Interview by Rosa Sposito of Brazil


O projeto OpenOffice.org completou 5 anos. Em sua opinião, quais foram as principais conquistas obtidas nesse período pela comunidade de desenvolvedores e pelos usuários? Qual o seu balanço desses 5 anos?

OpenOffice.org is 5.5 years old this 13 April; we were launched 13 October 2000, and we have accomplished a great deal in that time: from having a minimal market share, minimal brand awareness, and generally considered to have no real future to being a major competitor of Microsoft Office on Windows and a real alternative to MS Office for tens of millions of people, including millions in Brazil. Most of our downloads are by Windows users; most of our users are Windows users. We are not a geek novelty, we are not an open source curiosity we are a serious contendor which daily proves the truth of open-source development and the fact that it works and works well, and taken together, that is a triumph.
But OpenOffice.org is not just about Free and Open Soruce (FOSS). It is also about promulgating and promoting the OASIS open standard OpenDocument as its file format and also about, as I go on to write below, promoting a better way of doing things. The difference that OpenOffice.org has made is for tens of millions the difference between a system that is ultimately exploitative and one that is enriching. OpenOffice.org really is important, for Brazil and for the world.

Quantas pessoas estão envolvidas no projeto hoje: quantos desenvolvedores (aproximadamente) e em quantos países? E qual é o número aproximado de usuários?

It is very difficult to evaluate how many are really involved in developing the code or in working on the project. The Portuguese “desenvolvedores” seems quite useful…. But in rough terms there are probably anywhere from 50-100 Sun engineers working on the code and hundreds more working on some aspect of localization, porting, QA, art, website, documentation, complemented with thousands helping in support capacities. The project is huge, for I am not at all counting all those thousands who work regionally to advance OpenOffice.org in the many tens of countries where they live. You has how many countries? Beats me. There are about 190 countries, and I should imagine that we are in nearly all. And you ask how many users? Impossible to tell. But the number is probably between 20 and 60 million; in Brazil alone there are millions, as you know.

O OpenOffice.org está disponível em várias plataformas (GNU/Linux, Windows, Sun Solaris, Mac OS, etc.).Quem usa mais o OpenOffice hoje no mundo: os usuários de Linux (nas várias distribuições) ou de Windows?

Windows users represent the greatest number of downloaders and probably users. Virtually all the Linux distributors also distribute OpenOffice.org, so the download numbers are smaller for them. But pick a country advocating a Linux program and you will see a bias then to Linux. Governments make a huge difference here, as it is usually the case that the government is the greatest user in any country and it is also the fulcrum for all commercial activity, so if a government mandates Linux and OpenOffice.org, then all companies interested in doing business with that government must also consider Linux and OpenOffice.org.

A funny point: many Windows users, at least one study has shown, are totally unaware they are even using OpenOffice.org! And as Linux is nowadays friendlier (no viruses, logical location of files) than Windows, many Windows users come to love the change. But we never advocate an immediate and brutal migration: we advocate gradual changes.

Como é concorrer com uma empresa do porte da Microsoft, que tem um produto tão conhecido e difundido na área de aplicativos de produtividade, como é o Microsoft Office? Como é o relacionamento da Microsoft com a comunidade e com os usuários do OpenOffice? Existe algum tipo de hostilidade dela em relação à comunidade OpenOffice?

I used to say that we were not actually competing against Microsoft. Rather, I used to say, we were providing an alternative and leaving the user to choose. What Microsoft did or did not do was of little consequence, I used to claim; it certainly did not affect what we did or did not do. But many enterprises and governments are now looking at us and looking away from Microsoft because they do not like MS’s licensing policies, the cost, or the fact that they cannot look at and edit the source; and they really do not like the fact that Microsoft still uses a proprietary file format, though it has recently made noises to make that format “open.” So we have made OpenOffice.org easier for MS users and tried our hardest to minimize any disruption migration might introduce. At the expense of being boring, we have succeeded. I suppose then that we are now really competing! But we don’t compete in any old boring way, with ads and with a 500 hundred-million-dollar marketing budget.

So then how else do we compete? By offering free technology that works better than MS Office while still preserving the user interface, and that is built by a community of passionate and dedicated engineers and other contributors. The community makes a huge difference. The tens of thousands who contribute in any way they can do so because they believe in the process: with OpenOffice.org, they can see their opinions make a difference and their work affect things, and they can see how what they do is changing the world—and for the better.

