Este es el post de Louis hizo en su blog sobre el futuro de la
autonomia informatica.
Louis no solo habla de OpenOffice.org ni de Software libre sino tocas
eventos importantes en el proyecto brasileiro. El post es algo extenso
pero vale la pena leerlo.
* http://ooo-speak.blogspot.com/2007/04/toward-informatic-autonomy.html
Toward Informatic Autonomy
fisl 8.0, Porto Alegre, Brazil, April 2007
Louis Suárez-Potts, PhD
Copyright (c) Louis Suárez-Potts
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License
Introduction
I want to talk about where OpenOffice.org is and where we are going;
to give you
a report on the project and open an invitation. But I also want to
speak to the
logic of free software collaboration and reconsider the stakes at play. And I
want to listen to what you have to say. I don't want to just say what I think
you should do—we've all heard lectures like that and once is enough.
For in many ways, the future not only of OpenOffice.org but of a lot of free
software lies with you, working as leaders in a partnership with other
nations.
It lies with meeting the challenges of coordination, education, development,
distribution; challenges of poverty and infrastructure and bureaucratic and
political resistance; all challenges that you are meeting now. The story of
intellectual property and of the world's wealth is a story that we are all now
rewriting. No one nation or region can any longer rightly claim
dominance. Is it
too much to assert that empire is in twilight? I don't think so.
But this twilight period is fragile—countering hegemonic power always is, as
that power has deep resources and vast momentum; it can, for instance, buy its
way back. But we know all this, and we know, too, that resistance is
infinitely
creative and resourceful, but only if able to use tactics and techniques that
allow for the free exchange of ideas.
Resistance to hegemonic power means doing what benefits your community—your
local community most. For us, it means in this case using free software and it
means building free software. And that is my cue to start discussing
OpenOffice.org
more directly.
The state of the project
OpenOffice.org has never been strong or better, and is growing daily, as a
project, a product, a community, throughout the world. We owe this growth—this
world changing growth—to you: those who, like Carlos Dantas de Menezes, who
created the enormously useful grammar checker CoGrOO for Brazilian Portuguese,
and the Brazilian OpenOffice.org team, who have localized the application and
distributed it, and ensured that millions here in Brazil, in the
favelas in the
cities, everywhere, can use it in their language, for free.
This achievement, of people working together all over the world, with local
efforts collaborating with international ones, has enormous ramifications for
how we live today and tomorrow. OpenOffice.org gives users the power
to produce
not just office documents, and thus the power to enter the 21st century as
equals—but just about anything else: it's a productivity suite with no
horizons.
Because the application uses the OpenDocument format, or the ODF, as
it is more
popularly known, as it is default file format, and because the ODF is an open
standard, maintained by an international consortium and not by any one
company,
and because it is infinitely adaptable, flexible, and powerful, for all these
reasons, OpenOffice.org is a tool that gives users extraordinary power.
It gives you the power to produce a vast range of work that you can share or
save or edit using other applications, without the anxiety that your friends
must have the same application or that you must renew your own end
user license
with the company that created the application you used. The ODF, the
file format,
has been implemented by numerous applications already, meaning that a file
crated using OpenOffice.org or StarOffice or IBM Workplace or KOffice can be
edited using any other implementation. With the ODF, with
OpenOffice.org, there
is no vendor lockin. And because the ODF can be implemented by both
proprietary
and free software, it gives corporations and governments relief. They can
continue with purchasing patterns established in the last twenty years, where
they buy support and training and the application all from the same vendor,
while still benefiting from the virtues of free software—flexibility
as well as
little to no cost. This is why city, provincial, and federal governments in
Latin America, in Europe, Asia, Africa; in Australia and Canada, and
even the US,
have been mandating the ODF. It gives power to people in a way that is
friendly
to commerce at home and abroad.
It gives you the power to truly own your work. But this power is diluted if
users must create their work using the language of empire, English, and not
their own; unnecessary dependencies are imposed. So: OpenOffice.org in your
language is rightly seen as a crucial step toward informatic autonomy and
economic power. I mean by this term, "informatic autonomy" being able
to control
the documents, files, or more generally, the intellectual property,
you create,
as well as the tools that create them, like OpenOffice.org. Its opposition is
naturally, "informatic dependency," which means being dependent on the vendor
for your intellectual property. With informatic dependency, for all
the work you
do, you are primarily a consumer.
The disadvantages of being only consumers of the tools for participating fully
in the informatic economy, the economy of the 21st century and the key
to other
development, are enough to give one pause. The most obvious risk is losing
control over one's intellectual property. But the risks pile up. With little
control over the means of producing intellectual property, one must depend on
those who have control—the vendor; and inevitably, Brazil, Latin America—and
also India and other developing state—could become informatic backwaters,
clients to extraordinarily rich and powerful vendors whose only real
concern is
their profit. So much for freedom.
