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LibreUmbria’s 5 good reasons to switch to LibreOffice

04/03/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech
The LibreUmbria blog features a new post today entitled (in English) 5+5 good reasons to adopt LibreOffice. The 10 reasons themselves are split between those for end users (PDF, Italian) and administrators and managers (PDF, Italian).

LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

The post also features a fine graphic setting out 5 of the reasons. These are:
- Quality. When using Office, you will happen to notice that the 2000 version is being officially dropped. This is because there is a new licence to acquire for each update for commercial software. LibreOffice is a product being continuously improved because it is the users who ask the developer community to fix bugs and add and simplify its features. LibreOffice is a product that shall never run out.
- Freedom. LibreOffice is free software not linked to any company in particular. It can be freely used without limits and conditions imposed by user licences. You can install LibreOffice on your home computers, you can give to a friend and download it free of charge from the internet.
- Training. Switching to LibreOffice means being able to take a training course which will teach you all the functions you need to know about.
- Open format. With LibreOffice we use an open format (.odt) instead of .doc. You’ve surely never thought of it, but open formats ensure accessibility in the long term, but above all ensure transparency of the data exchanged; distributing content different from that which you seen on the screen will never happen with .odt.
- Help. When you start working with LibreOffice you can always count on help from a colleague, as well as its large developer community, research centres and companies ready to fix any bugs in the working of the software.
As previously reported, Italy’s Umbria region has a project to migrate 5,000 public sector workers from MS Office to LibreOffice (posts passim).
“One tombstone….4s”

03/03/2013 Steve WoodsBristol

I’m currently reading Charles Wells’ ‘A short history of the port of Bristol’, published in 1909 and available free of charge online from the Internet Archive.

Apart from the changes in the course of the Bristol Avon, what particularly interested me was the story of the development of the early port up until the completion of the Floating Harbour in 1809.

What intrigued me in particular was a very brief passage in Wells’ first chapter relating to the 16th century, as follows:

St Stephen’s, Bristol, 16th century purveyor of cheap repair materials.

As the centuries passed nothing seems to have been done to further improve the facilities of the port, and many merchants were content with their own private landing-stages on the banks of the tidal Avon. There is, however, now and then a mention of repairs to the Quay in the Corporation records. In November, 1577, for example, is this entry in the audit book: “Paid the churchwardens of St Stephen’s for one tombstone for the Quay wall, 4s.”

The tombstone intrigued me: I’ve long observed that old tombstones are often used for paving on church property. However, this is the first time I’ve seen their use for other purposes off church property recorded. Was the actual tombstone new and unused? If an old one, had the family whose grave it marked long died out? If used, did it still have an inscription? How many tombstones ended up in the walls of the city docks and the paving of the quay over the centuries?

Historians of Bristol are invited to leave possible answers below.
Open letter against Iceland’s proposed internet porn ban

01/03/2013 Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

Yesterday a group of forty security, privacy and human rights advocates and organizations from 19 countries, including Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, Palestine, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and the United States, released an open letter to Ögmundur Jónasson, Iceland’s Minister of the Interior, regarding the ongoing discussions on the possibility of establishing internet pornography censorship in Iceland.

The text of the open letter is reproduced in full below.

Ögmundur Jónasson
Innanríkisráðuneytið
Sölvhólsgötu
Reykjavík

Re: Open Letter to Ögmundur Jónasson, Icelandic Minister of Interior, regarding Internet censorship

Dear Mr. Jónasson,

As security, privacy and human rights advocates and organizations from around the world, we are writing to express our deep concern with your current proposals to attempt to restrict Internet access in Iceland to pornographic content.

Iceland is a liberal democratic state which should not serve as a role model for Internet censorship. Regimes, totalitarian and democratic alike, can use these proposals as an example in order to justify censorship of the Internet, practiced or proposed. It has already jeopardized longstanding efforts to prevent or abolish censorship in totalitarian regimes and protect civil liberties and human rights worldwide.

The current discussion of blocking pornographic content has offered no definition, no evidence, and suggested no technology. This is an affront to basic principles of the society, and while we acknowledge that this discussion is at a starting point, we feel that the way it is being conducted is harmful.

Traditionally, censorship has involved preventing publication and persecution of people with unpopular opinions. On the Internet, censorship has taken a new guise. It doesn’t merely prevent publication, but also restricts people’s access to the information they seek. Rather than silencing a voice, the result is depriving the population of material they can see and read. This is censorship, as it skews the way people see the world. It is tempting to regard filtering the internet as a quick and easy way to restrict unwanted speech, opinions, or media, which the government regards as harmful for either them or the people. The right to see the world as it is, is critical to the very tenets and functions of a democracy and must be protected at all costs.

