Open Forum Europe

The Register - Oracle is cooking up a strategy around the cloud, something chief executive Larry Ellison once referred as "idiocy" - albeit the sort of fashionable idiocy he's willing buy in to.

Sources close to Oracle have told The Register there's a growing pace of activity inside the database maker - at all levels - on the subject of cloud computing.

Senior Oracle executives are understood to be working on a holistic corporate story that encompasses Oracle's assets in databases, applications, and middleware.

At a lower level, people in Oracle's product units are working individually on projects that would make more of Oracle's applications and middleware available for use in cloud computing. It's understood these include putting Oracle's Siebel and PeopleSoft applications into the cloud.

CNet - Matt Asay - As I type this, Firefox 3.5 is blazing past 5.6 million downloads, having been released just a day and a half ago. While such uptake for Mozilla's upgraded browser is impressive, the bigger story is how Firefox 3.5 is upgrading the Web with its extensive support for HTML 5. Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) 8 has brought the company's browser back into the 21st century, but its sluggish (and perhaps perverse) response to emerging Web standards threatens to leave it in Web 1.0 Blunderland.

The Register - Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and a General Public License author, has slammed plans to include Mono in Debian's default install as a "dangerous" risk for the open-source community.

In a statement published on the Free Software Foundation site, Stallman says the move is being taken "for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#."

"The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents," Stallman said. "This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from future danger."

Centre for Policy Studies - The UK Government will spend about £16.5 billion on IT in 2009/10, equivalent to 1.4% of GDP. Most of this money is wasted, with only 30% of projects succeeding, writes IT expert Liam Maxwell in a new report (It's Ours: why we, not government, must own our data) published by the Centre for Policy Studies and described as a "must-read" by the Ideal Government Project.

Effective use of Information Technology (IT) can do much to improve public services. In particular, it has the potential to break the central monopoly by giving individuals the ability to exercise real choice and control over schools, GPs, hospitals and other services.

But improving government use of IT is not just a question of effective project management. Rather it is a matter of changing the assumptions behind the government's use of IT. For a clear choice is emerging:

ZDNet - The US Department of Justice has decided to extend its investigation into Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun, according to a brief statement put out late on Friday.

The Justice Department's 30-day window for looking into the $7.4bn (£4.5bn) deal was set to expire Friday. Instead of approving the acquisition, the Justice Department informed Oracle that it is extending that deadline, according to The Wall Street Journal. However, it is likely that the move simply means final details are being ironed out before the Justice department will give the acquisition its stamp of approval.

The news did not change Oracle's optimism that the deal will be approved.

ZDNet - The One Laptop per Child XO-1 interface is now available on a USB stick.

Sugar Labs, responsible for building the low-cost device's OS, has released the interface online for loading onto any USB flash drive greater than 1GB, and will allow it to be used on "any PC or netbook", it said in an announcement on Wednesday.

Called 'Sugar on a Stick v1', Sugar Labs hopes it will help spread the use of the OS in classrooms, without the need for the OLPC device.

An IDC analyst said in February that the OS would be one of the OLPC's more attractive aspects that vendors would be interested in copying for the netbook market.

OFE - OpenForum Europe calls for stronger government awareness about importance of their role in the adoption of open standards in the market place. “A consumer has no choice when a government publishes information in a file format tied to a specific vendor – even if that has not been a problem for decades, now it clearly is”, says Basil Cousins, OFE Director and Convenor of ODF European Action Group. “The market is, in principle, ready to move to a more mature phase”.

The H Open - Downing Street has responded to a recent e-petition on the Number10.gov.uk website asking for a commitment for the Timely Information to Citizens (TIC) project to be based around open source. The government supported the principle that where new software was developed it should be made available under an open source licence. This would make the software available to other local authorities.

OSOR - The Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade, Frank Heemskerk, wants Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Google, Adobe and open source software developers to work together on interoperability in applications using the Open Document Format (ODF). The minister's opened the ODF Interoperability Workshop that took place in the city of The Hague on Monday last week. "ODF applications must have the right degree of interoperability. We have to come up with a joint course of action for developing effective ODF support in each other's products."

According to Heemskerk, the country's policy of making open standards the default and to prefer the use open source software, will help create a fair software market. He explained this will help to save money, to increase innovation and to reduce IT vendor lock-in.

Rob Weir - I used a variation of this chart at the recent ODF Plugfest in the Netherlands. But the aspect ratio of a presentation slide doesn't suit this type of chart well, so here is a fuller version of what I showed there.

Those who are not familiar with standards development are sometimes amazed at how long it takes to develop a good standard. Perhaps the single-vendor, 6,000 page, 12-month escapade of OOXML in Ecma has skewed expectations. Fortunately, OOXML is the exception, not the rule. Achieving a multi-vendor consensus around a substantial technical standard will always be time-consuming, but it is time that is well spent.

ZEA Partners - Times of economic crisis are an opportunity to review our societal models and take advantage of the latest innovation to foster the world economy. This article is an opportunity to remind that EU officials and United Nations share the same vision on the need to favor open source and open standard to foster economic growth and international collaboration.

A year ago, in June 2008, voices were emerging to support open source and open standards. EU officials are calling for the necessity to fight for open standards and avoid unsafe monopolies, while the United Nations outlines the social aspect of open source software. Well beyond these issues, open source and open standards lead the way to a new model of society based on openness and collaboration.

Softpedia - IBM has just announced a new solution designed to help business customers reduce their costs by turning to the company's latest version of Lotus Symphony, a productivity suite designed as an alternative to Microsoft's Office. According to IBM, customers could save up to hundreds of dollars on each of their Microsoft Office licenses with the help of the new Lotus Symphony version 1.3, which can be easily downloaded, free of charge from one of the company's web pages. The Lotus Symphony will provide users with support for their current Microsoft Office 2007 documents, which can be accessed through IBM's ODF-based solution.

