LibreOffice is built from a large legacy codebase that dates back over 20 years. It includes millions of lines of code, can be compiled for a wide range of platforms and incorporates the ideas from long-superseded approaches to programming. Meanwhile, the LibreOffice development community is diverse, international and distributed. Bringing together the immovable object with the irresistible force has resulted in all sorts of interesting innovation. Read about it in my InfoWorld column this week.
For Valentine’s Day, here’s a song about real love.
That’s Who Are We Fooling, by Brooke Fraser and Aqualung. Amazon UK will give you £1 to buy any track if you have a Facebook account and tell them your favourite today (assuming you’re in the UK).
A rare en banc hearing of the US federal circuit court today will re-hear the arguments over a fiercely-fought software patent case, CLS Bank vs Alice Corp (the aggressor here is actually Alice; CLS is named first as they sued pre-emptively). Among the amici briefs is one from the EFF proposing Mark Lemley‘s elegant re-examination of the patent statute as a solution. This involves treating “a computer which…”, the weasley phrase added in front of abstract patent claims to make them patentable, as unacceptable unless it refers to a specific implementation of a computer. In this case, the statute’s rules on functional claiming would then apply, severely restricting the scope of the patent. I explain in more detail in InfoWorld today.
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.
The Communications Data Bill may have come under heavy fire in Parliament, but it’s not dead yet – and it’s already cost us a fortune even without becoming law. Read more in ComputerWorldUK.
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.
Visual Studio now includes GPLv2 code, derived from the libgit2 project. They are also collaborating with GitHub over the project. Did hell just freeze over? I don’t think so, as I explain in InfoWorld today, but it’s definitely part of a cooling trend in Microsoft’s war on FOSS which could eventually lead to a Hadean skating rink.
For those who are interested, they have been able to do this because libgit2 adds an extremely broad exception to GPLv2 that defines a clean project boundary absolving Microsoft from any need to apply the GPL to other parts of Visual Studio or Team Foundation Server. I view this as another manifestation of the trend toward the middle ground of open source licensing, although as with LGPL this remains a “strong copyleft” license, just with a limit to its scope.
Fascinating video of Imogen Heap explaining her “gloves” – actually a set of instrumentation that detects body position and gestures and provides haptic and visual feedback to the performer.
Package management in Perl and Linux may have seeded their existence, but app stores have been hostile to open source and failed to pass on software freedom to users. But that could be changing, and today’s exemplar could be … Microsoft. Read on in InfoWorld today as I lay out the groundwork for the discussion Amanda Brock and I will lead at FOSDEM.
On ComputerWorldUK, I’ve posted my picks for FOSDEM. I didn’t mention that I’ll also be speaking (about OSI) at the end of Saturday afternoon in the Free Java DevRoom. I’ve still a few openings for 1:1 meetings too – let me know if you want to meet. See you there!
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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