FLOSS News

There seems to be something of a military campaign afoot. One that surely shows signs of desperation and anxiety on behalf of the instigator.

First we had Asus telling it’s potential customers that “It’s Better With Winblow$” using phraseology such as:

“Windows helps you easily get online and connect to your devices and services - without dealing with an unfamiliar environment or major compatibility issues.”

Remember when, back in late February, the Cabinet Office released their “Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan”? Myself and many other FOSS commentators were obviously heartily encouraged and have talked about it and examined the policy in some detail.

I’ve not penned much on OOXML for quite a while mainly because there really doesn’t seem to be much interest in it outside of a small circle of Microsoft lackeys and puppy dogs. Even MS themselves are making more noise about implementing native ODF support with the just-released SP2 for Office 2007.

Anyway - two blog posts crept on my radar today that are worthy of mention and the cause for my writing at all.

There’s been much coverage and speculation of what might or might not happen following the announcement that Oracle would like to buy Sun Microsystems and Sun are apparently happy to be bought by Oracle [note the deal hasn't actually happened yet].

This post by Matt Assay discussing how we got to a competitive browser market got me thinking. (Dangerous I know, but bear with me.)

… I suppose the truly intriguing thing is not that we have a competitive market for Web browsers again, but how it happened. Baker told me recently that Firefox is “an anomaly” because it managed to beat back overwhelming Microsoft market share. Can we do it again?

Thanks to Roy’s tenacity and constant vigilance, I have learned how it now appears the MS Office binary format that is wrapped in XML and is now known as IS 29500 (OOXML), an ISO Standard Office Document Specification (ROTFL), is giving hackers everywhere a field day.

It is now official and also confirmed that OOXML files are not just insecure but there are also persistent attacks against new flaws (without any security patches being available, i.e. zero-day).

Remember the short piece I posted about the Radio 4 programme “In Business” a couple of weeks ago? Well, very kindly, the programme’s editor has provided me with a transcript of programme to

please use as you wish, but it has not been checked for accuracy. Good luck.

I have just read and listened again and didn’t find anything glaring although I did fix one rather amusing typo: “Linux Colonel” to “Linux Kernel”. It was sent to me as a Microsoft .doc file. I opened it in OpenOffice.org and exported it as a PDF so it should be readable by virtually everyone.

After having a bit of lay-in this morning (but not as long as I’d hoped for), I thought I should mention what we got up to at BETT last week.

Along with our friends at the OpenForum Europe and helpers from a few other Free Software or Open Source related organisations, we exhibited much of what it is best about FOSS to the international education community.

I know this isn’t exactly “new” news, (it’s 2 days old and has appeared on /. I understand) but to me it is really important and should be shouted from the rooftops.

VietNamNet Bridge – The Ministry of Information and Communications has issued an instruction on using open source software products at state agencies.

Accordingly, by June 30, 2009, 100% of servers of IT divisions of government agencies must be installed with open source software; 100% of staffs at these IT divisions must be trained in the use of these software products and at least 50% use them proficiently.

The last Windows computer in our house is very shortly going to be history

I have been threatening my wife’s PC for quite some time now, but there has been no real motivation to move until today… Our bank called and told her a credit card has been fraudulently used in the last few days. Fortunately they appear to have correctly and swiftly identified the misuse and are dealing with the problem.

As if the last security hole in Internet Explorer was not enough, here’s yet another reason to drop Microsoft Software. This time it’s their cash-cow, Office:

Attackers are exploiting the just-patched vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE) by hiding malicious ActiveX controls in Microsoft Word documents, according to security researchers.

Ouch!

Users of the world’s most common web browser have been advised to switch to another browser until a serious security flaw has been fixed.

The flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people’s computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say.

So, apart from being a crap browser at actually rendering web pages according to the standards, it also opens up your computer to a “serious security flaw” (as if we didn’t know that already).

Here’s my recommendation for curing this ailment. Permanently:

… by my reckoning at least.

Take a look at this chart (click for a bigger image):

OpenOffice.org Download Barchart

WOW!

Early on Sunday morning, the OpenOffice.org Community passed the ten million downloads mark for the latest version of its software, just four weeks after the launch on October 13th. The week also marked the first time the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference has been held outside Europe.

And this is only from the OOo servers. This doesn’t include mirrors and installs from distribution packages.

Glyn Moody (See blogroll) has an absolutely cracking post on his Open Enterprise blog regarding a recent announcement from Russia. The really interesting bit for me is not the article itself so much, although it is indeed great news and very inspirational, but the comments that follow.

Firstly, the main story. It is that Russia has had such a successful time using Open Source software in some School pilots that the government have decided to roll it out across ALL schools in Russia.