Annual report from the Danish NLC community

This is my first year as lead and therefore also my first annual status report. Trough out the past year I have tried to keep you all up to date on my blog: http://lodahl.blogspot.com. In periods I wrote blog posts every day. I'll try to continue this in the future, though in a lower frequency.

What happened in the passed year ?

First of all, my English is getting much better. I hope you can all agree with me on that.

I started as coordinator for the Danish localization project on March 1th., but in fact I have been the project leader from about January 1th. I had no idea of how tough it would be and no body could know how things should develop in Denmark and in the rest of the World.

I started out trying to get the project organized by handing out some of the most important daily tasks. I knew that I couldn't do it all by my self. We organized our selves with a webmaster, a QA-master and I also tried to get a new person to take up the documentation. This was what I used to do before.

Unfortunately it didn't work out the way I had hoped. Very few people from the Danish community was ready to take direct responsibilities. But at the same time we have seen a few new names on the mailing lists this year and I'm very happy about that. We are twenty people on the list of active volounteers.

The Danish community deliberately has no funds at all. That way we avoid discussions about how to spend the money. But on the other hand, it would be nice if we had a million.

One of our goals for 2007 was to use Bouncer for handling the downloads. We need that for two purposes:
1) activation of automatic update
2) download statistics. Unfortunately we didn't succeed on this issue because no one has been able to tell us how it works.

We are translating new versions (almost) on time.

One of the most important sub projects was the new Danish spell checker (we call it 'Stavekontrolden'). We didn't have control of the words in the old one and we didn't believe that we could develop the old list fast and firm as we would like to. So we established a brand new list and new affix definitions from scratch based on hunspell. After only twelve months, it was possible for us to announce the first release. We made a comparison of our new spell checker against the old list and it showed that we had reached a break-even on quality. Since then the quality has increased day by day. The resulting spell checker will be integrated in OpenOffice.org 2.4.

Another achievment is that we have managed to organize a monthly newsletter from the community. The list of recievers has increased from 600 to nearly 1.000 people over the year and I find that a success. We are continously trying to improve the content of the newsletter. The newsletter is in Danish, but you can see an example here http://doc.oooforum.dk/Nyhed/2008Januar.pdf

Another thing in year 2007 was the political situation in Denmark. The Danish Parliament was about to agree on implementing open standards in most public authorities but unfortunately the Parliament was accepting both ODF and EOOXML file formats. I and several other people from FOSS communities was fighting and it ended up with a compromise: Microsoft is accepted for now, but must prove their openness in the development process. The Danish Competition Authority has been by the Parliament to monitor the process. My major domestic contribution to the process in the Parliament, was when I was granted a meeting (in the parliament in a sub committee).

During the year, I have tried to get a good relationship with the press. This is one thing I'm still working on. I have good contact with a marketing bureau that helps us when we need to get in touch with the press. The press coverage is usualy positive but I find it very difficult to catch the journalists interest.

Some of the Danish participants made CDs with OpenOffice.org and gave them away to all Members of Parliament and all municipal IT-managers. The CDs to the MP's raised some debate in the media, because the the MP's was not allowed to install OpenOffice.org on their computers in the Parliament. We hope to solve this problem in the coming year. In 2008 we expect to produce CD for all public libraries in Denmark.

In the late summer we worked together with several other FOSS communities in the process in 'Danish Standards' to make sure that Denmark would disapprove EOOXML at ISO. Denmark voted No.

During the year I have tried to keep the international community up-to-date with information by writing on my blog. 173 posts in 2007. I will continue that work in the future, but not that many posts I think. I find blogging a very useful communication channel.

One of the Danish IT newsletters are making an annual questionaire among their readers. This year about 60% of the answering readers says that they have a positive impression of OpenOffice.org. Just a few years ago only 20% knew what OpenOffice.org was. Today OpenOffice.org is considered a serious alternative to Microsoft Office and we meet new references all the time. One of the most important new references on the list is the University of Southern Denmark. The battle for open document standards was on 4th. place of most important issues in IT in 2007.

What can we expect in 2008 ?
I expect that a few Danish authorities will use OpenOffice.org and that several municipals will use OpenOffice.org. Right now I'm working on a case where public schools are saving lots of money by avoiding expensive software. I expect that lots of schools will switch to OpenOffice.org in this year.

A wish for 2008 ?
I wish that one or two of the public authorities will contribute to the project. I think thats what we need the most in Denmark right now: Public acknowledgment.
It's my hope that 2008 will bring us a little closer to an explanation on hos Bouncer works and how we (the Danish community) can take advantage of it.

Best regards, and happy new year to you all


Leif Lodahl
Native-Language coordinator DA.OpenOffice.org
Mail: lodahl-at-openoffice.org
Blog: http://lodahl.blogspot.com/

Minutes

NEW: Danish version here: http://www.oooforum.dk/viewtopic.php?p=7975

I just went to a meeting with Microsoft. I was invited as representative of the Danish OpenOffice.org Community. I thought a lot about whether to accept the invitation or not, but I decided to go there. If I don't accept an invitation like this, I can't claim that Microsoft isn't open enough.

