It’s been a while since we posted a good round-up, and there’s so much we’ve come across lately that we really wanted to tell you about. In no particular order, here’s a list of things that have piqued our interest in the last few weeks:
Contributing author: Melanie Chernoff
You probably don’t lose any sleep worrying that your word processor is saving files in the wrong format. You may have some old files that don’t open correctly, or someone might have sent you a spreadsheet that doesn’t work in anything but Excel, but you probably found some way to work around the problem.
But when data is important and needs to be used in different ways or archived for a long time, the format really does matter. It all boils down to one question: who owns your data? If your data can be used in a wide variety of applications, you own it. If it can only be used cleanly with one vendor’s applications, that vendor is really the one with control.
This is why standards are so important. A complex standard that can only be fully implemented by one vendor does nothing to solve this problem, especially when the format was designed for only that one vendor’s data. This is the crux of the debate over OOXML, an XML format designed for Microsoft’s office suite, which was submitted to ISO for fast-track standardization as DIS 29500. This proposal will be accepted or rejected on March 29, 2008. » Read more
There are lots of ways that software gets included in Fedora releases. Because Fedora is a community-powered Linux distribution, the most common (and likely the easiest) method is when a community member packages and “owns” the task of building it for Fedora. This story follows that process. » Read more
Enjoy the third installment in our series of video-taped talks with the iconic Alan Cox. Afterwards, in case you need a catch-up, you can hear Alan talk about community and the enterprise or the state of free software in our video archives.
This is in response to a thread from fedora-devel-list. You can read the relevant post in the redhat.com mailing list archives.
Many people claim that “Linux is about choice!”. That’s a neat phrase, but what does it mean? Does it mean that you should have the ability to twist and turn 400 different knobs on your Linux install? That’s what some think. Does it mean that you have the right to choose Linux, or choose your flavor of Linux, and then choose from the package sets within those flavors? That’s what I and many others think. There is a very distinct difference here too. Let’s look at it from a food point of view (one of my favorite points-of-view). » Read more
In February 2007 we met Swapan, the only Red Hat® Certified Engineer® in the islands of Andaman and Nicobar. We thought we’d check in with him now that the year has passed, and see what he’s been up to. » Read more
Last month I was threatened with police intervention after taking pictures of my two-year-old. Why? We were in what you might think of as analogous to an outdoor mall. It’s a former industrial complex that’s listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Today the area has been revitalized with restaurants and office space, a large greenspace in the middle, and an attractive manmade river and waterfall. Despite there being no signs to indicate such, security informed me that the owners of the space have prohibited photography in order to “protect the intellectual property of the architecture.”
Today more than 15,000 bloggers are participating in Blog Action Day, an initiative that asks bloggers to post on one topic en masse on the same day each year. The 2007 topic is the environment, and open source bloggers are joining in. » Read more
