darcusblog

Ever since I heard late last year that my campus was moving to MS Exchange, I’ve been grumbling. I thought then that this was a shockingly misguided decision, and since the rollout, my suspicions have only been confirmed.

When they flipped the switch on the transition, I realized that Apple Mail—which had always worked flawlessly with the previous IMAP server—now was unusable with Exchange’s IMAP gateway. Moreover, none of the advanced calendaring functionality was available to me unless I wanted to change email clients (to MS Entourage). I did not, and resented the fact that the decision to move to a proprietary solution was creating two classes of users on campus: those who used the full closed MS stack, and those that did not. I have yet to be on a committee where the chair insists on scheduling through Exchange, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. I also resented the heavy-handed way IT administrators were pressuring people to conform to their single source vision.

So I started to lessen my dependence on the campus mail system, and move more of it to GMail. But that only went so far given the lack of IMAP support. Thankfully, Google is now rectifying that limitation. To wit, I’ve now got a solid, reliable IMAP server, an online calendar with an open API, and an open source cross-platform client (Mozilla’s Thunderbird + Lightning) that works beautifully with both.

Problem solved.

I’m a fan of Presentation Zen, and have often recommended it to students. A recent post on Pecha Kucha got me thinking: if the purpose of this approach is to cut down on excessive wordiness, to keep presentations focused, and to give many people a chance to present, perhaps it might be interesting to experiment with it for academic conferences? That might have the effect of raising the overall quality of presentations, and opening up more opportunity for discussion?

Just a thought …

I’ve not bothered to comment on the issue here, but Rob Weir has an excellent analysis of the recent unraveling of the OpenDocument Foundation, which at this point appears to be three people: Gary Edwards, Marbux, and Sam Hiser. Sam has a weak rebuttal that only reinforces one of Rob’s points: the self-righteous, self-serving, completely delusional belief that these three alone have all the solutions to the complex problems of interoperability, that they are somehow the torch-bearers of freedom, and that anyone that disagrees with them on anything is part of some conspiracy to deny the world a better future.

What’s really sad is that some journalists actually believe this rhetoric without any apparent further investigation. For example, Linux Today concludes in an example of shockingly bad and unsubstantiated journalism that:

… regardless of how “right” people think ODF is over OOXML, it’s still just one more thing for big vendors to fight about. In the end, Gary and the Foundation are saying, it’s the customers that lose out, trying to get their documents opened.

Did they talk to David Faure or Thomas Zander from the KOffice project? Obviously not. How about former Foundation members like Patrick Durusau? Nope.

When Marbux (a man who hides behind a pseudonym) started being abusive on the ODF TC lists and threatening lawsuits and to fork ODF, I wrote at the time that I would publicly call it as I saw it: as an unprincipled effort at extortion. I will continue to do that. Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists at the Foundation, it will be hard for them to explain away my position by reference to some corporate conspiracy. But I post it here for the record.

Ed has two recent posts that ought to get one thinking of the possibilities of libraries—and in particulaar big data providers like OCLC and the Library of Congress—getting on board the semantic web train. The first is a more high-level goal of the open data movement, complete with nice diagram. The second is a much more grounded example of the kind of practical things that can make it happen that he and I put together. Allow me to illustrate from my command-line:

$  xsltproc \
http://inkdroid.org/data/identity-foaf.xsl \
http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/key/lccn-no99-10609 | xmllint --format -

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:srw="http://www.loc.gov/zing/srw/" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">

<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/key/lccn-no99-10609"> <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person"/> <foaf:name>Berners-Lee, Tim</foaf:name> <foaf:made rdf:resource="http://worldcat.org/oclc/041238513"/> <foaf:made rdf:resource="http://worldcat.org/oclc/048753874"/> <foaf:made rdf:resource="http://worldcat.org/oclc/040278766"/> <foaf:made rdf:resource="http://worldcat.org/oclc/044933478"/> <foaf:made rdf:resource="http://worldcat.org/oclc/045065386"/> <foaf:made rdf:resource="http://worldcat.org/oclc/044281610"/> <foaf:made rdf:resource="http://worldcat.org/oclc/075964549"/> <foaf:made rdf:resource="http://worldcat.org/oclc/044721973"/> <foaf:made rdf:resource="http://worldcat.org/oclc/036040597"/> <foaf:made rdf:resource="http://worldcat.org/oclc/040938943"/> <foaf:made rdf:resource="http://worldcat.org/oclc/051662536"/> <foaf:made rdf:resource="http://worldcat.org/oclc/122918124"/> <foaf:made rdf:resource="http://worldcat.org/oclc/034829358"/> </rdf:Description>

</rdf:RDF>

It took all of about 30 minutes to do this. Now imagine if each of those target URIs also served up (either directly, or via GRDDL) RDF descriptions of those resources …

Eric Lai has an article about tension around technical and governance issues within OpenOffice.org. He asked for my thoughts on the matter, and included most of what I said in the article.

