Pendant des siècles, la définition de l’innovation était « rendre possible quelque chose qui ne l’était pas auparavant ». Même si cela n’affectait qu’une minorité technologiquement lettrée ou ayant la chance d’être bien équipée. Désormais, un autre type d’innovation prend le pas : « rendre agréable à une catégorie de personnes ce qui est possible ». Imaginons que vous souhaitiez […]
Last week, Lanedo sent me to GUADEC, the GNOME developers and users conference. As you may have read elsewhere, the conference was wonderfully organized, with splendid weather, gorgeous food and awesome people.
But there was a strange feeling amongst participants. Was it the last GUADEC? What is the future of the GNOME project? Xan López and Juan José Sánchez suggested to ship a tablet with GNOME in 2014. But isn’t that too late? Is it really useful?
Is this the end of the world, the end of the road?
OpenOffice, c’est un nom qui doit vous dire quelque chose. Il y a beaucoup de chances que vous l’utilisiez ou l’ayez essayé, que vous lui trouviez des défauts par rapport à Microsoft Office.
Lorsque je sors de mon petit monde geek, je suis à chaque fois étonné de voir à quel point peu de logiciels libres ont réellement percé auprès du grand public. Et si, dans le milieu professionnel, beaucoup ont vaguement entendu parler de Linux ou de Ubuntu, peu sont ceux qui comprennent réellement de quoi il s’agit.
Je n’ai trouvé que trois exceptions, très souvent installées et connues par la majorité des utilisateurs, même si ce n’est que pour noter l’infériorité par rapport à des concurrents propriétaires : VLC, Firefox et OpenOffice.org.
Par contre, il y a des chances que le mot LibreOffice ne vous dise rien. Si c’est le cas, laissez-moi une petit chance de vous l’apprendre. Et si c’est le cas de votre entourage, envoyez-les sur cette page.
En résumé, LibreOffice est le successeur d’OpenOffice et ce que vous devriez installer sur votre ordinateur. Mais comment en est-on arrivé là ?
LibreOffice heads to become one of the most prominent Free Software in the desktop ecosystem. Despite an increasing trends towards alternatives, most of desktop users out there are using a Windows operating system. The implication is straightforward: most of LibreOffice users and potential users are running Windows.
On the other hand, most of LibreOffice developers are currently under Linux. Which means that early testing, nightly builds and debugging mostly happens on Linux.
This is a known problem in free cross-platforms software. Tristan Nitot, head of Mozilla Europe, explained several times that he was using Windows not as a choice but to experience what most of Firefox users are experiencing.
Not so long ago, OpenOffice.org was the less attractive project of the Linux ecosystem. You would need it, you would use it daily but you would not think it was possible to contribute to that project or to improve it in any way.
It was a necessary pile of spaghetti code from the eighties that only Michael Meeks was able to understand. He was even spending every FOSDEM trying to convince you that compiling OpenOffice was not so bad, that it took only a couple of weeks and a few terabytes of hard disk.
Then, in only one year, multiple things happened:
I often heard people that complain about OpenOffice.org : it’s too slow, too buggy, it takes too much memory, it doesn’t care about ergonomy. It’s awful but we need it.
Altought I’m a long time OOo evangelist[1], I must agree most of the time… Sadly… Yes, OpenOffice.org is great and useful. But if you want to drop MS Office 2000 in favor of our lovely OOo, you must buy RAM, a lot of RAM. Is OpenOffice.org a proof of the limitations of OpenSource Development ? Is that true that we cannot compete with proprietary software in some markets ?
Michael Meeks is an OpenOffice.org developper, famous on pgp for his « bullet list only » blogging style. I’ve interviewed him before the upcoming FOSDEM, the 26th february 2006. I wasn’t prepared to hear so much good news in a single interview…
[1] See my talk at ENS Cachan in 2003 (185Mo)