Unfortunately, I haven’t had enough time to elucubrate about what I’ve seen and heard in Beijing. Therefore, this is going to be a random collection of thoughts. Maybe, in the future I will have the time to add some comments.
Let’s start with a big thank to the organization. Kudos to everyone. The closing ceremony with the authentic emotion of RedFlag 2000’s managing director is something that will remain in my heart forever.
The sightseeings were also unforgettable. Pictures of everything are here.
A couple of remarks about the opening ceremony: four hours without a (coffee) break have been difficult to manage, especially a few days after a long flight and several hours before the usual time zone, and the slides in Chinese about UOF could have been translated and projected in English on the second screen (which was there). They were extremely interesting, but we have lost most of them because of the translation.
OpenOffice.org is a mature project, which over the years has scaled to a level which was probably difficult to imagine back in 2001. The real strength of the project is the community of volunteers, although we can’t forget the support of companies such as Sun - the founder of the project - plus IBM, Novell and RedFlag 2000.
Without the community, though, OpenOffice.org would not be where it is today, because Sun has still to identify a real strategy to monetize the effort and the investment, Novell is stuck in between the development effort and the agreement with Microsoft, RedFlag 2000 is still too young in the community to be a strategic asset, and IBM is taking a lot more than what is giving (and will continue to do so in the future, IMHO).
The community is going to be key in the process towards interoperability, although the companies would really like to keep it off the table. The community wasn’t invited by Microsoft at their interoperability labs, the community wasn’t invited by IBM at the Beijing interoperability table (I’ve assisted for a couple of hours).
I have managed to get to the pre-conference meetings later than expected, because I have spent 45 minutes of my life showing a map in chinese to chinese people that were unable to tell me where the Sun office was (and I was in the right building). Let’s say that I was upset, to say the least.
The meetings were very positive and constructive, and the number of participants has grown with the hours. We have discussed marketing strategies to get to the next level of visibility, awareness and adoption. We have decided to share best practices at community level, in order to use the successful tactics in every market it makes sense to use them, in order to avoid “reinventing the wheel” every time. It’s a big effort, but we will try to make the structure work in a more efficient way.
The opening ceremony has been a little bit too long, especially for those still suffering from the consequences of jet lag. Four hours without a break, and we don’t call them coffee break without a reason, have been really hard to sustain. The simultaneous translation from chinese to english has worked perfectly, but the contents of the formal speeches was more or less the same (please come and invest in open source development in China and especially in Beijing, we are ready to support your efforts, we have software engineers, blah blah blah).
I understand the rationale, but let’s say that the organization of the opening ceremony of the OpenOffice.org Conference confirms how far away is China from international standards of communication. Two short speeches would have reached the same objective, without bombarding the audience with useless stuff. Anyway, in order to allow all the people that haven’t been able to attend the conference to have a summary of the main contents, I have shot a picture of the few slides that have been projected.
The lunch in the university canteen has been a real experience, and you can judge from the picture of the metal tray (the last time I used a metal tray for lunch or dinner I was in the army for my year of duty). Those that know me will notice the banana, which - in my specific case - makes the experience even worse (I just hate bananas, which I’ve always found disgusting).
I’m leaving for the OpenOffice.org Conference in Beijing. Four days packed with meetings and discussions, followed by two days of sightseeings (Forbidden City and the Great Wall). I will report about the sessions I will be attending, which will be the less technical and the more marketing and community oriented. I will use also Twitter, when I will have a wireless connection (hotel and conference). As people usually say, stay tuned.
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Speaking at the Second ODF Workshop in Pretoria, South Africa, Carlos Gonzalez of the National Center of Information Technologies, announced that the Venezuelan government had formally adopted ODF as a standard for the “processing, exchange and storage of documents”.
Venezuela joins a number of other countries who have adopted this open standard, along with Brazil, Uruguay, South Africa, Belgium - overall, fourteen national and eight provincial governments.
Many countries, provinces and cities have adopted ODF, because it is about competition on a fair playing field, and just like HTML, it will bring lots of new competitors, ideas, processes and products into a market that has long been stymied by the decadence of a monopoly.
ODF is currently implemented by office solutions such as OpenOffice, KOffice, Google Docs, Zoho, IBM Lotus Symphony and Corel Wordperfect. In May 2008, Microsoft announced that Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007 would add native support for the Open Document Format.
(Via SolidOffice).
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Sometimes someone at Microsoft releases an interview which is worth reading.
Two small excerpts:
For example, it is harder and harder to continue to define the world of software as a world divided between open source companies and proprietary companies. The truth is that today we’re all mixed source companies. Every company that traditionally comes from an open source background has over time moved to the middle after realizing that in addition to the open source foundation, they also need proprietary offerings that will differentiate their services from others and therefore will enable them to build a viable business.