It is technically impossible to censor content delivered over the Internet without monitoring all telecommunications. Not just unwanted communications or inappropriate material, everything must be examined automatically by unsupervised machines which make the final decision on whether to allow the content to continue or not. This level of government surveillance directly conflicts with the idea of a free society.

Internet censorship is used by totalitarian regimes in order to restrict people’s access to various information and material on the internet. The methods used to conduct this censorship are technically identical to the methods that would be employed by Iceland if these plans were to be implemented. The act of censoring pornography in Iceland differs in no way from repression of speech in Iran, China or North Korea. By stating that Iceland is considering censoring pornographic material on the Internet for moral reasons, they are justifying rather than condemning the actions of totalitarian regimes.

The internet is not the source of violence, it is merely a medium by which violence is made apparent. If the government of Iceland is genuinely concerned about the wellbeing of victims of violence, there are many more effective ways. The prohibition of pornographic content may create demand for an underground porn industry, unregulated and most certainly affiliated with other illegal activities, as we have seen in the case of drugs or alcohol prohibition. Hiding the problem is not a solution and may in fact make things worse.

If the Icelandic Government worries about children getting their sexual education from pornography on the Internet, the solution should be better sex education in the home or through schools. Sex education that deals not only with conception, contraception and sexually transmitted diseases, but also relationships, communication and respect.

There exist decentralized technical measures that respect the rights and dignity of all citizens in a society which involves aiding families with providing an accessible way to make their own computer and internet access secure for their children, but technically speaking, it would still be possible to go around the blockage.

Over the last years, Iceland has been regarded by the international community as a shining example of a free, democratic society. Iceland has positioned itself as a model democratic state in global context when dealing with freedom of the press, the open process of drafting a new constitution, and open review of information regulation. Therefore, we implore you to reject censorship as a viable option and seek more effective means of improving society, both in Iceland and abroad.

Kind regards,
Renata Avila Pinto, Human Rights Lawyer (Guatemala)
Jillian C. York, Director for International Freedom of Expression, Electronic Frontier Foundation (USA)
Kim Pham, Principal, Expression Tech (USA)
Sjón, Author, President of Icelandic PEN (Iceland)
Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT (USA)
Richard Stallman, President, Free Software Foundation (USA)
Mina Naguib, Human rights activist (Egypt)
Katarzyna Szymielewicz, Panoptykon Foundation (Poland)
Trevor Timm, Freedom of the Press Foundation (USA)
Michał “rysiek” Woźniak, President, Fundacja Wolnego i Otwartego Oprogramowania (Poland)
Ásta Guðrún Helgadóttir, Free speech activist (Iceland)
Stefan Marsiske, Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge (Hungary)
Beatriz Busaniche, Vía Libre Foundation (Argentina)
Walter van Holst, Vrijschrift (Netherlands)
Atanas Tchobanov, Balkanleaks (Bulgaria)
Mazen Maarouf, Writer (Palestine)
Aðalheiður Ámundadóttir, Lawyer (Iceland)
Douwe Korff, Foundation for Information Policy Research (United Kingdom)
Arjen Kamphuis, Chairman, Open Source Working Group, Internet Society (Netherlands)
James Vasile, Director, New America Foundation Open Internet Tools Project (USA)
Timo Karjalainen, President, Electronic Frontier Finland (Finland)
Ot van Daalen, Director, Bits of Freedom (Netherlands)
Aleksander Waszkielewicz, President of the Board, Fundacja Instytut Rozwoju Regionalnego (Poland)
Guðjón Már Guðjónsson, Internet Policy Institute (Iceland)
Margot Kaminski, Executive Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School (USA)
Smári McCarthy, Executive Director, International Modern Media Institute (Iceland)
Laurie Penny, author and journalist (United Kingdom)
Sunil Abraham, Executive Director Center for Internet and Society (India)
Thomas Hughes, Managing Director, Media Frontiers (Denmark)
Miguel Morachimo, Hiperderecho (Peru)
Annie Machon, former MI5 intelligence officer and civil liberties campaigner (United Kingdom)
Daniela Bozhinova, Bulgarian Association for the Promotion of Citizens Initiative (Bulgaria)
Dariusz Grzesista, Chairman, Polish Linux Users’ Group (Poland)
Mohammed Tarakiyee, Jordan Open Source (Jordan)
Józef Halbersztadt, Internet Society Poland (Poland)
Zineb Belmkaddem, Free speech activist (Morocco)
Rafik Dammak, Free speech activist (Tunisia)
Oktavía Jónsdóttir, Executive Director, Human Link Network (Denmark)
Josef Irnberger, Initiative für Netzfreiheit (Austria)
Markus Beckedahl, Digitale Geschel schaft (Germany)
Alek Tarkowski, Director, Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt: Polska (Poland)
Hugleikur Dagsson, Artist (Iceland)
Latvia’s economy ministry should boost use of open standards and open technology