No one wants this future. We all want a Brazil, and a world, that has
taken FOSS
seriously, as a consumer and producer. But it demands formidable
investment, and
not just by volunteers, but also by government and businesses. It requires
government to think not just a year, two, or even five but decades in advance
and to make investments in education and training that may have no clear
immediate benefit but which will pay off with a professional cadre able to act
on Brazil's promise as a leader in Latin America and the world.
Breaking dependencies
When I was in India last January, I presented to students at several
institutions on how to participate in OpenOffice.org and also how to start an
open-source project. (I'd be delighted to make my slides on the topic
available.)
I also presented to government and business executives on OpenOffice.org.
Although the actual particulars and emphasis of the messages differed
according
to audience—I wasn't about to speak on how to develop OpenOffice.org to the
President's IT policy people—the basic message stayed the same::
That OpenOffice.org can address user needs with greater security, ease of use,
and of course enormous cost savings; and
That sustaining OpenOffice.org is extraordinarily important.
India, a land of 1.1 billion people and less than half the size of
Brazil, has a
large technologically sophisticated class. Yet for all the technological
training I saw, and for all the emphasis on grasping the 21st century by the
horns, the default approach to free software was as a user, not
producer. "Free"
software was primarily interesting because it cost nothing, not
because it gives
the user the ability, even the responsibility, to be a producer, as
well. India
is not alone. For most of the world, free software is just a free
commodity. The
logic of informatic dependency has not been fully broken, and the power that
free software represents has not been fully appreciated.
This situation is changing, but from what I could see in India, many of the
efforts are still young and in need of coordination. Important federal
bureaucrats remain unpersuaded that free software is the answer, let alone a
logical place for scarce resources. Many still believe that it makes
more sense
to pay Microsoft yet more millions—millions!--than to build a local economy
based on knowledge and skill that can not only sustain itself but
expand. Yet I
am optimistic, for at the heart of the desire to work on free software is the
realization that not only is the freedom to think and act creatively and
collaboratively vastly enjoyable and rewarding but that what has been
produced,
the software itself, works, and beautifully.
Look at Firefox or at OpenOffice.org: these are but two desktop applications
that work better than their proprietary equivalents, have fewer
security holes,
are extensible, and are free—to be worked on, to be customized, to be changed,
to be used.
I used to use Safari. But Safari is not as standardized as Firefox and it does
not read Web files as well as Firefox nor save them in the now
standard way, and
it also looks boring, compared to Firefox. With Firefox, I can change
its look,
I can add extensions, I can do things with it that are different. I
can even add
an extension that allows me to read OpenDocument format files. As a
consequence,
I no longer use Safari.
Firefox is persuasive because it is better, not because it is free, for Safari
is also free, as it is included in Mac OS X. OpenOffice.org presents a similar
argument. For the vast majority of users, OpenOffice.org is simply
better. They
can alter its appearance, they can add an ever-growing number of extensions,
they can integrate it with other applications, and they can work more
efficiently knowing that if they choose to save their documents in the ODF
format, they will stay readable as digital documents far longer than any
proprietary format. And with somewhere more than 50 million users
throughout the
world, the community of users is enormous and possessed of an formidable
momentum. I fully expect and would make it a challenge, to have 75
million users
by the end of this year. That would represent a very sizable portion of the
estimated overall office suite market. And those users who have chosen to use
OpenOffice.org would have done so in all likelihood because it is better.
Knowing that there is such a market and knowing that people choose software
because it works better than the competitor's and is freely available,
should be
enough for governments and businesses to make rational decisions. Yet many
politicians and bureaucrats persist in choosing Microsoft. Why? Well, for one,
when threatened with market loss, Microsoft spends money—a lot of it.
They lower
the price (and alter the product) to accommodate the poorer countries. They
spend money on costly localization efforts; they spend hundreds of millions of
dollars on advertising campaigns. And, besides, many are habituated to Office.
As with cigarettes, or other addictive drugs, which we all know are really bad
for us, rationality does not come into play when habit and money speak.
It's time to break that habit and invest where it matters: on education, on
projects that give freedom, as well as further the local IT ecosystem, and
refrain from throwing good money after bad, or on those that wrap yet more
chains around us. What we all want is informatic autonomy, not dependence.
Achieving informatic autonomy
How do we achieve this autonomy? Put another way, how best to invest? I can't
answer that, of course, though I do like making suggestions—it comes
from being
trained as an academic--and later this next month, in Montreal, Moscow and
Beijing, I'll be doing a lot of suggesting.