I’m struck by how defensive OOo supporters are of any criticism. I don’t really think they fully appreciate the immensity of the task of not just providing a reasonable alternative to Microsoft’s desktop monopoly, but a superior one that will actually draw users to it. In terms of market share, OOo is utterly failing. Just to give my own experience, I have yet to meet a single colleague in my field that uses anything but Word to author their documents. I would be surprised if any of them have even heard of OpenOffice.

Clearly this failure is not the fault of OpenOffice.org alone; indeed, it’s as much as anything a consequence of monopoly. The question raised in various places about the technical and governance infrastructure of OpenOffice.org, then, is not about pointing fingers and assigning blame. It is about recognizing the enormity of the challenge and figuring out how to address it. Our model should be something like Mozilla, which has managed to steadily chip away at both the market share and the mind share of Internet Explorer by providing a superior product, with demonstrable innovations, backed up by a vibrant user community, organized in an effective open community. So the question many of us are raising is: what changes can we make to OpenOffice.org to see similar results?

Great to see IBM finally step up and join the OpenOffice project. Of course, there are still some issues to attend to around organization and community to ensure the long-term health and viability of the project.

In related news, we have someone over on zdnet asking:

IBM to give OpenOffice the Outlook e-mail killer it needs?

Oh god, please no. This is exactly the kind of “follow Microsoft over the cliff” thinking that kills the possibility for real alternatives. My university has just implemented what I consider a disasterously poor decision to move to Exchange. I have yet to hear a single person express happiness about this move. The kind of integration that its promoters promised, of course, really only works if everyone uses a Microsoft stack: Windows, Office, and Outlook. I and many others simply won’t do that, and it turns out that the mail server works rather inconsistently with IMAP clients such as Apple Mail. The promised wonder system is, in my experience, a decided step backwards, and it is so precisely because of its monolithic integrated design.

No, the solution is open, decoupled systems; disparate services and applications tied together though open standards (think efforts like CalDav). OpenOffice does not need yet more integrated functionality; it needs to be stripped down. OOo will not have much of a future unless its developers look forward and ask how personal computing and productivity might look different in the internet age.

Excellent overview of the possibilities of using OpenID to facilitate seamless exchange of profile information among social networking services and sites. Dare notes the business reasons why this is unlikely to happen in the for-profit world of Facebook, MySpace, et al. In the realm of open bibliographic services like Zotero, CiteULike, and RefBase , on the other hand, it seems a perfect solution.

Michael Meeks (from an interview) on what many of us have seen for a long time as serious problems within OpenOffice.org:

I would stress that there are people inside Sun that do ‘get it’. People that are open, and helpful, and really good. But there are also a large number who are very traditional, very staid people, particularly in quality assurance. You can’t argue with them, because they’re in their own self-reinforcing world view. They say specifications are necessary for product quality, and you say “That’s fine, but look at the quality. It’s still not very good.” They say more specifications are necessary! The answer is always more of the same, and you can’t argue with that. It leads to obsolescence - quality through obsolescence, is what I like to call it.

Michael notes a lot of progress on the OOo organizational front of late, such as the move to more frequent releases. But clearly the deeper organizational dynfucntions are really, seriously, weighing on the capacity for OOo to innovate. I really hope they don’t slow down implementation of the new metadata support in ODF 1.2. It really has the potential to be a killer innovation opportunity for OOo, but not if it gets delayed for five years by business as usual.

I’m cautiously optimistic, though.

There’s been a lot of focus on both the promise and likely pitfalls of Joost’s attempt to bring television to the web. But this post emphasizes that all the focus on the multimedia aspect of the effort misses what may well be Joost’s killer feature: its metadata support.

They have a lot of really good people working on building out a killer metadata system based on open standards like RDF, and exploiting open source code. Moreover, they are contributing back to the open source world (witness TripleSoup at the Apache Foundation).

Janko speculates on the goals:

So what can these metadata frameworks be used for? Timestamped comments and tags are certainly one interesting possibility. Combine this with FOAF-like social networking structures, and you got yourself a whole new way to explore TV programming.

Perhaps Joost will be RDF’s first recognized “killer app”?

So it seems Steve Jobs managed to convince a first major record label to take the anti-DRM plunge. This is a good step, in that it removes one major impediment to my willingness to buy content from services like iTunes.

But there’s one other major problem with the existing state of affairs in online music that this deal does not really address. Yes, they offer the songs in a slightly higher bit-rate and quality for a little more money. But the files are still lossy compressed: an obvious step down from the quality one would expect of CDs.

So what would it take for me to be willing to buy content from iTunes? Simple; for content to be available in an open lossless format like FLAC, ultimately including quality levels better than CD.

Otherwise, I’ll continue to restrict myself to buying CDs and higher resolution alternatives.