This is another article in our series co-publishing with Fedora Interviews.
AbiWord just had a great 2.6 release and the developers took several hours of their spare time over a few weeks period answering questions and providing information. Thanks to the team and especially MarcMaurer for his time and patience. We present you a detailed interview with the AbiWord team on a broad range of topics. » Read more
Hello, Red Hat Network Satellite users! We hope you’re excited about the recent release of Red Hat Network Satellite 5.1. Earlier, we gave you some details about the new Satellite exporter tool that allows you to easily populate content on disconnected RHN Satellites.
Another new feature introduced by Satellite 5.1 is multiple organization support. This feature allows you to partition your Satellite into different organizations, each with their own subscriptions, systems, and content. It provides Satellite administrators with a new way to control user and system access to resources on a Satellite server. For more details on multiple organization support, please refer to our whitepaper: RHN Satellite 5.1 Best Practices for Multiple Organizations (PDF download, ~700KB).
The Satellite Team would like to learn how we can improve this feature to better suit your needs–and we need your help. » Read more
Contributing author: Melanie Chernoff
Over the past year, the OOXML debate launched a worldwide discussion about what an open standard should be, how it impacts the technology industry, and why open standards are important.
Last week, OOXML–an XML format designed for Microsoft’s office suite–was approved as a standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). In past articles1 2, we have discussed problems with voting irregularities, the use of a fast-track process without adequate industry review, proprietary Microsoft technologies used without specification, and other problems. Now that OOXML has been approved despite these objections, let’s take a look at the standardization process and the impact that OOXML’s approval will have in the office suite space. » Read more
In 60 countries around the world, 200 teams have organized activities for today, the first Document Freedom Day. It’s a day of grassroots effort (based on the model of Software Freedom Day) to promote and build awareness for the relevance of free document formats and open standards. » Read more
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
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
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.”
This week a friend posted on her blog that she was marking all of her Flickr images “all rights reserved” (instead of with a Creative Commons license) and “friends and family only” (instead of publicly viewable) because of this story. A person uploaded photos of his daughter to Flickr. One was used without permission by Nerve Media’s Babble.com on an article about children and lead poisoning. The photo had been marked “all rights reserved,” and Nerve/Babble blamed the error on an ill-informed intern. The community responded that the company had been guilty of the same offense repeatedly in the past. Babble responded on their site that there wasn’t an alleged “long history” at all. He said/she said.