As we are now working more closely with enterprises and governments, I expect our uptake to be that much faster, for these organizations influence millions. Recall, this is one way that Microsoft gained so much traction, that and by turning a blind eye to rampant piracy. It is no secret that the casual piracy practiced by so many of copying the cdrom used at work for home helped MS Office’s penetration, just as it is no secret that continued piracy perpetuates that dominance. But FOSS is staunchly against piracy and for legal transmission of intellectual property, and we have a distribution mechanism that legally encourages people to copy the application as many times as they please and pass it along to whomever they please, and it is all legal.

Goodbye piracy, hello software livre!

Li que recentemente a Microsoft se juntou a um pequeno subcomitê chamado "V1 Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface", que está encarregado de conciliar os votos no ISO a favor do formato OpenDocument do OASIS (foi o que eu entendi; se eu estiver errada, por favor me diga). Isso pode indicar que, de alguma forma, ela está tentando se aproximar dos grupos que defendem um padrão de interface aberta?

I am not sure I quite understand your question….. But, I’ll try. The details of MS joining that obscure office were relayed by Andrew Updegrove of Consortiuminfo.org and Pamela Jones of Groklaw. See in particular, http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20060322092711966&mode=print or, http://tinyurl.com/zxq6a
Basically, it’s an important emplacement that give Microsoft leverage to stall the approval process, if it wants to. Obviously, anything that slows the process down enough, so that Microsoft’s own “Open XML” “standard” effort can get through faster is desirable for it. No one ever said MS doesn’t know how to fight.

But this raises the larger point: Is there a logical and functional difference between ODF and Microsoft’s OpenXML, should both be approved a standard by the ISO?
There is: the ODF has been created by a consortium of companies and projects and does not represent any one company’s interests. It has been implemented by numerous applications. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_applications_supporting_OpenDocument). OASIS maintains it as an open standard, again validating its openness. In contrast, Microsoft OpenXML is implemented by one company: Microsoft, though others, including OpenOffice.org, can read/write MS files. Second, even if it is ISO standardized, that scenario won’t change: MS will still be the only company implementing the format because it costs a lot to do the technology; it’s not trivial. Third, it’s a little speculative to imagine that MS will really allow a truly impartial body like the ISO to take control of the format, which is what would happen, if it becomes standardized by the ISO.

Conclusion: ODF is a standard now and is implemented by many applications. Use it or lose your documents.

Does that address your point?

Como estão atualmente os esforços para tornar o OpenDocument do OASIS um padrão aberto internacional para a troca de documentos? Como está a adesão a esse padrão no mundo? Quando ele deverá se tornar mesmo um padrão (oficialmente)? Quais as principais vantagens que os usuários terão com isso?

Hm. Many questions, and I am not sure I understand them all! But… at present we have formed at least two consortia dedicated to promoting the ODF: the OASIS OpenDocument Adoption Technical Committee, of which I am a member, and the OpenDocument Alliance, of which I am also a member. Both have as their mandate the furtherance of the ODF among users (of all sorts) and developers, and both number among their members many organizations.

The basic message is that the ODF ( which is a file format, not an application; OpenOffice.org is an application using the ODF, so are KOffice and StarOffice and Workplace), gives users the ability to use an interoperable format that won’t limit them to any particular vendor either now or in the future. The implicit message of the ODF is one of democracy and responsibility, and Microsoft, for all its marketing, cannot make similar claims. (It has also refused to adopt the ODF and absurdly claimed that the ODF is thus exclusionary.) It’s message is the one we all know too well and it is ultimately all about benefiting Microsoft, at my, and your expense.

Em seu e-mail, você disse que há um esforço geral para disseminar o OpenOffice.org pelo mundo todo, nas diversas línguas nativas. Em quantas línguas ele está disponível hoje? Dá para citar alguns exemplos?

