The Deeper Significance of LibreOffice 3.3

Over on the RedMonk blog, there's an entertaining post by James Governor on the subject of forks, prompted by the imminent arrival of a major new version of Android, version 3.0, code-named “Honeycomb”, designed with tablets in mind:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Will Mark Zuckerberg Prove He's Open Source's BFF?

Although I don't use it much myself, I've heard that Facebook is quite popular in some quarters. This makes its technological moves important, especially when they impact free software. Yesterday, we had what most have seen as a pretty big announcement from the company that does precisely that:

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Continuing Scandal of Vendor Lock-in

As I've noted many times, one of the big benefits of deploying open source is freedom from lock-in: using open formats that anyone can implement means that it is relatively easy to change supplier. That's not the case with Microsoft's code and formats, as the following sad saga underlines...

On Open Enterprise blog.

GNU PDF Project

Around ten years ago I fought a fierce battle to get people to use HTML instead of PDF files, which I saw as part of a move to close the Web by making it less transparent.

You may have noticed that I lost.

Now, even the GNU project is joining in:

The goal of the GNU PDF project is to develop and provide a free, high-quality and fully functional set of libraries and programs that implement the PDF file format, and associated technologies.

...

PDF has become the de-facto standard for documentation sharing in the industry.

Almost all enterprises uses PDF documents to communicate all kinds of information: manuals, design documents, presentations, etc, even if it is originally composed with OpenOffice, LaTeX or some other word processor.

Almost all enterprises use proprietary tools to compose, read and manipulate PDF files. Thus, the workers of these enterprises are forced to use proprietary programs.

I still think HTML, suitably developed, would be a better solution. (Via LXer.)