Also, here. Let's look at the two areas: use and development. For large-scale
users, such as businesses and governments, the primary obstacle,
besides the one
having to do with negotiating with a multitude of open-source projects and
dealing with free software licenses, like the GPL, has to do with finding
support and training. It's a myth that there is no support for free software;
there is, and it's often offered by huge, multinational companies, as
well as by
small, local businesses.
Okay, I often hear, so there is support. But our MS Office macros
don't work on
OpenOffice.org. And there are other minor but infinitely infuriating problems,
like subtle changes in bullet points, which make many of our migrated
presentations look silly.
I answer: With OpenOffice.org 2.2, which we released just a couple of
weeks ago,
there is not only greater compatibility with existing MS Office files but
increased support for just those things that you need. We are also working on
improving macro support. Still, there will surely be problems—working with the
black hole of proprietary software does not make it easy. But it is still
cheaper to hire a developer or two to fix those minor problems ad hoc than to
renew a multi-year license with Microsoft.
But what about Office 2007? It uses a different file format, OOXML, and is
pretending to be an open standard. Certainly, Microsoft would love it if it
became one like the ODF, which is the ISO standard, though that seems
doubtful.
The format's schema—how it is defined—is forbiddingly complex and
excruciatingly
detailed (and at over 6,000 pages, long), contains many contradictions and has
seemingly succeeded in making it nearly impossible for any other
application to
fully implement it. But the big question is, How well does OpenOffice.org work
with Office 2007? Let's assume that some people, somewhere, are actually using
it—a big assumption, for if they create files in it, their colleagues
will have
to have it, too, at least in order to view the full file, and from what I read
and hear, not nearly as many are adopting it as had been imagined by
Microsoft.
At the moment, there are various translators that allow users to work
with some
Office 2007 files, and soon there will be a native translator that will give
OpenOffice.org users superior capabilities. In short, one can have a hybrid
environment, meaning, in fact, that there are even fewer reasons not
to migrate
to OpenOffice.org. In such a hybrid environment, some could be using
MS Office,
others OpenOffice.org and its derivatives— or other applications that
implement
the ODF.
Yet I see this period as transitional. What is important is that files created
and distributed be freely available to all, and not just to a few who
can afford
the extraordinary costs of some proprietary software, and that the tools for
content production be open.
Besides the political reasons I sketched above, there is also the pragmatic
reason openness is good: better products. Remember the example of Firefox vs.
Safari? Well, OpenOffice.org is, as I mentioned, extensible, too. And
even more:
it can move beyond the limits of its legacy, in a way that is close to
impossible for others.
I mean by this that the office suite embodies its legacy of being designed for
computers isolated from each other and needing integrated applications
utilizing
a common file format and interface. It is a continuation of the days
before the
Internet, before deep connectivity, before Google, before mashups. It is a
holdover from the 20th century.
And it's still useful. Most of us do not have huge Internet pipes and infinite
bandwidth, and for complex documents, such as certain spreadsheets, where each
cell may house a formula, having a complete and feature-rich suite on your
desktop is necessary.
But for the other elements, the current exciting state of Internet
applications
allows us to create what's effectively our own suites ad hoc. What is crucial
here, of course, is again, the file format (interfaces have more or less
converged). It counts for nothing if you create documents limited by their
format. That's why OpenOffice.org is even more relevant. It gives you
the power
to take the ODF-generating element and move beyond the suite. We're serious
about this, and have created the ODF Toolkit project
(odftoolkit.openoffice.org),
whose express aim is to disentangle ODF generating code from
OpenOffice.org. Any
logical application could utilize this free code.
An obvious example: Say you are writing an email. This happens to me a lot. At
some point, the email becomes an essay, or a blog. Now, if you are
using an HTML
capable client, you can add HTML formatting. But it's not clear you could then
cut and paste it into your application and expect formatting to be accurately
preserved. In fact, it would probably look awful. But imagine now that you are
using a client that can save the file as an ODF document. Formatting is
preserved; what is more it can be further edited, as any ODF document, in any
number of applications. I find these possibilities exciting. For by using a
common file format, we eliminate the needless obstacles that 20th century
technology threw at us. We return, in a way, to the pure simplicity of pencil
and paper, where we could focus on creating.
OpenOffice.org gives you an unencumbered future. But getting there requires
having the engineers who know how to code and work in a free-source
project. It's
not a question of "finding" them and then hiring them. I wish it were that
simple. It's more a question of educating them.
Autonomy and education
How do we do this? How do we educate all the developers we need?