OpenOffice.org, as a project and product, is available in over 65 languages. The actual number I do not recall and it also varies a little, as it depends on whether the relevant group has released a build in the latest version. But on a regular basis, we promote well over 45 (and probably a lot more) QA’d and supported versions, and the languages range: From the Brazilian Portuguese, which you know very well and which is maintained and supported by Claudio Filho Ferreira and Roberto Salomon among others, of the BR-PT Native Language Project (see http://br-pt.openoffice.org) to Hungarian to Southern African to Finnish to Japanese to Korean to Hindi, Tamil, Basque, Welsh, and so on. Our list---which is incomplete, I acknowledge—of languages is at http://projects.openoffice.org/native-lang.html. I think we all owe Pavel Janík of the l10n project (http://l01n.openoffice.org/) and Charles Schulz, of the Native Language Confederacy, a big thanks for helping us all in our efforts to localize and support OpenOffice.org in our own language!

By the way, Microsoft copies us here as elsewhere but it just does not get the logic of our success, which depends on community. They think that community is all about making people feel good. It is not. In Software Libre, it is all about working together openly, and good feelings are just a byproduct of mutual respect. So they try to copy our localization communities, and make big marketing events out of it and end up looking like condescending padrones helping the poor –stay poor. In contrast, we believe that community work is wealth itself and it is a wealth that when returned to the community can only increase.

Quem é o maior usuário do OpenOffice atualmente? Alguma grande empresa? Você conhece algum caso interessante, ou curioso, relacionado ao uso do OpenOffice?

We list the major users of OpenOffice.org at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/15/lessig_stallman_drm/print.htmlhttp://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments . It’s an incomplete list, but suggestive. In terms of the more interesting cases, I’d have to point to the French government usage, by the administrations, by the gendarmerie. (Sophie Gautier, of the Francophone project, was instrumental in getting them on OpenOffice.org and my thanks to her.) What makes the French use interesting was that it was one of the first large-scale deployments. They also coupled it with support, which is pretty important! In the old days—a couple of years ago—it was believed that there was no professional support for OpenOffice.org, and that one would have to deal with the “unpredictable” FOSS community. In fact, there is professional support now. We list just some of the organizations and companies offering OpenOffice.org support at http://support.openoffice.org/. Sun Microsystems, for instance, which does most of the coding for OpenOffice.org, is very visibly listed as offering support, and other organizations are listed in our Consultants Directory, which you can get to from the Support page. So there is lots of support, both in English, and I’d imagine, in Brazilian Portuguese.

There is also training and certification. We are working on creating criteria for such programs (as well as support), but will not be endorsing any particular company, but we encourage companies to alert users that they are in compliance with our criteria.

Li no site oficial do OpenOffice.org que o projeto tem três categorias principais: accepted projects, native-lang (native language confederation) e incubator. Dá para explicar cada uma delas e, se possível, dar exemplos de projetos ou atividades em cada categoria?

Hm. Let’s skip over this…. I explain it on the page.

Li também que OpenOffice.org está trabalhando para melhorar a performance desse aplicativo, principalmente em plataformas Linux. Pelo que entendi, nesse ambiente o OpenOffice é mais lento – principalmente a planilha Calc, que é similar ao Excel da Microsoft. Quais são os principais desafios (técnicos) que essa suite de produtividade ainda precisa vencer?

I’m actually not the best person for this point. Michael Meeks recently gave an interview on the subject, in which he clearly stated that Calc is not as fast as Excel, and it is not. But then, Excel doesn’t run on Linux and it is not free, either. The larger point, though, is that we have to improve performance. Intel, as well as Novell—both are contributors to OpenOffice.org—have been working hard on doing just that, and we expect major improvements in the future; I wish I could precisely state when.

But the performance issues that have caused such a ruckus actually do not affect most regular users; they don’t affect me and I doubt if they affect any of your readers. They affect a tiny minority of “power users” who create vast spreadsheets with complex calculations embedded in them. And for these users, a simple solution: keep on using Excel. OpenOffice.org is not a panacea, and we do not urge all to migrate to OpenOffice.org overnight. Rather, we encourage the opposite: to take it slow and to migrate gradually. The point is not to introduce disruption and chaos, which would degrade the quality of office life, but to improve office life and productivity. At some point, and I think it will be soon, OpenOffice.org’s Calc will leap over Excel---we saw something like this with our database module, Base, which is superior to Access. And I think it will be soon because enough banks and financial institutions are now committed to OpenOffice.org and because the application is open source, their commitment also means that they have the power to change it and improve it.

An invitation: if you want it better, help us make it better!

E quando a versão de 64 bits do OpenOffice vai estar disponível?

