hell!"

Microsoft's Brian Jones innocently says 'Gee I can't imagine how that's happening?'

You're making me laugh, Microsoft.

You went to the DoJ for this behavior in Netscape. This is going to add to your fines in Europe. We know how you're doing it; we're going to tell on you.

If Brian Jones is obviously looking in the wrong place and can't grok what's happening it's because his head is buried in XML (within the files) and it's the Windows Department who are playing fast & loose with interoperability: the file-association behavior of Office 2007 was working for the OpenDocument Foundation's da Vinci Plugin with Office 2007 Beta and broke in the Final version (yes, we've known about this for about 6 months).

Y'all are some dirty mutherfuckers.

Give me your markets, or I'll take them from you.

Recursive Hypocricy

Question: What's recursive hypocricy?

Answer: The hypocrite calling the kettle black.

[At least I can make myself laugh...Hiser bringing new dimensions to the 3rd-degree mixed-metaphor]

After the community worked so hard on identifying standards contradictions in the new Microsoft XML file format in January, Microsoft wants to give IBM all the credit. There'll be no justice.

Nice round-up by Walt Hucks ("the Hux-ter")
"Teacher, Those IBM Meanies are Hurting Me"

Stephen Walli is embarassed for his old firm...
"Microsoft Whining for Sympathy"

J. Matusow
"Doc Format Activities..."

Craig Kittering
[Craig is just a spear-carrier and too insignificant to link]

J. Paoli & T. Robertson
"Open [Whining] Letter (to all Governments)"

Sun's current CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, is the latest convert to belief in the beauty of ODF. His company spawned it but until now -- when he can sell servers, or at least open conversations about selling servers (they're not so good at closing, those Sunnies aren't) -- you never heard a pleasant word from TheSchwartzMan about OpenOffice or ODF. It's nice timing, putting JS just a cut below Microsoft's current CEO, Steve Ballmer, on the Scale of Ineptitude. (Shield mine eyes from the PonyTail.)

Conclusion: ISO-Gate continues to take its pound of flesh. We'll know how much on or soon after Feb 28th when all the National Bodies' objections are processed by the ISO JTC 1.

How do I know that it's even worse than you think? Because the ODF Twilight Bark -- from South America this time -- tells us that Microsoft is going into federal government agencies and saying, "Let us help you with your interoperability problem." This is a dramatic change of content & tone from "You'll buy fifty-thousand!"

Keep your eyes peeled for the only vendor-neutral XML document interoperability solution: the OpenDocument Foundation's ODF Plugin for MS Office.

Shield Mine Eyes from The Ponytail

Neil McAllister for InfoWorld brings us Jonathan Schwartz, unimproved by his new title. That's unfair: he's got The CEO Platitude as down as if he's been practicing it in front of a mirror for months. Given the full length of rope, however, Jonathan can end his career as CEO of Sun Microsystems within weeks with more revelations of non-strategy like these...

"I think the core technologies that we've delivered to date have demonstrated an ability to drive growth," Schwartz said during the conference call that announced his new role as CEO. Asked about the possibility of future acquisitions, he said, "We're going to continue to look at companies that could continue to expand the features and functions in Solaris to make it competitive against its principal competitor."

"And frankly," he said, "its principal competitor is none other than Microsoft Windows."

Uh...no.

"We will be one of the consolidators of the open source industry," Schwartz went on to say, "as well as, certainly, in the open source operating system industry."

Uh...is that a threat against Linux...against Red Hat, Novell & IBM? With what, a Content Versioning System and a wet noodle?

I pray for my friends and the many other talented people at Sun that they can have a grown-up leader who's fit to develop a commercial culture that'll do justice to intellectual and technological resources there. Schwartz is not it. (Ballmer -- the MonkeyBoy -- would be a better fit...and he'll be looking for a job soon if ODF keeps going well.)

Solaris deserves the open source treatment it's getting; that means the markets can sort out its future. Playing head-games with Linux, however, has no strategic rationale. It's beneath 'dumb.' It's...it's 'adolescent.'

OpenDocument: Reaching Another Safe Harbor

Jono Bacon reports comprehensivley on O'Reilly.net the migration of Bristol City Council's 5,500 workstations to StarOffice. We knew Bristol was on the case list, but never did I imagine the similarities with The Commonwealth of Massachusetts were so strong.

There were two main drivers for its work on a new office software standard--one internal, one external. Within the council, staff responded to a survey about what standards they should incorporate--part of a Best Value Review of information and communication technologies (ICT)--and the top issue the respondents asked the council to fix was the mixed environment of Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and Microsoft Office. Users complained of spending too much time on converting documents, even for internal sharing, and without a corporate licensing agreement there were many versions of each product in use. Many of these tools did not support the newer features of Microsoft Office, which made collaborating with partners more difficult.

Gavin Beckett, Bristol's IT strategist, has gone the Full Monty in making the business case for an open source-based office suite which offers as its center-piece the open standard OpenDocument file format.

Please read Jono's piece, it  covers everything from how they made the business case, to cost modelling (what they included from Gartner's migration cost model and what they threw out), their assumptions, user views and more. There is interesting information about how they addressed human factors -- fear and the overriding perception people have that Microsoft is the only solution. Plus, there's a section on how they are doing the migration...more similarities to The Commonwealth.

McNealy's Jewels

Scott McNealy had a nice Comment in the Financial Times today ("Share the 'crown jewels' and create new markets"), beckoning CEOs to think about opening up corporate cultures:

Share: blend internal assets with those outside. That means sharing things you value, such as intellectual property, best practices, employee time and even your thoughts, with tools such as blogs, podcasts and wikis (communal web pages). In doing so you lower barriers to entry and encourage people to notice and take an interest in your business.

Sharing Sun's lessons from successes like OpenOffice.org / StarOffice and Open Solaris / Solaris is useful and leaders in all industries should prick an ear. There'd be a better chance they would listen, though, if Sun's numbers were more -- ahem -- solar.

My own view is that Sun's continued independence after the recent tech lull is a significant enough testiment to its value. A less-innovative company would have withered.