The basic logic is to open secondary and college curricula to open-source
projects and to involve those projects with schools and colleges and other
educational institutions. A couple of years ago, Sophie Gautier, lead of the
Francophone Project on OpenOffice.org, and I created an Education project. The
point was to coordinate student and educational activity related to
OpenOffice.org,
and it derived from work she was doing and I had been doing. I had
even created
a process that allowed professors and students to collaborate on
OpenOffice.org
and get grades. Then, around that time, Google initiated the Google Summer of
Code, which prompted the project to refine its to-dos, so as to make
them easier
for students to do within a semester or summer.
Coincidentally, Mozilla, with greater resources than we could pull
together, was
doing something similar, and working with the US university Oregon State
University, and the Canadian college, Seneca College, based in
Toronto, where I,
and Mike Shaver of Mozilla, happen to live. I had not known this, but many of
the extensions we use with Firefox have been qualified or even created by the
students at these colleges, who have taken to working on the extensions with
enthusiasm and joy. With reason: how often did we have the opportunity, as
students, to do things that really mattered? If your experience was anything
like mine, most of the work I did as a student was duplicating what others had
done, so that I could learn a lesson. But sometimes I think I mainly learned
boredom. Not so these students, for there is nothing boring about working on
open source code that millions, tens of millions will use, enjoy, and which
exists not in a environment of commercial distance, but in (and for) a
community.
OpenOffice.org is now also working with these same colleges and
several others.
As our extensions project is more clearly defined, more students and
professors
will participate, that is certain. But it's not just extensions. Students at
both colleges, but especially at Seneca, which is leading in integrating
curricula with open-source projects, students are also doing core coding. They
are not being exploited; hardly. They are rather learning how to code in C++,
how to solve problems in real environments, and to solve them in ways that
others can utilize their solutions; they are learning how to architect complex
code; and how to work with others. They are learning invaluable things
that will
get them jobs.
The Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where the tech-heavy city of Hyderabad is
located, has understood this, and has arranged coursework with IBM to further
educate students in free software. The point is not just to get the students
jobs, but more important, to shift teaching coding so that it includes free
software projects like Mozilla, OpenOffice.org and many others. Free
software is
clearly the way of the future, and it's also personally rewarding. Indeed, the
lectures I presented there and elsewhere underscored the pleasures and payoffs
of working with others on real subjects with actual importance.
But it's glib and ignorant to speak of including OpenOffice.org and other
projects' code without fully understanding the educational situation
in Brazil,
so my points are to be taken more generally, that a new model of teaching code
is possible with the involvement of free-software projects. Even with that
caveat, there are considerable resource and logistical issues that need to be
addressed.
Naturally, I cannot address them here. I can say that there are ways of
articulating the relation among students, professors, and the free software
project community so that no one is shocked or intimidated. And we
have learned
that for those students who wish to engage the community directly,
they benefit
by having a mentor who can show her or him what to do and how to do it.
OpenOffice.org has many community members who are willing to be
mentors, and our
project is justly famed for providing all community members with a
friendly and
constructive environment. Students who have worked in the project on code have
described their experience as the best in their life—and I'm not
making that up.
There are no obstacles to starting this year. We could start with extensions,
which are much easier to create, as OpenOffice.org is written in C++.
Or, if the
students are sufficiently advanced, and I'm sure that many here are, we have
listed a variety of interesting and important tasks. The issue is shaping
curricula so that those tasks can be worked on, so that the work done
indicates
that the student has truly learned what she was supposed to learn. And
I have no
doubt we can help there.
The payoff for such a collaboration is huge. It is not just making a better
productivity suite for all nor transforming what even counts as a
suite, so that
it goes beyond its legacy limitations—and even beyond Google Docs—but
in giving
Brazil and Latin America and elsewhere informatic autonomy and shaping them as
the leaders of 21st century informatics.
Where to go for information
Below are some useful links that should help you get started. I've
also included
my contact information and am happy to receive messages in English,
Spanish and
even Brazilian Portuguese.
Wiki main page:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Main_Page
Firefox extension:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Firefox_OpenOffice.org_extension
Getting the source:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Getting_It
Building it:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Building
Tips:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Tips
Hacker tutorials:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Tutorials
Writing error-free code:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Writing_warning-free_code
Commit rights (how this works...)
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Commit_Rights
Contributing patches:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Contributing_Patches
Architecture:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Architecture
UNO
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Uno
Directories:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Source_code_directories
Meeting the team on IRC:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/IRC_Communication
Contact information
Louis Suárez-Potts
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Location: Toronto
_________________________________________________________________
Article:
* http://ooo-speak.blogspot.com/2007/04/toward-informatic-autonomy.html
--
Alexandro Colorado
OpenOffice.org
Community Contact // Mexico
http://www.openoffice.org
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jza
Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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