01/03/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

According to a report on Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, LATA – Latvian Open Technology Association – is calling on the Ministry of Economy to make open standards and open technologies one of the core themes of the ministry’s business education efforts. LATA published a statement (Latvian) on Wednesday, pleading continued funding of ICT training for Latvian companies. Earlier this week the ministry announced a four-fold reduction in the training budget.

“Businesses get the maximum effect from the right skills to use open technologies and open standards.” LATA argues that open technologies and standards make companies more efficient, as well as improving interoperability.

Latvia’s Ministry of Economy is currently preparing its 2014-2020 plans for using European Social Fund monies. It has announced that it intends to reduce the ICT training budget to 5.25 mn. lats (about €7.51 mn.) and to restrict funding to SMEs. Between 2007 and 2013, over 20 mn. lats (about €29 mn.) was available in employee training grants.

According to LATA, many Latvian ICT companies are using European funding to improve ICT skills and gain knowledge of new technologies.
Allergy warning: Office 2013 marketing may contain traces of FUD

28/02/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech
In the IT world, FUD is a very useful acronym: it’s short for fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Wikipedia defines FUD as:

Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), is a tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics and propaganda.

FUD is generally a strategic attempt to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information. An individual firm, for example, might use FUD to invite unfavourable opinions and speculation about a competitor’s product; to increase the general estimation of switching costs among current customers; or to maintain leverage over a current business partner who could potentially become a rival.

The term originated to describe disinformation tactics in the computer hardware industry but has since been used more broadly. FUD is a manifestation of the appeal to fear.

As you’ll find if you read further down the Wikipedia entry, Microsoft, that superannuated leviathan of the proprietary software world, is no stranger to FUD. Indeed, it seems to have roused its sales partners to use it to help promote Office 2013/Office 365, the latest versions of its bloated, overpriced and ubiquitous office suite.

This came to my attention courtesy of Misco, who are kind enough to send my recycling box lots of sales material once a month. Included in this month’s batch of recycling was a 2-page spread for MS Office. Included in the ‘Top reasons to buy Office” was the following dubious information (reproduced verbatim from the leaflet):

End of Support

Running Office 2003 and Windows XP after the end-of-support date (April 8, 2014) may expose your company to security, compliance and compatibility risks due to a lack of ongoing updates.

Several points can be made about this misleading statement.

Firstly, all Microsoft products are insecure: just ask any decent, competent sysadmin.

Secondly, what’s all this ‘compliance risk’ about then? Is Microsoft revoking all Office licences for Office 2003 and older versions and sending in the software police? I think we should be told.

Thirdly, as far compatibility is concerned, users are wholly at the mercy of Microsoft as to how long files produced with earlier versions of Office programs can still be opened, read and edited using different versions of Office. This is vendor lock-in and it stinks.

Especially in these times of austerity when money is tight, my advice to anyone thinking of procuring or upgrading an office suite would be to look carefully at gratis open source alternatives to Office, such as:
- Apache OpenOffice – available for Linux, Mac and Windows;
- LibreOffice – a fork of OpenOffice – also available for Linux, Mac and Windows;
- Calligra – available for many Linux distributions and Free BSD and now with preliminary support for Windows and Mac.
All of these can also open and write files in Office formats, as well as working natively with Open Document Format – an international standard recognised by the ISO that’s being adopted increasingly by national governments across the world as a means of ensuring their documents can still be read in centuries to come.

I’ve been using open source office suites – principally OpenOffice and LibreOffice – in my professional capacity for the last 8 years and none of my clients – all of whom use Office – has reported problems opening the files I produce.
LibreOffice Impress sprint in Dresden

27/02/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech
The LibreOffice project has been offered a project weekend from Friday 22nd March to Sunday 24th March at Dresden Technical University which will focus specifically on Impress, LibreOffice’s presentation tool.

The main aims of the weekend will be to:
- get into the code that is on stage with boatloads of presenters each year;
- go bug hunting and help bug fixing;
- find paper cuts and look into usability – life on stage is stressful enough without your presentation software acting up;
- have a good time and meet new people!
The main venue for the event will be the Beyer Building (map) at Dresden Technical University’s main campus physics faculty (map).

