It’s back-to-work-day! I got home yesterday, at half past eleven in the evening. The trip back was bit longer, as we had three hours to kill on Frankfurt’s airport. It was also slightly less comfortable, as Air Malta operated the flight from Malta to Frankfurt, and I had significantly less legspace than on Lufthansa flights.
But none of this happened before another interesting two sessions at the Summit. I’ve heard a lot of good things about this guy, so it was time to finally see him doing his job as a Free Software Evangelist! I’m of course talking about Jan Wildeboer, who shared with us an interesting view on Open Source business models (subscription based models), which models work and which don’t. He talked about Sun (or Oracle, whatever, as Jan put it: it’s now Larry’s problem), the CDDL license and why this will not work, and the fundamental requirements for building a succesful business around open source. As a free software enthousiast I was of course already familiar with most of this, but it was explained to us so clearly that it was very good for me, as I can use this in my arguments as well.
Next session was also Jan Wildeboer’s, this time on Open Standards. First defining what open standards are and how they are defined (and why OOXML at this moment is not an open standard). He also told us about the important work he’s doing, lobbying with the European Council and European Parliament, promoting the use of Open Standards. Another very useful presentation: it always starts with awareness, he’s very good at creating awareness, and he gave us the tools to let us do our part. So, good job!
If you ever communicate with your governement in any way, without using open standards, for instance a .doc file attached to an e-mail, please send it back to ask them how you should go about opening this file. They should realize that a government can’t require it’s citizens to buy a copy of Microsoft Office to communicate with them. Ask them how to do this using Linux, and point them at open standards like ODF. Microsoft will be releasing ODF-writing functionality for their Office Suite pretty soon, by the way. But how compliant they will actually be remains to be seen. History is not on their side…
#1 by PJ at April 24th, 2009
“Microsoft will be releasing ODF-writing functionality for their Office Suite pretty soon, by the way.
Tsk. I’ll believe that when I see it. One of the MS corporate strategies is footdragging to keep leveraging its monopoly [1]
“But how compliant they will actually be remains to be seen. History is not on their side…”
Yup, history shows MS avoided compliance by consistently deceitful and often illegal behaviour.[1]
[1] http://www.ecis.eu/documents /Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf