Microsoft/Novell deal

 November 4, 2006

On the 2nd of November, Microsoft and Novell announced an agreement to share some patents, cross-marketing, and collaborative development.

The deal is very recent, and it is difficult to say what exactly it includes and what consequences (if any) it will have.

From the information currently available, it seems there are multiple parts to the deal:

Both companies will work on the compatibility between their OSes and the other company’s virtualization solution (Windows on Xen and SLE on Viridian).
There will be a collaboration between the companies to improve the compatibility between OpenOffice.orf and the Open Office XML Format.
Novell and Microsoft will provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products.
Microsoft will officially recommend SuSE Linux Enterprise to their customers that will enquire about Linux options.

I find this deal not favorable for the Open Source community for many reasons.

Fedora Bordeaux

 April 23, 2006

About one year and a half ago, I tried Fedora Heidelberg (Fedora Core 3), but it did not last too much on my machine because I was eager to test Ubuntu Warty Warthog.

Fedora Bordeaux (Fedora Core 5) got released about one month ago, and I immediately installed it. It has been a month now since I’ve installed it, and I like it. I feel that I’ll be using Fedora for a long time because I found an environment that feels right to me for the first time.

OpenOffice.org 2

 October 25, 2005

Last week, OpenOffice.org 2 was released. This is a major release of the office suite, but I think it’s also a major accomplishment for the project. There are two main aspects I think make this release very important.

The first aspect is the default use of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) to save files. I believe that the future of office documents should be the ODF format, even if most probably it will not. Currently, the de-facto standards are the Microsoft Office ones (doc, xls, ppt), but those are not official standards, and therefore interoperability is very hard if not impossible. I hope that we will have official international standards for these kinds of files over time and that everyone will use them. To achieve this goal, I see as an excellent first step this default setting in OpenOffice.org 2.