The Disparity Bit

I don't think anyone who doesn't know me personally is reading this blog. Either way you ought to know I'll be very busy in the coming months.

Not that my blogging had ever been on a scale that requires a lot of dedicated time, but it's a convenient excuse :-)

Last time I wrote that the threats presented by Novell's OpenXML support plugin for OO.o don't outweigh the benefits of having such support. Even broken and partial support is still better than nothing because it enables companies to do a one-off conversion, with a manual pass if need be, to migrate away from MS Office. And it lets individuals, and companies which aren't ready yet for that migration, read evil OpenXML documents sent by other companies (or your government, in some cases).



Of course OpenXML support in OO.o can also encourage people not to move away from MS Office, because if the metaphorical neighbours' kid who insists on using free software can read the documents your MS Word produces, he won't refuse to fix your computer. (A lucky few even have a government that wants to use open formats.) And it can also make people see OO.o as an inferior MS Office clone, because it can work with MS Office files but not as well as MS Office does itself, and it loses a bit of formatting data every time it opens them.



But by that measure we should also condemn projects like Samba and Wine. They too deliver inferior and late implementations of proprietary Microsoft technologies. I haven't heard any cries out of Groklaw that Samba betrays the free software community. (And don't talk to me about pure-Samba no-Windows networks. You could have all the same features on top of NFS or whatever if a tenth of Samba's development effort had gone that way instead. Samba's purpose is Windows compatibility, period.)



And what about the existing partial and inferior support for the MS Office .doc .xls etc. formats in OO.o and every other free office suite in existence? What about the FAT and NTFS filesystem support in Linux? I seem to remember PJ being proud of the community for such massive effort and dedication to often thankless projects of reverse engineering.

Zuska links to this article by Natalie about teenage girls being presented with stupid role models. The following quote is representative:

Unfortunately, the message repeatedly rammed down our throats, even today, is that women are not attractive if they are smart.

This is certainly the case. I just wanted to emphasize two points. Teenage boys are also influenced by this pop-culture message, which can make them search out and prefer the stupid, sexy, submissive girls they see advertised. (Read: encourage such behavior in girls who wouldn't behave that way by themselves.) And there is also another message, which says men are not successful and attractive unless they are physically strong, aggressive and uncompromising. And incidentally stupid.

Groklaw is running a story with the heading, 'Novell "Forking" OpenOffice.org'. PJ writes,

There will be a Novell edition of OpenOffice.org and it will support Microsoft OpenXML.

Except that, reading the article and comments and other sources such as Miguel de Icaza's post on the subject, there doesn't seem to be a fork. Not in any conventional sense of the word. Instead there is (or will be) an OO.o plugin that adds OpenXML support. The plugin has a BSD-style license, and if it requires changes to OO.o itself (which it shouldn't), those changes would have to be published under the LGPL (OO.o's license) or a compatible license.

I've written here before about some reasons free, openly developed software generally has fewer security issues than proprietary software. However, one would expect Microsoft to beat the odds, since they're capable of funding any development process they want. They can hire world-class programming and QA teams and make sure at least their software contains no bugs or vulnerabilities.

Of course we all know that doesn't happen, but it might one day. I'd like to point out that there's another fundamental reason Windows and Office, or any similarly proprietary OS and applications bundle, can't be as secure as a good Linux distribution. Since I used to be a Gentoo Linux packager, I naturally consider package management to be the indispensable quality Windows lacks.

Everyone's abuzz with the Microsoft-Novell deal. (Groklaw coverage ^{1 2 3} and surely more to come; you can also pick it up on Slashdot or anywhere else.) It's a trap! They're coming! Ack, they're using patents, run for the trees!

So what's the big deal? Microsoft's strongest suit has always been marketing and FUD, rather than technology. This isn't an unexpected development by any stretch of the imagination. The only thing which might be surprising about it is the Novell side of the affair. And I always did think there was something weird about Novell, with their support of mono. Anyway, unless you're a Novell customer who now feels he has to switch, you probably don't really care what Novell do or don't do.

I used to be a Gentoo developer until last June. A few days ago Seemant Kulleen wrote a farewell post which is really nicer than I deserve.

This isn't a post designed to highlight his good opinion of me (grin :-) but to return the favor as it were.

Today's Daily WTF includes a photo of mistranslated instructions for a certain piece of hardware. Although the anonymous author is currently reduced to writing user manuals, he clearly has a bright future in sales and PR.

And I'm not saying that just because his style is somewhat reminiscent of Viagra spam. ("3.5 inches of hard dishs!" "Spreading the hot good!" "Pick up a people to can satisfy your need!")

There's something about DRM that makes people stupid. Content providers believe it will give them total control over customers. They drool over anything that has "DRM" in its name until they can't see it clearly. Then they spend their billions on something any competent engineer could out-design and out-code in two months.

How else can you explain ideas like Aladdin's recent US patent application for an "XCD"? (story, slashdot story.) This is an encrypted CD or DVD, with one edge shaped into a USB contact. The USB gives access to a key that lets a special player application access the data on the disc itself.

The new Vista license has been published by Microsoft, and people have been pointing out the differences from older Windows versions.