Blackmoor Vituperative

In a statement issued on Friday, Oracle announced that it intends to discontinue commercial development of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The move comes several months after key members of the OOo community and a number of major corporate contributors forked OOo to create a vendor-neutral alternative.

OOo is one of many open source software projects that Oracle obtained in its acquisition of Sun. OOo has long been plagued by governance issues and friction between its corporate stakeholders. Sun’s copyright assignment policies and bureaucratic code review process significantly hindered community participation in the project. Oracle declined to address these issues after its acquisition of Sun and exacerbated the friction by failing to engage with the OOo community in a transparent and open way.

A group of prominent OOo contributors eventually decided to fork the project, creating an alternative called LibreOffice. They founded a nonprofit organization called The Document Foundation (TDF) in order to create a truly vendor-neutral governance body for the software. LibreOffice is based on the OOo source code, but it also incorporates a large number of other improvements driven by its own developer community. […]

The community defections eventually made OOo financially untenable for Oracle, which is why the company has finally thrown in the towel. Oracle says that it is ready to hand over control of the project to the community, but doing so at this point would be little more than a symbolic gesture; the community has already moved on of its own accord. […]

The LibreOffice escape from Oracle is a powerful demonstration of how open source forking can be used to protect community autonomy and lock out exploitative stakeholders.

(from Oracle gives up on OpenOffice after community forks the project, ArsTechnica)

You might be tempted to applaud. You shouldn’t. We would all be better off if Oracle had participated in the OpenOffice project in a transparent and open way. Users would be better off, because Oracle brings a lot to the table, and Oracle would be better off, because they would have a foundation for their commercial Cloud Office project (which appears to have been terminated along with their participation in OpenOffice). So, we all lose here, in the short term.

However, in the long term, the project continues, under better conditions that Oracle permitted, and we all benefit from that. It’s just a shame that Oracle was so short-sighted.

I had the strangest dream last night. I was teaching French at a Catholic school, but I was neither French nor Catholic. The students were nuns, and they weren’t paying any attention to me, just taking turns sitting on the desks and pushing each other around around the room.

RavenCon is over. Sunday is generally slow at cons, and today was no exception. Even so, I enjoyed the panels I sat in on. I don’t have any final thoughts, really. I think it went pretty well.

Favorite thing at RavenCon 2011 that had nothing to do with me: pretty young women in corsets. (Yeah, so sue me.)

End of the day Saturday, and I think it’s gone pretty well. I was able to sit in on a few panels, and that was fun, because they were panels I thought up and I wanted to hear people talk about them. Superheroes and the law, for example. There was only one serious hiccup today, when an equipment delay caused a filk to run late, which caused the next filk to run late, which caused the next panel to run late…

This actually wasn’t a big deal, due to some quick thinking by the affected panelists, who came up with a feasible solution. I mean, yes, we had people hanging out in the hallway for 30 minutes, and the delays in the panels almost certainly made someone miss a panel or performance they wanted to see, but it could have been considerably worse.

Now, I made a point of putting nearly all of the presentations in one room, and all of the filk in another, hopefully to prevent this kind of situation. I think next year I will make an even greater effort to restrict all audiovisual programming to one room. The time it takes to break down and move the equipment is just too long. I’ll also move the filk related programming to a larger room next year. The room I was told to put the filk in was too small for the audiences.

Other than that, there were no major issues. People got to where they needed to be, when they needed to be there, and for the most part the equipment got there as well.

I am a trifle disappointed in the parties. That’s kind of a mean thing to say, because the parties I was able to find were held by very nice people and had a great selection of drinks and goodies. But still, there were only maybe 2.5 parties total this evening, and 1.5 of those shut down before midnight. RavenCon is just not a party con.

I had a weird experience when I decided to call it a night and head back to my room. The doorway to the hallway our room is on was blocked by eight or so teenage girls, sitting around playing cards. When I walked up, intended to step gingerly through them and on my way, one of them informed me that this area was off limits, and “girls only”.

“Well, my room is down that hall,” I said. “Do you mind if I go to it?”

“No, it’s not,” the girl assured me. I was not sure whether to be annoyed or amused. I had never encountered a situation quite like this, and wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it. I was just baffled.

“This is the fourth floor,” another girl added in a haughty tone. I looked at the numbers on the nearby door, and son of a gun if she wasn’t right. Whoops.

“Oh, wow. I’m on the wrong floor,” I said. “Sorry, sorry.” And I sheepishly headed back to the elevator, wondering how I’d ended up on the fourth floor, despite my being almost completely sober.

Which just goes to show, teenage girls still have the ability to make me feel like an idiot. Some things never change.

Friday night’s programming is complete, and I think it went pretty well. For those who came in late, I scheduled programming for RavenCon 2011. This included coming up with panel ideas, contacting guests to ask them to volunteer for panels or suggest new ones, and scheduling the panels so that the whole schedule would be full for people who pay to come to the con.