“IBM is delivering on its commitment to free businesses and consumers from having to pay licensing fees over and over just to access their own personal or company information,” said Kevin Cavanaugh, VP of Lotus Software. “Now, it will be much harder to justify paying Office licensing fees when you can preserve and access your Office documents for free using Lotus Symphony”

EETimes - LONDON — Having been warned by the European Commission that bundling its Internet Explorer web browser with its Windows operating system is a possible abuse of its market position, Microsoft has now been warned over its plans to do the opposite — to sell Windows 7 in the Europe region without any browser at all.

Microsoft was planning the move, apparently in an attempt to avoid to mitigate fines likely to levied against it by the European Union.

The European Commission is the executive arm of the 27-nation European Union. It is to decide shortly in a pending browser-tying antitrust case whether or not Microsoft's conduct from 1996 to date has been abusive and, if so, what remedy would be necessary to create genuine consumer choice and address the anticompetitive effects of Microsoft's conduct.

However, the Commission made it clear in a statement that it does not like Microsoft's new solution. "In terms of potential remedies if the Commission were to find that Microsoft had committed an abuse, the Commission has suggested that consumers should be offered a choice of browser, not that Windows should be supplied without a browser at all," the European Commission said in a statement.

Computerworld - It's hard to believe that there was such sound and fury when OOXML was being pushed through the ISO process. At the time, it seemed like the end of the world, since it looked like Microsoft had succeeded in obtaining a nominal parity with ODF, which had been approved earlier.

My, what a difference a year makes.

One of the central reasons for standardising the file formats is to allow alternative implementations and interoperability between them. This gives users the ability to avoid vendor lock-in, and creates a competitive marketplace that drives down prices (assuming they are not already zero, as in the case of open source).

While OOXML-compliant software seems conspicuous by its absence, ODF goes from strength to strength: there is literally no contest between the rival standards in this respect.

Computing - Government chief information officer (CIO) John Suffolk has raised the prospect of developing a “government app store” of software applications, as the public sector moves towards a cloud computing IT infrastructure.

Suffolk responded to a post on a Google Groups forum discussing G-Cloud, the plan to adopt cloud-based IT services for all government technology projects, announced in the Digital Britain report earlier this week.

In his post, Suffolk suggested that five million public sector employees could ultimately use G-Cloud, and that would then make it viable to build a government app store – modeled on the mobile phone app store concept popularised by Apple’s iPhone.

“Rather than having shared services in departments we will move them to the cloud so the sharing across the public sector - more than 5 million people - can be even greater,” Suffolk wrote.

“How easy would it to build a Government App Store? The European law on procurement for public sectors is complex but if we can crack this we shift the paradigm again.”

ZDNet - Intel, Oracle, BT and a number of other high-profile IT companies have backed the launch on Wednesday of the Kantara Initiative, which aims to bring greater harmony to identity management.

The project, which has been in the making for a year, is dedicated to examining ways of improving interoperability between different identity technologies and standards. It also intends to address topics such as privacy, which can be sidelined by purely technical discussions, according to Kantara.

"The challenges around identity go beyond just technology," wrote Matthew Gardiner, a CA senior principal involved in the initiative, in a blog post on Wednesday.

To date, developers have focused on solving technical problems, without recognising that the real challenges to identity and security revolve around issues such as privacy and trust, according to Gardiner. "The Kantara Initiative will focus on this in a way that is neutral to the underlying technologies," he wrote.

CNet - Some have described Google as an advertising company. This might have been accurate at one time, but given the sheer breadth of Google's ambition and product mix, it's far too limiting a description.

Google is a search company. It's a cloud company. It's a subscription services company. And, as is becoming increasingly obvious, Google is the world's largest open-source company.

Tim O'Reilly has been telling us this for years, but it wasn't until I read this brilliant Keir Thomas article that I appreciated the clarity of O'Reilly's vision.

As Thomas writes, Google is the antithesis of Microsoft. Where Microsoft is closed, Google is open. Where Microsoft is limiting, Google is expansive. Where Microsoft is desktop, Google is the Web.

OFE Press Release - "OpenForum Europe observes with great interest the long-awaited inclusion of support for ODF within the release of Microsoft's Service Pack 2 for Office 2007. This adoption underlines the growing requirement by both public and private sector for open standards based interoperability based on ODF. It represents a strategic victory for ODF, a victory which we need to consolidate.

Governments across the world, including the UK, have adopted ODF. This number continues to grow as has the depth and range of ODF supporting software. Over 50 ODF supporting word processors, spreadsheets and presentation applications are available - a significant proportion originate in from Europe. OpenForum Europe are actively supporting the ODF Workshop in the Hague on 15th -16th June called at the invitation of the Dutch Government which will focus on full interoperability for ODF implementations.

It is hoped that their support of ODF will represent a substantive move by Microsoft towards ungrudging participation in genuine multi-vendor interoperability. Freely exchangeable document formats are fundamental to the development of open interoperability frameworks which intimately link both public and private users with each other and with their suppliers. Open document formats enable competitive choice to the IT user, encouraging wide ranging innovation. Closed document formats stifle customer choice.

OpenForum Europe will continue to advocate genuinely open solutions and will carefully monitor the impact of ODF and other document format implementations."

Basil Cousins says: “This COULD be an opportunity for Microsoft to prove its critics wrong. We will watch the first user trials of SP2 with great interest - let the public judge.”

Basil Cousins - Director, OpenForum Europe