The rough programme for the weekend is as follows:
- Friday 22nd March – arrival and introduction, knowing your way around Impress;
- Saturday 23rd March – bug hunting and fixing;
- Sunday 24th March – wrap-up, future work.
More details are available on The Document Foundation wiki.
DFD 2013 event registration opens

27/02/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

Event registration opened yesterday for Document Freedom Day 2013 which will be held on Wednesday, 27th March. Local event teams can add details of their activities to the Document Freedom website and have them marked on the global campaign map.

Last week 50 promotional packs were dispatched to hackerspaces to kick start event preparations. They contain posters, fliers, stickers, and advice, including how to apply for financial support. Packs are now also available to order online.

“Last year trail-blazing Open Standards advocates introduced thousands of people to better standards,” said DFD Campaign Manager Sam Tuke. “Teams now have more resources at their disposal and fresh ideas including switching from Adobe Flash to HTML5 technologies”.

“Markets for digital products such as audio-books and cloud documents have grown dramatically in recent months, but without open standards customers are victims of vendor lock-in and anti-consumer market control,” said Erik Albers, Community Manager at the Free Software Foundation Europe.

This year the DFD campaign aims to have more events in more locations. In 2012 groups of volunteers ran 54 DFD events in 23 different countries, including Belgium, Colombia and Indonesia.

This post originally appeared on Bristol Wireless.
Plain talk about plane trees

26/02/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

The Bristol Post is not particularly renowned for the quality of its journalism.

This point of view was borne out by its report today on public works in Weston-super Mare, which features the following paragraph:

The species to be planted include silver birch, hazel, Scots pine, Himalayan plain, London plain and common alder. Work on removing the trees is due to start this week.

Himalayan plain? London plain? The Post should be sent to sit in shame in homophone corner until it learns the difference between a plain tree and a plane tree and promises not to make such elementary sub-editing errors in future.

However, the Post is not only guilty of falling victim to homophony and failing to do a bit of basic sub-editing. Indeed it is also guilty of churnalism – “a form of journalism in which press releases, wire stories and other forms of pre-packaged material are used to create articles in newspapers and other news media in order to meet increasing pressures of time and cost without undertaking further research or checking”.

Checking back on the source of the story in question, one arrives at a North Somerset Council news item of 20th February 2013, where – lo and behold – the following sentence appears:

The species to be planted include silver birch, hazel, Scots pine, Himalayan plain, London plain and common alder.

Thus the anonymous Post hack quoted initially has merely repeated the error of the original author of the news in North Somerset.

This blog has pointed out before that North Somerset is a strange place (posts passim), but having an illiterate write news on the council website is just plain perverse.
ORR fails open standards test

24/02/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Data, Open Standards, Tech

As a regular rail user, I sometimes use real-time train information and was intrigued to learn that the Office of Rail Regulation is currently holding a consultation on real-time train information until 28th February.

However, the ORR is clearly confused as to what open standards (such as web standards. Ed.) really are, as shown by the following sentence from the consultation page:

So that we are able to apply web standards to content on our website, we would prefer that you email us your response in Microsoft Word format.

Firstly, MS Office formats are closed, proprietary formats, unlike the Open Document Format (ODF) used by more sensible office suites.

Secondly, does the above statement imply that the ORR uses MS Word to edit its web content? MS Word has a hard time behaving like a word processor. 🙂 When used for HTML it produces some of the sloppiest mark-up known. As Homer Simpson would say: “Doh!”
Croatia: President supports open source

24/02/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

Croatian President Ivo Josipović. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
What Croatian President Ivo Josipović has done would be akin to Elizabeth II supporting the work of the UK LUGs, according to a report on Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site.

Ivo Josipović is providing support to a conference organised by Croatia’s 2 free and open source advocacy groups, the Croatian Linux User Group (Hrvatska Udruga Linux Korisnika, HULK) and the Croatian Association for Open Systems (HrOpen) and has accepted the groups’ invitation to become honorary patron of the the event – the 2013 Croatian Linux Users’ Convention (CLUC) to be held in Zagreb from 15th to 17th May.

HULK and HrOpen met the president in Zagreb on 21 January. “We briefed President Josipović on the benefits of using open standards and the use of free and open source software”, explains Ivan Gustin, HULK’s chairman. “He appreciates our activities and efforts, especially in getting this type of software accepted by Croatia’s public sector.”

HULK is an association promoting the use of open standards and open source solutions. It represents both professional and amateur users and developers of free and open source software. HrOpen, whose members include several of Croatia’s universities, promotes and encourages the development of open IT systems and an open internet in Croatia.

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