I wish I could give a definitive answer, beyond: as soon as it is ready! But, if your audience include developers, and I hope it does, then this page is the best one for the status of the 64-bit work:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Porting_to_x86-64_(AMD64,_EM64T)

The basic points:
• The x86-64 port is work in progress. It is not ready for use yet, but it compiles (with quite large set of patches), and performs basic operations. It is of no use for non-developers.
• Help is appreciated, join the project! :-)
• The work is based on ooo64bit02 Child Workspace (CWS). The problem is that this CWS is too huge to be integrated - it would be an incredible task for the QA. The idea is to split it to smaller CWSes and get them integrated one by one.

Sun, Novell, Intel e Red Hat são algumas empresas citadas como patrocinadoras (ou colaboradoras) do OpenOffice.org. Por que elas têm interesse em manter investimentos nesse aplicativo?

Dá para citar outras empresas que apostam no OpenOffice.org? O Google, por exemplo? Alguns sites aqui no Brasil chegaram a noticiar que o Google ia investir no OpenOffice para transformá-lo em um aplicativo online. Você sabe de alguma coisa sobre isso?

Among the many corporate contributors to OpenOffice.org we can count:
• Sun Microsystems (original and continuing contributor and sponsor )
• Novell
• Red Hat
• Propylon
• Intel
• Google
And many other smaller ones, who may have allocated one or two developers to the project and are invested in ensuring that OpenOffice.org does well. I really need to create a page that lists all these, so that people can see that OpenOffice.org is by no means just a Sun effort but an international collaboration!

With regards to the popular fantasy that Google’s intervention is but one step to making OpenOffice.org an online application, I’m afraid that reality must intrude: Both Sun and Google have publicly stated that that is not really the goal nor even particularly feasible. And with Google’s purchase of the company making Writerly, which works perfectly well with the ODF, one can begin to see that there may some truth in what they claim.

I think that a more realistic approach is to imagine an ODF reader not unlike a PDF reader. Such a reader could be employed by any device, really, from cell phones to handhelds to computers and would allow users anywhere anywhen to view OpenOffice.org documents. And one could even streamline edits and functionality for this purpose, so that only a very limited set of features were available when documents are viewed in this way. But one need not wait for Google. Brazil has many talented developers: I invite you to lead the way!
Quais são os principais desafios para a comunidade OpenOffice.org atualmente?

What is the challenge for the community? Ah, there are many, both global and local. Globally, we need more developer contributions and we need more support from those currently using OpenOffice.org. The project is doing great but it can only continue to answer the needs of the world if the world responds by answering ours.

But every global problem is also a local problem and the case of OpenOffice.org is no different. We need Brazilians—students, independent developers, government offices, companies—to contribute their skills, insight, funds, support to the local Brazilian OpenOffice.org project (BrOpenOffice.org) and to the global one. OpenOffice.org has to match what Microsoft Office does on a continuing basis, else businesses and governments will look away; and we have to surpass it. We are on our way to creating an application that boasts more elective features, options, capabilities, just as Firefox has bested IE long ago, but we need your help.

The other challenge, and it’s related to the first, is encouraging. The way we have structured it so far is that the code is maintained by a “core” group. But the architecture allows for new features –extensions, addons, etc.—to be created for OpenOffice.org. This gives remarkable freedom to the developer. Already, for instance, a grammarchecker for Brazilian Portuguese has been created by Carlos de Menezes; there is none for the English version. Other extensions are more than possible. I can help anyone who wishes to develop for OpenOffice.org; if you have questions, contact me. My email is louis_at_openoffice.org.

As to the challenge of getting people to use OpenOffice.org: that is a continuing challenge and adds to the fun. I sometimes pity Microsoft, our great rival, but I never underestimate its power or resources. So the challenge is always in informing people of what OpenOffice.org is, what it offers, as a project and product, and how they can benefit from it. Only by repeating the message again and again can we be heard, for Microsoft pays billions of reals to silence our words of freedom.

Qual é o investimento anual no desenvolvimento do OpenOffice.org? De onde vem o dinheiro para isso?

