Final Malaga report

This post comes from the train on my way to Barcelona but I might continue it from the bus since we just got noticed that other train got derailed and we will have to move to buses. I guess now I have time to talk a bit about what the OpenOffice.org and the conference in Malaga was all about day one, two and three. I hope this could become a full report since there were some significant topics going around the conference.Frist let me start by saying that this has been one of themost inpsiring events I have ever been. Only comparable to my first Linux event on LinuxWorld 2001 in New York City or ExpoLinux in Monterrey.Besides that I have to tell you that this event was much bigger and with much better talks than those before. Now we are launching into how many governments are usin FLOSS and seen the results not just in software but also in society.So day one was very important, it had more of an angle of overal governance of the floss use across the EU. My first talk focus on OSOR.eu which intends to hold best practices in FLOSS for government acquisition. Many things were discussed but also the networking of procurement practices were not too defined but enough to the extend of having parties involved between the project an the government entity.After that session a great keynote by Tim O’Reily where he mentioned the importance of the free culture transending open source while at the same time questioning it and comparing it versus the Web 2.0 world and the open contribution. Also he went on to encourage developers to develop beyond FLOSS into other topics like ecology, further resources, etc.O’Reily’s talk pretty much served as a point to quote many of the discussions through the conference. Other talk through the day were interesting, also focused on sustainability on governments and free software projects. However I also noticed that they were all too focused on creating new software rather than improving the software. While is true that general users can’t get in the source code and modify it, a governement or company with a good budget could.I met with the people of CENATICs and the development of the Mobile ODF reader. Something very interesting yet something that got me a little upset since they reach the OOo community to later develop it on their own ‘reinventing’ the efforts of the community. Althought is free is a bit illogical to have a close process of development where so much is done on the open. However I am very happy that ODF for mobile is now a reality and hopefully we can integrate now and start developing towards an ODF editor on mobile. BTW somehting I notice is that I really need to get a SIP number so that people can reach me.As I reviewed the program I think there were other meetings that I would have loved to attend and I wonder if I would be able to see the video of them. Specially the ones on Services for opensource businesses.The end of day one was very important since there was a debate on open source sustainability and the debate really went through different phases. Simon Phipps really emphasize on the freedom aspect of the model. Things really need to be done to further freedom which seemed very good coming from an open source guy rather than free software.At night I miss the buss and got on with the rest of the crew to attend the ‘exclusive dinner’ with the partners which eventually got me in touch with Nahim, a mexican guy in charge of AMESOL. We had a couple of talks on how to improve FLOSS in mexico an some funds that he can get for FLOSS however there is this feeling of investing my time in these things just to get money. However what I really want is to start talking on what to do in order to get FLOSS developed. I talk with one of the Apache guys on the way to correctly contribute to FLOSS Good development practices and architectual changes in order to be more distributed and easy to contribute. Also some ideas on the things that need to be done to make cleaner and better code. He was very impressed after watching the video on ODF@WWW developed by Kay Ramme.Other talks on ODF with Jomar which also got different aspects such as how can ODF be compromised by Microsoft now that he wants ISO to control the standard as opposed to OASIS. MS got a mayority in ISO and could potentially break the standard as well as intentionally. Badly supporting ODF on MS Office can also severly scrutinize the standard adoption and development. One thing is that they want to take the standard from 1.0 as opposed to the current 1.2.At the end of the meeting was a big rocky way back to the hotel since we decided to walk back home which was pain in the ass and my feet got very sore. However after a good bath I was relax enough to just pass out on the bed.Next morning was a good ride to the conference, by now I have met many people and recognized others. I had also start thinking about all the experiences, discussions, issues about floss nowadays. It was also the day of my talk so I was also thinking about that. We were supposed to meet with Louis and Claudio in order to get ourselves inline to a process for the meeting… we never did. However the meeting itself turned out to be a good thing and in the end everyone was happy. There are some things I noticed however, one is that Br-OO and Open for Business could colide now that we are both in Spain. Claudio and I have to put our heads together and come up with a solution. Louis seemed pretty happy about my talk and was surpringly no later comments on it however there needs to be further talks now that O3 is released and how will it affect the rest of the internal projects.That day was mostly rainy but the conference was pretty live an vibrant, I spend also a further talk with Joman about ODF as we watch the sky pouring. The real development of ODF and the different ODF communities around. From Fellowship, to friends of ODF and OpenDocument Foundation which unfortunately die after Gary couldn’t capitalized on that. He did mention what happened on the ODF Workshop and also a great project called pod developed on Python. The need for an C library that process ODF and also a better and more robust toolkit on how to integrate ODF with your project. Currently OOoES is very commited to ODF and I think is a good opportunity to get developers from different areas. Currently we need something like this:

• 4 Java developers
• 5-10 PHP developers
• 3 VBA developers
• 1 ActiveX developer

Is there any budget on research and development in any of these countries we could get some of the project started. We can also develop with our OpenOffice.org A.C. centers in these countries having partially funded by either governments or industry associates.I need to define how governments hire companies or individuals from abroad. I know most of them had a budget for research and development, also that they have organisms that can concentrate FLOSS companies. Finally I know that there are fundamental needs comming from the project itself and that there are developers willing to contribute to further the use of FLOSS. Key is how to make them work together.