So at the same time, companies that you could have associated traditionally with a pure proprietary software development model, including Microsoft, you see them today cooperating with open source development projects, even shipping open source code as part of their breadth of their offerings. Over time this distinction, which was mostly an ideological and very emotional distinction, the reality of business is causing all companies to converge to the point where, as I said, in a few years this distinction will be without meaning and we will all be mixed source companies.
Of course, there are areas where the opinions of Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel for Intellectual Property and Licensing, are still questionable, but they have made some strides in the right direction.
It would be nice to know which are his opinions about the OSP (Open Specification Promise).
During the second day of availability of OpenOffice.org 3.0, the suite has been downloaded 620.000 times at worldwide level (all languages, all flavours) and 50.000 times in Italy (the Italian version). This brings the total for the first two days, respectively, to 1.010.000 and 82.000.
The average OOo download is quite sizeable at 142MB. Therefore, during the two days, the total Internet traffic generated has been 150.3TB at worldwide level (58TB on the 13th and and 92.3TB on the 14th) and 12.2TB in Italy (4.8TB on the 13th and 7.4TB on the 14th).
Firefox, during the Guiness World Record set for the availability of Firefox 3, has been downloaded 8 million times at worldwide level and 320.000 times in Italy. With an average download of 7.8MB, the volume of Internet traffic generated has been 65.4TB at worldwide level and 2.6TB in Italy.
While Firefox downloads have been certified, OpenOffice.org download have not been certified. This means that the OOo counter does not represent the real figure but just a fair percentage of it as several language projects do not rely completely on it, and there are servers that mirror “unofficially” the real ones.
If you have had some problems while trying to download OpenOffice.org 3.0 during the last two days, now you understand the reason. Although my calculations are not “scientific” (my degrees are in geography and journalism), they are extremely close to the reality (as usual, I have underestimated OOo data and rounded them to the lower thousand).
OpenOffice.org 3.0 has been an incredible success, which has gone beyond every optimistic forecast. Although we have not set a Guinness, we have probably established a world record for the amount of Internet traffic generated in a day.
It is probably time, for the industry analysts, to give OpenOffice.org the market share it deserves. Of course, it’s a difficult task, because the adoption patterns of free software are different from those of proprietary software (which, most of the times, comes preinstalled on the PC).
Free software is downloaded when the PC is already at the user premises, and therefore is difficult to calculate which is the percentage of adoptions over the total of downloads (and Linux distributions, and covermounts CDs, and copies made from friends, and…).
Let’s have a Guinness, now, to celebrate.
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Sometimes today, a sunny Italian Sunday, someone will download for the fourth million time the Italian version of OpenOffice.org. In the same timeframe, the number of PCs sold in Italy has been around six million. Of course, downloads do not count installed copies, because there might be multiple downloads for the same PC or from the same person (for instance, I have downloaded OpenOffice.org six times, because I own a PC and a Mac and I have downloaded versions 2.3.1, 2.4 and 2.4.1), but also a single download for multiple installations (as in the case of enterprises or schools). In addition, downloads do not include installations from the CDs included in the trade press and Linux distributions, where OpenOffice.org is already included as standard in the basic configuration.
The Italian OOo Conference will happen next Friday, October 3, in Bolzano, one of the geographical areas where open source software is most widely adopted, with solutions in place in the Italian schools - the region is officially bilingual: German and Italian - and in several offices of the public administration.
It is going to be an exciting event, not only because we will celebrate a number of milestones - OOo 3.0, four million downloads, the growth of the association - but also because we will have two very special guests: Charles Henry Schulz, head of the Native Language Project, and Pier Paolo Boccadamo, Director of Platform Strategies at Microsoft Italia (with Giacomo Segantini).
Italy is definitely going to be the country where Microsoft meets the OOo Community.
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According to a BBC research, Italy has the second-largest majority favouring the election of Barack Obama as US president and a large majority believes America’s relations with the rest of the world would improve under an Obama presidency. Italians are among the largest majorities that say US relations with the rest of the world would stay the same if John McCain were elected president.
• More than three in four (76%) in Italy would prefer to see Barack Obama elected US president, while just 12 per cent would prefer to see the election of John McCain.
• A majority (64%) says that the election of Barack Obama would improve US relations with the rest of the world, while 20% say they would stay the same and just 5 per cent feel they would become worse. In contrast, a slight majority (53%) says America’s relations with the rest of the world would be unchanged under a McCain presidency, with much fewer saying relations would improve (13%) or worsen (16%).
• Asked whether the election of Barack Obama, an African-American man, as US president would fundamentally change their perception of the US, Italians are divided, with 43 per cent saying it would change their perception, and 44 per cent saying it would not.
Although we are usually known for being politically immature, as a country, it looks like we have very clear - and very sound - opinions about the US presidency. Let’s hope for the better, i.e. Obama.
You can download the entire BBC research here.