Why is Microsoft inviting to this kind of a meeting ?
Well of cause they want our (my) sympathy and then they want to claim that they are 'open'. These meetings will probably be used as arguments for openness in the future. But inviting to a meeting is not at all enough to claim to be open.

At the meeting was five representatives from Microsoft. Chris Capossela and a guy called David Scult or something from head quarters. From Denmark, the Country general Manager in Denmark, Jørgen Bardenfleth and 'Office evangelist, Bo Drejer with some other people. - Chris was doing most of the talking.

I and one other invited guest from the FOSS community was the only non-Microsoft present.

The meeting was not at all formal and the discussions was held in a friendly and honest tone. We never claimed to be best friends and I started (while presenting my self) to say that I was there as a Microsoft opponent.

I will not refer word by word from the meeting.

Chris was asked about when Microsoft decided to go with 'open standards'. Chris explained that this decision was made about when Office 2003 was developed. Through the discussion it turned up, that the word 'open' again became the problem. Because what Chris was actually talking about was the use of XML. In his mind XML itself makes the file format open.

Chris Capossela was eager to explain that they would very much like the processes in both ECMA and ISO to be more open, that the fact is. I responded that it was a Microsoft choice to go that way. Chris could nothing but agree.

We discussed the openness and Chris explained that the reason for choosing the name Office Open XML was to signal a new era by using the word 'open'. We discussed and agreed that we interpret the word open in different ways. Chris agreed that OOXML 'is not open in all means'. It's only open in the fact that the format is not binary, the spec is available and (because of the OSP (Open Specification Promise), free of charge. We didn't discuss why the OSP isn't enough but Chris did a lot of work criticizing Andy Updegrove for his articles against Microsoft. Well, in another audience that might work.

I criticized Microsoft of taking the fast track route when it was later discovered that the specification was not at all qualified for that route. A document is not ready for a fast track, when so many faults and errors can be found. ECMA didn't do their job. Chris some kind of agreed (!) with me and said that the route was chosen after recommendation from ECMA.

Chris explained that the customers asked for a file format that could 'ensure backward compatibility'. And to 'ensure competition' Microsoft is trying to make it a standard. I told him, that backward compatibility should be handled in the application, not the format. The rules in ISO should prevent dual standards but Chris still think that two standards (not two applications) is ensuring competition. Hmmm. I gave up. I don't think his mind was open for that today.

Chris asked me what I thought he (Microsoft) should do. I told him that what the customers need is buildt-in support for the 'other' file format. Microsoft Office should have a 'save as odf' button and OpenOffice.org should have a similar 'save as OOXML'.

I don't think that the meeting moved anything, really. On the other hand, I don't think that Microsoft thought they could move me or anybody else. We exchanged opinions and business cards, and thats that. Microsoft is not more or less open after this meeting. Even that they tried to explain that.

I am beginning to understand why Microsoft is still claiming to be open. Basically it's a matter of how we interpret the one word open. Microsoft think that XML alone makes the standard open. I use another definition. The process has to be open and transparent and the organization must be protected from being hijacked by a singe vendor. I don't think he agreed or even commented on that.

This is a very fast writing. Sorry about misspellings ;-)

Btw: Thanks to all who gave me good and valuable advise before the meeting. Thank.

Interesting meeting this afternoon

A have been asked to meet Chris Capossela, Vice president at Microsoft Office.

It seems that he is 'on tour' in Europe at the moment.

The invitation says "Lets meet to have an open dialog regarding open document standards". Let's see what shows up today. I'll refer from the meeting later. Stay tuned.

ODF Alliance answer to Burton Group

The very famous report from Burton Group is very friendly to Microsoft:
http://www.burtongroup.com/Guest/Pdf/WhatsUpDOC.pdf

ODF Alliance answers back:
http://www.odfalliance.org/resources/BurtonGroupResponseFinal.pdf

OpenProj 1.0 is now available

In August last year the company Projity (http://www.projity.com/) announced the second beta version of the desktop application OpenProj (http://www.openproj.org). Today Projity released the first 'real' version of the same application.

It is very nice to see a serious competitor to Microsoft Projects and I am looking forward to look closer to the details in the application functionality one of the comming days. According to the website I can expect to find Gantt Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, Earned Value costing and even more.

For now I will just note a few details:
The application is open source, and this is of cause positive, because it gives us users the safty we need, because we can download the source code and find how the file format is designed. But the application uses a binary fileformat (.pod) for storing the project information. It is possible to export the project information in Microsoft Project 2003 (XML) file format. It would be nice if the native file format was xml based and perhaps based on some kind of standard file format.

The application is based on Java code and is not depending on a single software platform or operating system. It has been released for Linux, Unix, Mac and Windows.

The open source license is a so called Common Public Attribution License Version 1.0 (CPAL) witch is approved by OSI https://www.eu.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?cpal.

All together I find this initiative very nice, but I don't think this is the great revolution for now. If the company can establish a solid user community that can take some of the mising details, I think this could grow over time. I would like some more user documentation and mayby a few example projects to download.