Demand OpenDocument: Tell Microsoft You Want It

An online petition for Microsoft to support OpenDocument was launched today by the OpenDocument Fellowship. Microsoft has stated that the company will support the OpenDocument format in MS Office if there is customer demand. This petition will demonstrate that customer demand already exists.

The OpenDocument Fellowship, a volunteer organisation with members around the world, calls on everyone who uses MS Office, or who has an interest in open standards, to sign the petition at http://opendocumentfellowship.org/petition.

The petition, available in several languages, states:
"I request that Microsoft fully support the OASIS (Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) OpenDocument Format for Office Applications in its MS Office product. This should include the ability to read, edit and write OpenDocument files reliably, according to the format specification."

OpenDocument (short for OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications) is:

• An open, XML-based file format.


• An open standard from the OASIS standards group.


• The default file format for OpenOffice.org 2.0, KOffice 1.4, StarOffice 8, IBM Workplace and other applications.


• The required office format for internal archives of the US State of Massachusetts.


• A format that fulfills the European Union's criteria on open standards.

"OpenDocument is important because it keeps your data accessible and promotes competition," said Jason Faulkner, press contact for OpenDocument Fellowship. "People want their information to be free, and competition is good for customers. OpenDocument brings open architecture to your data in the same way that the IBM PC brought open architecture to computer hardware. The competition encouraged by that has seen ever-improved performance and decreasing prices of computer hardware."

OpenDocument is designed not just to handle all office type files but also to integrate with the Internet. Users whose data is stored in OpenDocument format will never again face the problem of not being able to access data because the application that created it is no longer supported.

Open standards already enable users of different computer systems (both hardware and software) to access the Internet and communicate with each other. ODF enables users of different computer systems and software to freely exchange and use files. Vote for ODF!

For more information, see the Fellowship's website, http://opendocumentfellowship.org

LOAD - Photo

MyLINUX has published on their website a picture from LOAD with me giving the presentation about OpenOffice.org 2.0

LOAD

Linux Open Alternative Days is a business oriented conference and I was invited to keep a presentation on OpenOffice.org. Obviously, the subject was the classic "What is new in OOo 2.o" with a touch on the Romanian Native Language Project.

My slides are in Romanian language and available here.

And a picture of the conference room:

What can I say more? I was a nasty boy, and interrupted two respectable people from their presentations:

• Victor Spigelman - IBM WW Linux and Infrastructure Sales Executive was saying that the city of Munich decided to migrate to Linux despite the price reduction made by Microsoft because of religion, in his vision the migration was dictated by a religious attitude toward Linux - I pointed out the reason was because of long-term costs


• Claudiu Borsan, Novell SEE, Country Manager Romania was saying that Linux is not necessary free, and it cost money (he was talking in Romanian but used the English word free), and did it twice, so I had to interrupt him and point that Linux is Free but not necessarily gratis

Also, it was a pleasure to know Andrei Pascal from ITtraining and Mircea Buzlea from MyLINUX

Borked Colours

Have a look of this:

It seems the Photoshop-fu is weak in the person who made it, he managed to alter my cake and transform the chocolate is some disgusting chemicals:

Also the blue colour of "Office.org" is bad: it should be the same as the horizontal bar (R6, G52, B140).

In my experience this is caused by colour setting in Photoshop: next time use GIMP, dude!

Tango Project

I am trying to understand what is this Tango Desktop Project, beside the claim of "exists to create a consistent user experience for free and Open Source software with graphical user interfaces".
The Icon Theme Guidelines look like a fork of the GNOME HIG but using instead a very bright look for icons, it reminds me of KDE.
Beside the talk about all Open Source GUI applications, of GNOME, KDE and Mozilla, the people behind it are exclusively GNOME people from Novell.
Maybe I am mistaken, but it looks to me pretty much as a HIG fork, as adopting it by GNOME would obsolete its own guidelines.

Stuck in Corel land

I need some OpenOffice.org business cards, as I will keep next week a presentation at a Linux conference. So designed a nice one in Inkscape and experimented with some export options.

The next step was to search for a print shop to make them.

Print Shop 1, a little pricey, varying from .25 to .50 RON (about 0.07 - 0.14 EUR) each, depending on the amount of colour used. It was like this:
- What file formats do you accept?
- Any Corel up to version 12
- Anything else? EPS? PDF?
- We don't work with EPS, PDF yes, if you do the entire A4 paper, but we will not be able to edit it or adjust colours.
- OK, I will not need adjustments, but you will accept bitmaps?
- Sure, but we will not be able to edit it or adjust colours.
- Fair enough, what dpi?
- Anything more than 72 dpi
- OK, will do 600 dpi

Print Shop 2, a seriously cheaper one: .18 EUR
- What file formats do you accept?
- Corel
- Anything else? EPS? PDF?
- No, only Corel
- F*ck you very much

I don't have much time to search for other options, so I guess will go with Print Shop 1.

Another step will be do design a t-shirt (with OCAL to wear at the same conference) and to find a shop where to print it. I expect it to be more trouble some, as I want to use a non rectangular shape and maybe some gradients (at a second thought, maybe without gradients). I suspect here PNG is the only option.

All this experience reminded me of another one, about one year ago, when I had to do a brochure for my job. Then the print guy (our company is a regular customer of him) was a little more enlightened: he used both Illustrator and Corel (with a preference for Corel) and, as a big surprise for me, was a OpenOffice.org user, preferring it to MSO because "it work better with tables". But from our discuss I learned he never heard of PNG before. SVG, W3C? Obviously, he knew even less about those. (Is possible to know less than nothing about something?)