Don't cast your axe into the sea
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Open Source joins European election battle
THE FREE SOFTWARE movement is trying to recruit European election candidates to fight big software business interests in Brussels.
Campaign group The Free Software Pact has already recruited 96 candidates in France and Italy. This week it appointed open source operator, Mark Taylor, to lobby candidates in the UK. It is also establishing campaigns in Germany and Spain.
Mark Taylor told the INQ: "A massive amount of the politics that's relevant to free software happens in Europe. Its phenomenaly important for people who care to ask their MEP candidate to sign the Free Software Pact."
Europe was where the battle between proprietary and open source software was being most fiercely fought, he said. The interests of big business were influencing the European legislature in ways that threatened still to introduce software patents, end net neutrality, and promote proprietary standards.
The Free Software Pact has been dormant since 2007 when it won the backing of all 12 candidates in the French Presidential elections.
"It is something that unites all political parties," said Loic Dachary, campaign co-ordinator in France. "The right likes free software because it saves money. The left likes free software because it helps people who have nothing."
The campaign strengthened the French commitment to open source that has seen French MPs and police use free software alternatives to Microsoft on their desktop computers.
"There is definitely a sentiment of independence which we push with free software," said Dachary. "It saves you from the domination of external companies."
In the UK, the Green MEP candidates Derek Wall and Caroline Lucas have already signed up to the Pact. µ
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When I said Steve Jobs, I meant Steve Balmer.
OpenOffice is great, MS Office 2007 is brutal to use.
Never have I wasted so much time just fannying about trying to do a simple mail merge of a spreadsheet and a word document than with MS Office 2007. I have the customer data in excel, names, dates etc. And I have a simple document in Word, and I then Mail Merge both together.
Except the dates get f#cked up into USA dates, and MS has NO PATCH for this. Instead I have to copy n paste some stupid bits of code wherever I have date fields. Those PRICKS at MS cannot even support and test office 2007, 2 years old by now, with UK date formats.
Also, trying to find which button is the Mail Merge button, and which option lets me pick the data source is like spinning the wheel of ribbon fortune with 100+ options, hit and hope, then undo again, and again and again.
As someone who supports small businesses I have to warn them about Office2007 and insist they do not buy it. After showing them Office2007 on my laptop they don't.
However as an OS I think Linux is just as bad as MS Office 2007 is as a "productivity" app.
Even on an Eee Linux still needs command line interface commands when the updater fails. And when it fails the errors are almost meaningless, unless you're a geek. Eee's are not meant for geeks.
Linux is still for geeks.
Openoffice is the saviour in all of this. Any small bussiness or user I've shown it to have thought it's just like the easy to use old MS Office.
Steve Jobs, if you signed off OFfice 2007 then you need to sign yourself off. Day-Month-Year in mail merge isn't don't correctly.
Also in Office 2007 (2 years olf now, come on u lazy cnuts) the formatting is not carried through in Mail Merge. So currency symbols get "lost". WTF is that about?
How was this all not spotted in testing. And since these problems have been reported for over 2 years, why isn't this patched yet?
And you want me to buy Windows 7, not facking likely.
Europe Needs Open Source: Open source is the only viable direction for Europe to pursue if they don't want to be locked into technology controlled by American companies.
Open Source needs Europe: A huge amount of development work is done in the Linux ecosystem, however it is still lacking that final usablility/compatibilty polish today's users expect. Huge strides have been made but it's not there yet. This final polish needs a commercial push - paid programmers doing the uninteresting but required finishing of a product rather than perpetually working on new features. We need open source software to pickup this commercial backing. Obviously there is no sales revenue, and hopefully no support revenue (if the software works well). So where can the commercial backing come from? Large companies and governments spend small fortunes on software licensing every year. If this money is redirected from proprietary software to Open Source development, to pay programmers to finish off the features required then open source software can reach the finished, polished level required and everyone can save a ton of money in the long term.
You may ask why one organisation should pay for development which everyone else will then get for free, but remember, that organisation is also taking advantage of a huge amount of existing development. Home users and small business will get software for free, but enterprises and governments will see real benefit in paying for the coding they need and the software ecosystem will continuously get better for everyone.
One final note: Software will not stagnate under this model - the Linux ecosystem has shown a huge passion for implementing new features without any commercial reward required.