It’s only Friday, but so far it’s gone really well. Nearly all of our guests responding to my emails in a timely manner, and all but one eventually responded with the names of panels they would like to participate in. As far as guest response goes, it’s gone better than I expected.

As a lark, I participated in a riff of Star Crash, Mystery Science Theater style, with Rob Floyd of Team Fantasmo. I had fun doing it, we had a pretty good crowd, and they seemed to have fun, too. That pleased me.

There has really only been one blemish on the weekend so far, and that’s the aforementioned guest who never replied to any of the nine or so emails I sent them. I still have not heard from this person, but two other people have come to me all aflutter asking why that person is not on more panels. Well, the fact is that person is on four panels (suggested by other guests who said they would be sharing the panel with this noncommunicative guest: the artist who did his book covers, for example). They are also featured in an interview (which was my idea), making five.

So: five panels, which is 20% more than the minimum I aimed for. If this guest wanted to be on more panels, they would have said so. Frankly, I have little sympathy for anyone who complains to me about it. If they want to complain, they should go complain to the person who never responded to their email.

Other than this extremely minor hiccup, Friday went really well. One or two panels had an excessive number of panelists, and one panel had no one in the audience, but this sort of thing is bound to happen. I learned a lot from this year, and next year will have fewer occurrences like this.

I consider Friday a success.

A friend took me to see Sucker Punch this evening. I do not think it is a bad movie. I think it is a sad movie, and that the middle hour or so is empty and pointless (literally, sound and fury signifying nothing). Fun to look at, but lacking any meaning or purpose, on any level.

I think Sucker Punch had one layer too many fantasy worlds. I would have liked it better had the movie been without the “asylum” reality or without the “bordello/prison” reality. The thing is, I think a movie that took place in the asylum would have been more interesting than the movie that took place in the bordello/prison.

So basically it starts like A Series Of Unfortunate Events, fills up the middle with the most expensive (and meaningless) parts of the Matrix sequels, and then ends like One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

You might consider that a spoiler, but it isn’t. The ending of the movie is shown very plainly about ten minutes in. Everything in between is just killing time.

In the context of people using fantasy to escape a horrible situation, I think Brazil is better (and has a less obvious ending).

So: bad? No. But not great, and not memorable. I liked the soundtrack, though.

Back in 2006, I gave up editing Wikipedia, primarily because it was just too frustrating fighting the lunatic fringe. At the time, I was dealing with nutcases who simply kept putting their nutcase fantasies into articles, and I was just exhausted dealing with them. However, that isn’t the only problem with Wikipedia. Another problem with Wikipedia is that there is a small minority of editors who take it as their mission to eviscerate Wikipedia and make it as small as possible.

I simply do not understand this type of editor. I never have. I have encountered them, and it’s equal parts baffling and saddening. These are people who either just don’t get Wikipedia, or are actively trying to destroy it.

Rob Balder, of Erfworld fame, recently brought to light a recent example of this phenomenon.

Finished the RavenCon schedule. Not difficult, but more time consuming than I expected. I learned a lot, though. I can do it in half the time next year. Here is how not to do it.

Hexographer and Dungeonographer received major updates a week or two ago. If you’ve used either tool since then, you’ve probably noticed the changes.

Both tools received layout changes which reduced the number of menu items by placing buttons for many of those features in panels dedicated to those features. For example, the ability to add custom map items is now a button on the map items tab/toolbox.

There were a great many other changes, as well. You can read more about it at the Inkwell Ideas web site.

If you want a great deal on a 10″ tablet that beats the socks off of, well, anything else under $800 or more, head over to Woot. Today they have the Viewsonic G for $280, which is a great deal. It’s currently $370 on Amazon.

I have one of these and I love it. Buy it, go to xda-developers.com and install the TnTLite or Vegan ROM, and you are good to go. Working Google Market, Flash, wifi internet, the whole shebang.

Yes, you need to be a little bit of a techie to flash the ROM, but it’s not rocket science. If you can copy a file to a mini SD card, you can do it.

I have heard some people complain about “viewing angle”. I don’t know what they are talking about. The screen is gorgeous. I have no trouble seeing it. Personally, I think that’s “user error”. (Hint: the screen is the side with the shiny glass.)

And no, it does not dual boot anything: it runs Android. Awesome, awesome Android.

This is a great deal. I am tempted to buy a second one.

I feel a bit bad about putting this in the “Music” category. It does qualify, in a “no accounting for taste” sort of way.

Here I am, trying to wrap up a project that I am, I admit, more than a little behind on. (I have good reasons for that, but it’s gotten ridiculous, and I really need to get this done.) Anyway, so here I am, making a good faith effort to catch up on this, and I get sent this:

It’s a deceptively catchy tune, but not quite catchy enough to conceal the truly awful lyrics.

“Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today is Friday, Friday
Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes afterwards.”

It’s almost surreal in its sheer awfulness.

“We so excited.”

Indeed.