News: International OpenOffice market shares - Portal - Tutorials, Tipps und Tricks für Webmaster auf Webmasterpro.de

Ah, I realize that my February post on these data lacked the HTML code.... so here is the link again demonstrating OOo's and more generally the technology's use.

News: International OpenOffice market shares - Portal - Tutorials, Tipps und Tricks für Webmaster auf Webmasterpro.de

Secrecy Around Trade Agreement Causes Stir : NPR

An interesting NPR article on ACTA.

Secrecy Around Trade Agreement Causes Stir : NPR

Intellectual Property Watch � Blog Archive � AIDS Patients Protest EU-India Trade Agreement

The logic of intellectual property--who owns it, keeps it, safeguards it, distributes it, and why and how--applies as much to medicines as to software and other intangibles. In the case of medicines, what's at stake is pretty clear: lives. If the drug is too costly or otherwise unobtainable, the user might very likely die, or suffer rather horribly, as patented medicines aimed for niche markets (even if they number in the tens of millions) can be priced arbitrarily high. (Think of it as ransom: only the rich can afford their lives.)

The consequences of such encumbered software are less visible. But lives, too, can be at stake, as software *enables* the flow of ideas and the making of things. Good software that does what the user wants is essentially invisible: the user's desires are achieved and she doesn't worry about the means or the medium. She simply does it. But if the software is poorly designed, buggy, or equally, enormously expensive, it adds to the cost of doing things and introduces obstacles to their doing. In fact, those doings, however meritorious and necessary, may simply not be done.

Open source is by no means a panacea. It is a strategy for making and distributing things, and it is purposefully unscripted when it comes to precise methodology. That's the nature of pragmatism. It's an option that could answer the exigencies of efficiency and cost. Applying the logic of openness to other fields, such as open access and open IP for the production of such things as the medicines, and not only that, seems at this point, compelling.

Intellectual Property Watch � Blog Archive � AIDS Patients Protest EU-India Trade Agreement

OSI Board Addition May Bring Needed Change | ITworld

I was delighted to read of Simon's election to the Board of the OSI, and can think of no better person for it. Congratulations, Simon! I, like many, do look forward to seeing OSI become more relevant. We need a standard by which claims of openness are measured and deemed true or false. We need sanity in the licenses. We need policies that address the world's turn to Foss and open standards. Simon has been working in all these fields.

OSI Board Addition May Bring Needed Change | ITworld

The Hindu : Business / Economy : Think local, go ‘open’

I used to work with Gopi, who's featured here, and I've also helped produce a lot of the language I read here. And so it's doubly nice to see the attention given to open source and open standards here in The Hindu, which is a quite important paper in India. But I've also seen similar attention evanesce. The difficulty is not in getting attention but in keeping it. And most important in engaging the attention of the politicians who make the crucial decisions.

Foss, open standards are in the end political issues, as they now demand *how* to spend your (taxpayer's) money. Your money can be spent on proprietary work made by companies which depend on the luck of the market. Or it could be spent on work that does not impose what is effectively a user tax and which is more removed from the uncertain roll of the market's dice.

The Hindu : Business / Economy : Think local, go ‘open’

This winter was the driest on record - thestar.com

Global climate change, aka Global Warming, at home.

This winter was the driest on record - thestar.com

An Individual’s Agenda � What I Couldn't Say…

Worth reading, this and the subsequent blog on patents and IP.

An Individual’s Agenda � What I Couldn't Say…

Paths of and to Openness

I was talking with an analyst/consultant based in the Middle East about the state of OpenOffice.org in the region. He wanted to know the usual.... and the usual is that which is really hard to supply. Users are under no obligation to tell us of what they are doing, and this is also true of those providing support and services, such as ArabDev, which is based in Egypt. Developer communities, however, do let us in on their work, and outside of individuals working on localization, I don't think there are any developer groups or companies in the region. I wish there were. But it takes a lot of time and money to do core work on OOo. Which is all the more reason to do extensions.

In talking to the analyst, it occurred to me that a really rather cool study would be to chart the how (and to a degree why) public and private enterprises adopt and migrate to applications such as OpenOffice.org. The narratives to such a migration are many, and for public narratives, as well as for a lot private ones, we know that they want to save money and gain flexibility: Why spend a lot of money on something that limits your ability to engage in the future? Okay, but *how* did the decision makers (if any) come to this understanding in the first place? That is the interesting question.

I guess I've known answers: that one path is to work from the ground up. This is a classic Linux/Foss narrative: that we persuade the actual user geeks who actually work with and are informed of the software gamut, and these then persuade their managers, unto the CXO who decides. We know this path and help those in the narrative of persuasion by supplying facts, arguments, presence.

The other path that I pursue is the opposite: the top down approach, where I seek to persuade the most powerful person of the virtues of OOo. He or she can be the CXO or even above. What counts is selling the executive on the things that appeal most, such as saving money, flexibility (no vendor lock-in) or whatever, while at the same time, underscoring that a migration to open source (or its proprietary versions) is not likely to erode his or job, but rather grant more power and security, as the executive is no longer dependent upon any single vendor. This method works fairly well in a lot of regions where the top echelon is regarded most highly and the bottom not at all.

But there are other paths, and it is never obvious which, exactly, is the right one to follow. Each region, each cultural pocket determines its own path. What I do in Canada, where I have been trying to get the country, as well as the provinces, to adopt OOo, will differ dramatically from what I do in India, say, or in the China or elsewhere. Power may be the same but its narratives always differ.