It’s almost impossible to put a figure on that, as development includes so much and as so much is done by volunt eers. Take the Brazilian Portuguese effort, for instance. Their contributions, if they were coming out of a proprietary company, would be worth millions. Now magnify that for the many languages and ports that OpenOffice.org makes available. What’s important is the actual cost per company vs the return it gets for its investment in OpenOffic.org. And you will see that the returns, in technology, in brand awareness, and in that one thing that is absolutely invaluable, “coolness,” which makes one company more appealing than another and which is something that Microsoft lost long ago, are of far greater significance than any particular investment.

And this is the secret of FOSS and why there is so much national interest in it: it saves huge amounts of money for any one company and it enriches the wealth of the “commons” or what all involved companies, governments, and individuals have in common.

Existe uma estratégia para tornar o OpenOffice.org um produto comercial, como o Microsoft Office? Em outras palavras, o desenvolvimento do produto vai continuar dependendo do esforço da comunidade e do patrocínio de algumas empresas? Ou existem planos de torná-lo um produto comercial, cuja venda possa sustentar seu próprio desenvolvimento e o suporte aos usuários?

Right now, we are happy to make available for free excellent and QA’d versions of OpenOffice.org to one and all, in many languages. Did I mention these are free? Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems sells StarOffice, derived from OpenOffice.org with proprietary elements added; Novell sells its own slightly modified version of OpenOffice.org in its own offerings; Red Hat, same story, and the same story is retold by many other enterprises and smaller companies. We have tried to track all the companies selling derived works, and when OpenOffice.org was licensed under both the LGPL and SISSL (like the BSD), there were very many. Now that OpenOffice.org is licensed exclusively under the LGPL, we anticipate that more companies will contribute to OpenOffice.org, and we have seen that already in the case of one company, an Hungarian company which sells “OpenOffice.org Premium,” and which is now working with the project.

But will we commercialize OpenOffice.org, in the sense that Microsoft Office is commercial? Is Mozilla commercial, even with a .com portal? No. Do you have to pay for Firefox? No. To state it as positively as possible: OpenOffice.org will remain free, as in beer and speech. One can make money even without transforming the product itself into a version of Microsoft Office, which puts money before everything else. In FOSS, one makes money off of support, services, training and in the sale of other ancillary products, like t-shirts, support documentation, and so on.

Como você situa o Brasil dentro da comunidade de desenvolvedores e de usuários do OpenOffice.org? Ela é representativa dentro da comunidade internacional? De alguma forma, o esforço do atual governo brasileiro para promover o software livre acabou incentivando a adoção do OpenOffice? O uso desse aplicativo aumentou durante o governo Lula (Luís Inácio da Silva)?

Again, so man questions masquerading as one! I’ll try to respond to the gist of the questions.

Brazil is extremely important when it comes to FOSS. With no exaggeration, it can be said to be pivotal to the worldwide acceptance of FOSS. There are a couple of obvious reasons for this. First, of course, has to do with Brazil’s size: it’s huge and has an enormous population that is growing rapidly. Second, it faces today the inescapable problem of bringing in from the margins the historically disenfranchised, a problem that, sooner or later, virtually all large countries will have to face. FOSS is crucial here because not only is it cheap—it’s free—but more importantly, it naturally opposes the essentially colonialist logic of hegemonic IT corporations like Microsoft. That is, right now, across, the globe, governments depend on products created by a company that is located in Redmond, Washington, USA, a company that is dedicated to its shareholders, and that must constantly expand its user base or less succumb to the pressures of the market. Nations are in effect held hostage to proprietary applications, formats, machinery. It’s as if all that people do were written in a code by scribes coming from a far country and answerable to no one. Today’s dependency came about silently and swiftly, through the massive deployment of applications by US-based corporations and through the blindness to the consequences of accepting this dangerous candy. But there are alternatives today: Linux and other open source alternatives work perfectly well on the desktop; even Macintosh is based on open source technology. And OpenOffice.org is the definitive alternative for those who need a productivity suite that does what MS Office does. Actually, OpenOffice.org goes quite beyond OpenOffice.org.

Lula, a truly visionary leader, I understand, who, while recognizing economic verities, is nevertheless committed to furthering the condition of all Brazilians, is, from what I can gather, strongly behind FOSS, and his support has made a difference, I have no doubt. That difference could ultimately be the one between dependency and autonomy; between rewriting the dark history of colonialism and writing the far brighter future of independence.

