The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has now confirmed that its final decision is that their “Enterprise Technical Reference Model” Discipline for Data Formats specifies OpenDocument format as a requirement for office documents, as they did in their final draft.

To quote:

Description – The OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) is a standardized XML-based file format specification suitable for office applications. It covers the features required by text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents. The specification was recently approved by OASIS as an open standard. OASIS has also submitted the standard to ISO for consideration as an international standard for office document formats.

Guidelines – The OpenDocument format must be used for office documents such as text documents (.odt), spreadsheets (.ods), and presentations (.odp). The OpenDocument format is currently supported by a variety of office applications including OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, KOffice, and IBM Workplace.

[…] Agencies will need to develop phased migration plans allowing them to configure existing applications to save office documents by default in the OpenDocument format with an implementation date of January 1, 2007. Any acquisition of new office applications must support the OpenDocument format natively.

They also have a FAQ page which shows that they really do “get it” and didn’t buy the claims that vendors would be “locked out” by choosing this format, debunking the myth thus:

QUESTION: Why are you making agencies deploy a single office product? Doesn’t state procurement law require competition among vendors, which you will foreclose?

ANSWER: The Final ETRM Version 3.5 does not require that agencies use only one office product. To the contrary, it offers agencies many choices. Agencies may choose to retain their existing MS Office licenses, as long as they use a method to save documents in Open Document Format. They may also use one of the many office tools that support Open Document Format in native format— OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice, Abiword, eZ publish, IBM Workplace, Knomos case management, Scribus DTP, TextMaker and Visioo Writer. Because the Open Document Format is an open standard, it increases the vendor pool available to state agencies by encouraging and permitting vendors not already in this field to develop products that support the standard. Adoption of the Final ETRM Version 3.5 will greatly increase competition among vendors for the sale of office applications to agencies.

They’ve also published all public comments received on this initiative, interesting reading!

I’ve also put my Melbourne SFD photos up on Flickr under a Creative Commons “attribution, non-commerical, share-alike” licence.

I’ve now put the photos from Melbourne’s Software Freedom Day 2005 up in the photo gallery.

Congratulations to all involved!

450 CDs given out in under 1 hour!

Today was Melbournes Second Software Freedom Day with members of Linux Users Victoria wandering through the CBD of Melbourne giving away copies of The Open CD and an Ubuntu Linux Live CD. There were about 8 people giving away CD’s and I took photos (53 of them by the look of it), which I’m now in the process of uploading for the organisers and I’ll also add into the photo gallery too!

Afterwards three of us headed over to ComputerBank’s event where they demo’d open source systems to visitors and gave a good talk and raised some very good questions from someone involved in a project to set up what sounded like a Linux based educational system at an orphanage in India (though I could have gotten those details wrong).

In Scotland there has been a motion lodged in the Scottish Parliament in support of Software Freedom Day.

Here’s a fun quote from the IT Managers Journal:

The IBM case, which is likely to be the first one up, is not scheduled for trial until February 2007. Meanwhile, the company has less than $13 million of cash on hand, and is spending more than $2 million a month on average — you do the math.

But my favourite quote has to be:

Always the optimist, Darl McBride, president and CEO of The SCO Group, put on his rose-colored glasses and described the recent financials as “a productive quarter for SCO.” Unfortunately, SCO did not take questions during its conference call so no one could ask how he might define an “unproductive quarter.”

You know someone’s in trouble when even the serious journos are making fun of their company..

This looks like it could be interesting, Open-MPI claims to be taking the best from a host of MPI implementations and making it open source. Supports Myrinet too, though not Quadrics yet.

Saw a very nice hack demo’d last night at LUV; Jason King (who did the remastering Knoppix talk back in August) had created (with help from a couple of other folks) a (mostly) working, bootable Knoppix DVD that had a fully functional Wikipedia installed. It comes up running Apache, MySQL, KDE and you can then browse Wikipedia from the DVD.

I say mostly working because it had none of the submitted images, but given that the downloadable database dump of the current pages in English is 900MB gzip’d, it’s not suprising! Of course it’s not particularly fast (around 60 seconds to do a search), but it could be extremely useful as a free information source in places where there is no (or very limited) Internet access.

It’s still a work in progress, but there was quite a bit of interest in helping Jason out with the project, and one of the LUV members who works for MySQL reckoned that with some tweaking of the indexes, etc, it could be sped up too..

Groklaw is reporting a potential strong win for open standards over proprietary document formats, Massachusetts has decided to back OpenDoc XML as the state-wide standard that their office applications must support in their latest draft!

If this is put into practice this is likely to be a very significant move as there will be a considerable knock-on effect for those who deal with the state government there.

They’re asking for comments and I ask folks who support this move to write with the reasons why they feel this is a good move.

It’s amazing the sorts of things that happen when documents get unsealed in court.

Here is an extract from a SCO email from 2002 about searching for copyright violations in Linux:

At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.

There is, indeed, a lot of code that is common between UNIX and Linux (all of the X Windows system, for example) but invariably it turned out that the common code was something that both we (SCO) and the Linux community had obtained (legitimately) from some third party.

So, SCO’s own UNIX expert said that Linux is clean in 2002..

This is part of an excellent Groklaw article, but if you read on here you’ll see the complete SCO email.

Groklaw has a PDF of the email (it was scanned & converted by Frank Sorenson from the a copy of the paper exhibit obtained from the court) if you want to go to the primary source.

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