arvino’s posterous

Group photo taken on OpenOffice Conference 2008, Beijing.
 
"Document format and platform-of-innovation shall always belong to the people, for the use of the people, for the benefit of the people.
Through that we can preserve the continuous seed of innovation, and contribute our effort towards the betterness and advancement of our greater society as a whole."
 
-arv

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Recently Google just released a built-in PDF viewer for Gmail. I gave the feature a try. The result is magnificently awesome!

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The Romulans attack the Federation for they can’t read the Peace Treaty sent to them in Word 2307 format… they only have Word 2303. A hilarious cartoon by Geek and Poke. Joke? Perhaps … or not.
 
How many files, documents and paper that you composed during your university days (or a couple of years ago), which now -- suprisingly -- become unreadable?
How many files, documents and paper that you compose today (which you already keep, backup, copy, store very very carefully these days) yet -- unexpectedly -- would/might/may become unreadable soon (or later into the future) ??
 
This is exactly the reason why open document format (ODF) is important. ODF ensure content can be read, no matter when, where and what type of tool you use to create it. It ensure content can be read no matter what type of tool you use to read it -- today, and into the future.
In that retrospect, that's where OpenOffice becomes relevant and important. It ensures ownership of the content (and its format) belongs back to the user, and not being 'proprietarily trapped' inside the silos of particular companies, nor company.
 
OpenOffice fully embrace ODF concept since day 1. Microsoft Office until today is not. People need to make the right strategic choices in regards with such. It's people that shall be the owner of their digital content, at all time. Never companies, nor company, after all!
 
It's content -- not tools -- that is really important, and truly matters.

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To the words: "Developers ... developers ...", we answer: "Open ... Open ...".

Fundamental change is required. Crucial format and standard shall belong to community and society, not just to few companies. Innovation capability shall (again) belongs to everybody.

Open system does not necessarily mean open source. Open system reflects on idea of systems that conform to a common global standard (which owned by the people), systems that connect and 'talk' each other (in full conformity to global format and standard which belongs and owned by global society), systems that enables innovation to flourish once more around the globe -- wherever the best ideas born and develop -- without boundary.

It would be beautiful if -- one day -- both aspiration can be combined: DEVELOPERS fully adopting OPEN standard in their 'arsenal'.

The danger of monopolistic-ownership of world-global-standard (by one or few companies) shall be over. No company shall own internet standard, doc format, xls format, office format, bits and bytes -- which increasingly becoming fundamental fabric of our digital living and networked society today -- and even more importantly into the future. These all shall belong to the people. Without such, world's innovation capability will be halted, world's knowledge asset could be seriously threated, and our world's progress as digital living society could be jammed.

Social (and crucial) internet/document/data-interchange standards (HTML, Office Documents, XML, etc) shall belong (back) to the people.

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DataViz, makers of Documents To Go, a Microsoft Office editor app for mobile devices, has confirmed that they are developing an application for the iPhone. The application would allow for editing of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on your iPhone, or, presumably, your iPod Touch. According to a company representative, the application will likely be available in early 2009.

This would be awesome! This would make iPhone or iPod touch the 'smallest workable portable computer', ever invented.

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