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Guru’s genius???

Some of the questions that I had from the FLOSS event I though there are lot of points. Here are some of the questions that I got on issues that where touched:

Education on the olpc – we need software for kids on 6-10OOo have an UX and education, educating the ways of FLOSSMarketing evolution on FLOSSHP on EEEPC HP and Microsoft Works, come clean on marketing dollarsOpen source the transportation system and global distribution channelsEcoFLOSS for solving things

Malaga day 2

Just got to the event in Malaga and the night was a bit busy but finally got a healthy 5 hours of sleep. After that I came downstairs to get some breakfast and started recognizitng someof the faces at the event. between these faces there was many of the spaniard community including Juan Tomas, Rodrigo Salvador from Andalucia and Claudio Filho from the Brazilian OpenOffice.org community.The first event was the e-procurement process on OSOR for e-procurement. OSOR seems to be an evolution of the Open source software usage in Europe. These are guidelines maninly that we can use open source on the government level.These talk seem interesting and something that would be very good to have expanded to other governmental systems in US and Latinamerica.These talk is mainly a workshop which means that is not only a talk but an activity about how to paritcipate on these procurements. So my interaction with the system proves to be something more important on leveraging with it. Something particulary important for producitivity products like OpenOffice.org.Their main point is to get a good positioning on the government environments to get open source ready to do business with them. Neatherland seems to have the lead o the OSOSS procurement guidelines followed by France and Italy and Denmark. The Dutch guidelines have a better legal background than the other two. Theres is also a difference between guidelines as a recomendationand not an official policy to follow up.The preference or software is based 39% for Interoperability and 33% for compatibility and 8% don’t know.The brand recognizition versus the actual functionality most of the procurement are very brand based as opposed to function based. The top 10 software vendors found were:Microsoft 36%Oracle 20%IBM 12%SAP 11%Adobe 10%Good practices is another strong process on these guidelines such as non-discrimination and equal treatment and other good tools like transparency. However this goes back to what Microsoft has preached in the past but certainly there are more things to be aware like the freedom in them.Differences between licenses, service and support and the payment model that we need. The technical requirements and the future use on software modification. Documents and standards are key here because there should be awareness as well as internal applications that can work with them.There is a good point in the way governments use open source/free software such as payments and tools that doesn’t need to be procure actively. This hits straight in the face of what is defined as shadow IT. Knowledge on how to manage these hability without falling into shadow IT. The other challenge is the tender that needs to be procured through IT services.Another thing is the way to handle donations, what guidelines should government follow to be an active participant of FLOSS projects.Legality and legal frameworks are important since FLOSS has little knowledge of it. Yet the way we can advanced is basically through brands.

