Stop at Zona-M

The correct way to use and advocate OO.o and the real reason to do it

(this is something I wrote in 2007. Everywhere you read “OO.o” you can (and should) replace it with “Apache OpenOffice or Libre Office”. See the bottom of the page for the origin and history of the text)

Many people, schools and small businesses use OO.o only because

The actual advantages of OpenDocument

(this is only the final part of something I wrote in 2007. Please do read the first part to understand where the text below comes from!)

A highly structured, metadata rich, application independent XML file format like OpenDocument can finally offer two huge advantages

Call to fund research on an easy and COMPLETE alternative to Gmail, Facebook etc...

UPDATE 2013/09/17: THIS PROJECT NOW HAS A HOME AT per-cloud.com

I have been using my own email service and self-hosted blogs since 2006/2007. I started explaining why everybody should do the same three years ago, when I proposed Virtual Personal Email Servers to overcome the big limits of today’s email. In 2011 I repeated why it is important to find alternatives to Gmail.

Since real support for privacy, control and data ownership should be present in everything we do online, last January I also pointed out that alternatives to corporate social networks already exist and only need proper packaging.

Now the Snowden/NSA/PRISM affair has finally made evident, to an audience immensely larger than geek circles, that I (with many others of course) was right. Everybody, including non-geeks (no: starting from them) should have, as soon as possible, at least the possibility to

Why Mailpile, FreedomBox, Diaspora... aren't enough

Thoughts and Tips from the 2013 Open Data Week

I participated to the 2013 Open Data Week in Marseille to lead a workshop on an idea I had a couple years ago, one that seems to be more and more ready to seriously take off every month:

Girl Scouts, other equal opportunity employers and... software discrimination

Casual browsing (more on this below) just brought me to the website of the Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada (GSSN). As many other organizations of all kinds, in the USA and elsewhere, they are, as clearly stated in their official Application for Employment:

an equal opportunity employer. All applications for employment will be considered without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, citizenship, disability or marital status.