(I should add: the point is not that it is necessary to give everyone a computer. The point is that it is vital to give everyone access to the wealth of information and commerce that computers afford and make possible. I am actually opposed to Nicholas Negroponte’s goal of the 100-dollar computer; I see it as a mistake. Rather I am in favor of local free Internet centers where one can exchange email, etc., and use OpenOffice.org freely. The library, whether of books or the Web, is the vehicle for freedom, not yet another consumer item.)

Você dedica todo o seu tempo ao OpenOffice.org ou tem outra atividade profissional? Qual?

I am also an adjunct professor at York University, in Toronto, Canada, though I do not have any teaching responsibilities (I also don’t get paid by York). The role grants me, however, valuable credibility in continuing my research and publication on US culture, though I am also branching out into the culture of open-source production and in particular into analyses of the political logic of FOSS, especially in areas outside of the US.

Gostaria que você me desse um pequeno briefing sobre você: idade, formação, empresas em que já trabalhou (só algumas), quando se interessou por software livre e, em particular, pelo OpenOffice. Enfim, preciso de um pequeno briefing sobre você para poder dizer aos leitores quem é o homem que hoje comanda a comunidade OpenOffice.org.

Gack. That’s a lot. I can refer you to my homepage, http://homepage.mac.com/luispo/, which covers a lot of the above, including a brief résumé of my recent work and recent writings, including my blog. But the stuff that’s not included there:

First, I don’t lead OpenOffice.org per se. OpenOffice.org is led by a Community Council, which I chair, but there is no “one” leader. Call me the chief figurehead and initiator of projects. As to me: I was born in Mexico City and raised there by my mother and grandmother, a famous artists of bullfighters, Lita, until about 5, when we (mother and brother and I) moved to Spain for a couple of years or so. Returned to Mexico and a year later moved to the US (San Francisco/Los Angeles), until I was 10, then migrated to Sydney, Australia (this early 70s), for about three years. Then back to Mexico for two years, then San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived, more or less continuously, albeit with some periods in San Diego and New York City, through college and graduate school.

My interest in cooperative and collaborative work has a very long history and perhaps relates to my experiences traveling. In the late 70s, when I started college at the University of California, Berkeley, I was elected to the governing board of the University Student Cooperative Association (I was the youngest board member ever), and also was elected to the position manager of work activities at the largest of the student cooperative houses. That is to say, from the earliest time, I have acted on my belief in cooperative and collaborative work. The environment—Berkeley—was conducive to this, of course, as was the time, the late 70s, so these things confirmed in me my beliefs.

Open source claims to be a new thing—all the new things do, even those that are not—but its logical roots lie deep in Western culture as the antidote to the impersonality and, if unregulated, exploitation of the market. The novelty—the true novelty—of FOSS lies in its use of technology to enable collaboration, which is to say, in the use of technology to overcome obstacles of space and time. I discovered the virtues of this technological collaboration in the mid-90s, when I took over a program designed to augment in-person discussion groups with online collaboration at U.C. Berkeley, where I was working on my degree in English/American culture. The program had some successes, but its main virtue, at least for me, was that it made it clear to me the strength of such technology in practice. FOSS, which was just then gaining media attention, synthesized into concrete practice the promise of real collaboration with no regard to time or space using technology that was effortlessly easy. It was (and is) better than fiction because everyone can be a hero. And it served as an inadvertent antidote to the ruthless logic of market capitalism promoted by Reagan and Bush I that had so decimated the hope of 70s cooperatives. (Inadvertent because many of the early US-based practitioners of FOSS were actually quite libertarian and conservative. But FOSS community doesn’t really care what your politics are.)
My career in OpenOffice.org began very soon after I finished my degree, in 1999. I wanted to stay in the Bay Area, where Berkeley is located, for personal reasons, and was lucky to be recruited by CollabNet, which Brian Behlendorf had founded shortly before. I was hired just around the time OpenOffice.org was launched and right at the peak of the .com wave and thus just as it was starting to decline. Fortunately, for me and the world, Sun stayed with OpenOffice.org!

And I want to finish by inviting others to join us. I invite the Brazilian government; universities and secondary schools; independent companies and developers: I invite you all. OpenOffice.org is for the world but it can only exist if the world returns the gift. It is time now to break the model of consumption that Microsoft and others have given us. It is time to move away from this model of weakness. It is time to show how powerful Software Livre is.


Posted: Wed - May 10, 2006 at 11:44 PM          

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