Lanzamiento oficial de OpenOffice.org 3.0

La Comunidad de OpenOffice.org se enorgullece en anunciar el lanzamiento de la Tercera de las Mayores distribuciones del Software de Oficina de Fácil-usoOpenOffice.org 3.0 entraga más flexibilidad, funcionalidad y funcionalidad que ningúna otra de las suite de oficinas en el mercadoYa disponibe por primera vez como aplicación nativa de Mac OS X14 de Octubre , 2008– Liberado de manera oficial en la fiesta de lanzamiento en Paris el día de ayer, y justo a tiempo para el octavo aniversario del proyecto, la Comunidad de OpenOffice.org anuncia el lanzamiento de OpenOffice.org 3.0. La tercera mayor actualización de las suite de productividad líderes con una entrega con mejoramientos significativos y avanzados, además de extensible y entregar herramientas de productividad para todos los usuarios, incluyendo usuarios de Mac, además ahora OpenOffice.org corre de manera nativa en la plataforma de Mac OS X .OpenOffice.org 3.0 es más que una simple aplicación de productividad. Con este lanzamiento los componentes básicos, que incluyen al procesador de palabras, hoja de cálculo, presentación, gráficos, posibilidades de fórmulas y bases de datos , puede ser complementado fácilmente con extensiones bajadas desde el repositorio de extensiones de the OpenOffice.org. En vez de un software demasiado complejo, OpenOffice.org 3.0 le entrega la libertad a los usuarios de empresas, oficinas y escuelas la libertad de configurar sus suite a su manera .La libertad que OpenOffice entrega ha sido probado su popularidad con las cientos de miles veces que ha sido descargado, pasando por lejos a los grandes lanzamientos . “Nuestro mercado ha crecido ,” dice Louis Suárez-Potts, Administrador de la Comunidad de OpenOffice.org. “Como un gobierno luego de un gobierno, empresas luego de las empresas adoptar el formato de Open Document Format (el formato ISO-aprobado que usa nativamente OpenOffice.org ), usualmente adoptan OpenOffice.org y lo aman . Con la versión 3.0, la aplicación es más interoperable con MS Office, posee más capacidades, es más extensible. Libera el escritorio de las restricciones del vendedor .”“OpenOffice.org 3.0 es más poderoso que nunca antes y con soporte para MS Access 2007 y archivos .accdb , mejorados para soportar las macros en VBA , y una nueva habilidad para leer archivos MS Office Open XML, es incluso más fácil que hacer los cambios en los software de MS Office antiguos,” citado por Florian Effenberger, Co-Líder del proyecto de Marketing de OpenOffice.org.OpenOffice.org 3.0 posee una vista natural y renovada, con un nuevo centro de inicio, nueva panatalla de presentación, nuevos iconos y variados mejoramientos de usabilidad . El nuevo conjunto de características incluyen :oWriter (procesador de texto ):o Nuevo control de diapositivas para el zoom que permite la muestra multi-página mientras se editao Nuevo soporte poderoso multi lenguajeo Mejoramiento de las capacidades de las ntoaso Habilidad para edición de documentos wiki para la web, además de documentos office convencionaleso Calc (Hoja de cálculo ):o Incremento de la capacidad de columnas de hasta 1024 por hojao Una poderosa resolvedora de ecuacioneso Nueva característica de colaboración para múltiples usuarioso Draw (gráficos):o Habilidad para el uso de gráficos con tamaño de poster – hasta de tres metros un cuarto o 32.3 pies.o Impress (presentación):o Soporte de características de tabla en la presentaciónOpenOffice.org soporta extensiones continuas para ir de la mano con OpenOffice.org 3.0. Un rápido y creciente número de características que están disponibles de distintos desarrolladores para agregar capacidades como una consola de presentador de Impress, soporte para análisis de negocios , importación de PDF , creación de documentos PDF Híbridos , y una nueva forma de soporte para lenguajes adicionales .“OpenOffice.org 3.0 demuestra que a pesar del crecimiento de las aplicacinoes web, cuando hay un trabajo serio, en sistemas basados en escritorio reina la supremacía por la velocidad de uso y un rango simple de características ofrecidas . OpenOffice.org hace fácil ingresar al nuevo mundo Web 2.0 , sin aprender lenguajes web esotéricos como XHTML y MediaWiki, al permitir que los usuarios creen su web y documentos wiki en el mismo Writer,” dice John McCreesh, Líder del Proyecto de Marketing OpenOffice.org .Se invita a toda la comunidad de OpenOffice.org a participar en la conferencia de OpenOffice.org 2008 que se realizará en Beijing, entre el 5-7 de Noviembre .Para descargar OpenOffice.org 3.0 de forma gratuita, visite http://es.openoffice.orgAlexandro ColoradoCo-Lider de OOoEShttp://es.openoffice.org

Trip to Malaga

In a few days I will be going to Malaga, Spain for the Open Source World Conference. The event promise to have many resources and be with the ‘creame’ of the open source sphere. Including a presentation from Jim O’Reilly keynote, many presentations and panels from around the world. I notice that there are many governments including Uruguay, many regions of Spain and Europe.Personally I need to buy lots of new clothes and get some cables for the event also an extra battery for my N800 and other things. Also I just got a 4GB SD which is great because cost only $25 bucks.I am looking forward for the programme getting updated with my Open for Business talk. So hopefully after I sent my presentation they will get me on the plan with all the glamour and glitz. Let see how it goes.

OOo 3.0 is out

In the middle of OOo launch we now have a 3rd release of OOo. For us at OOoES it means the start of new adventures including a OOo 3.0, open for business, e-learning platform and other things that bring more visitors to the site, and give them something to do.Aditionally we are going social, now you can contact multiple OOo community members from around the web thanks to Gtalk gadgets. Probably next month we can go live with this things.Multimedia is another thing we want to launch including more videos and media that you can learn, promote, and present.Right now we are experiencing a huge demand and the site will be restored soon. However having a more AJAXy site might also put the spotlight back into the OOoES site as a framework to work with. Now that 3.0 is out we can start thinking about also some kind of exchange for the multiple OOo tools and utilities.

Open services for the new FLOSS

After the Openoffice.org open for business takes over the world, we would like to get a blueprint so that the industry can match our offer on the ground level.The services will take care and come as a response to the more professional services that business demand. But having to face some clients the liability seems a bit high an the quality of service might not be ensured. The reality might actually play a different role. The services and passion that the people in the community plays is more than most motivated people in most companies. Right when we get the first services like the education and the support we set a presedent and eliminate the longest oldest question. Where is the support?How can we get the peer review of a community of experts review the next OOo professionals? How can a recognition be oriented on a community model or is it just the model of creating a real bazaar platform.