The release of LibreOffice 4.0 continues the regular drumbeat of feature releases (coupled with maintaining a known-stable earlier version) that’s a signature strategy for The Document Foundation. While a lot of the long-term investment they’ve made has been in cleaning the code, speeding it up and making it more stable, there are also important features in the new release that improve LibreOffice’s enterprise value, such as CMS integration, MS Visio 2013 support and support for large spreadsheets and XML data import. Overall, the pressure on Microsoft to innovate remains high. Read more on InfoWorld.
Some significant new features here, especially the CMS integration with Alfresco, Sharepoint and others. The interoperability continues too – LibreOffice is increasingly the “Swiss Army knife” of file importers, able to create ODF from just about anything. Impressive work.
I was pleased yesterday to see the MariaDB community starting the process of creating a Foundation to host open collective governance for their community. I’ll be interviewing Monty on Monday in a live webcast at 5pm; watch my Google+ stream for the hangout. Meanwhile, I’ve written a short news item on InfoWorld about the Foundation.
What’s driving open source? That was the question InfoWorld asked me to explore for a feature-length article. I spent a good deal of time over the summer thinking about it, and went on to present some ideas as the opening keynote at the eighth International Conference on Open Source Systems in September.
My conclusion is that the key forces driving open source – both for good and bad – are:
The rise of open source foundations
The number of licensing choices available, and how they are understood
The threat of software patents and responses to it
Cloud computing and the usage modalities it induces
Big data and the change in the value point of software it implies
I’m continuing to work on these ideas and welcome input.
RT @AlecMuffett: If I had to find a description for Professor Ross Anderson FRS FREng FIMA FIET (@rossjanderson) it wouldn't include:
"tec… ✍ 5 days ago
RT @webmink: Many of the issues observed with the CRA may arise from the use of the term “commercial” with a definition from the Blue Guide… ✍ 6 days ago
Many of the issues observed with the CRA may arise from the use of the term “commercial” with a definition from the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… ✍ 6 days ago
All views expressed on this blog are those of Simon Phipps and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other entity, including current and former employers and clients. See my full disclosure of interests.
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