OpenOffice.org is the leading international office suite that runs on all major platforms and offers open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.

It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office, and the vendor-neutral OpenDocument standard from OASIS. Governments around the world are looking at moving towards Open Document Format.

Available in over 65 supported languages with more being constantly added by the community, OpenOffice.org has an estimated 40 million users.

Louis Suarez-Potts is the community manager of OpenOffice.org.

Marshall:

Can you explain to our readers just what it means to say that open
standards are democratic?

Louis:

It's tempting to answer that with another question, What do you mean
by democratic? but I'll help a little by phrasing the problem as
question of how we envision civil society to be structured and what
we understand to be the responsibility of government. I'll touch on
the issue of civil society first.

Wikipedia neatly defines civil society as, "the totality of
voluntary civic and social organizations or institutions which form
the basis of a functioning society as opposed to the force-backed
structures of a state (regardless of that state's political
system)." Civil society is the domain of the middle classes,
those who have essentially unfettered access to their nation's
intellectual wealth. And that broad reach, which abets free
commercial exchange and a politics of freedom and community, depends
upon the consensual stabilization of technologies of communication,
among other things. Put another way, if everyone is using a
different modality of communication, like a different operating
system or different telephone systems or different file formats, then
civil society fragments and is in danger of disappearing altogether,
and with it, much of the overall wealth of the nation.

Open standards, whether related to electrical outlets or train tracks
or file formats encourages but does not determine the growth of civil
society: people are able to communicate without encountering the
artificial borders that technological Babel--incompatibility--introduces,
an example of which we saw recently in New Orleans where because of
the different formats used by walki-talkies, communication among
rescue personnel was exceedingly difficult. if the government had
mandated the use of an open standard, rescuing drowning or isolated
people would have been a lot easier, I am sure. But the virtues of
open standards go beyond emergency situations. Open standards lead to
lower cost through the establishment of level playing fields and
through the encouragement of a real market that responds to real
needs - not artificial desires. And this can lead to a healthier
democracy, or rule by the people, who are no longer isolated by the
strictures of branding. Otherwise you are left with an effective
oligarchic system, or rule by a few groups for their own benefit.

All users of Microsoft products, for instance, are able to
communicate but those outside of the MS perimeter--those who cannot
afford to buy into it, say, or who have chosen not to--are
effectively silenced and politically and economically
disenfranchised. The problem becomes more acute when we consider
government or more generally public sector use of proprietary
standards. Say a government office like the Environmental Protection
Agency creates all its documents using MS Office. Some of these are
public documents and thus the property, as it were, of the tax-paying
citizenry. But if the documents are in MS Office file format, then
there is a problem of access: many citizens cannot afford MS Office,
as it is very expensive. What the government has done is create
public property that is anything but public and it is requiring
people to buy into a private company's goods. An analogue would be
having to rent an expensive car to visit a public office, and just as
that is unacceptable, so is the idea of the government or any public
sector office using proprietary applications to produce files that
are by their very nature discriminatory.

It gets worse. Any format that is proprietary is virtually
guaranteed to fail the proof of time. By this I mean the simple fact
that with proprietary or monopoly-sponsored formats, what is legible
today is not necessarily legible 50 years from today. Things change,
technology evolves, companies go out of business and before you know
it, the novel you wrote 15 years ago and with it all the documents
from that period, is now lost forever. Why? Because the company who
made your word processor is no more, taking with it the application
you used to create the things, and guess what, the format was
proprietary and not at all a standard.

With open standards, that is standards maintained by impartial bodies
and widely implemented, this nightmare I describe is not relevant.
Compatibility across time is ensured because the format will not be
subject to the caprices of the market but rather will be supported by
applications both open and not. The files you create today will be
legible well into the future.

Okay, so open standards are good. But to make the process *really*
democratic, you also need a free and freely available application.
Otherwise, you have democracy in name alone and not in practice.
OpenOffice.org, KOffice, are two applications that meet that
requirement: free and they use the ODF. [Open Document Format]

Marshall:

Why is this of sufficient importance for nonprofit organizations
when, in the Global North at least, Microsoft Office is so close to
ubiquitous?

Louis:

It's important for all, as the point is to ensure ease of
communication. But a nonprofit is in a delicate position. Not only
must it spend its money wisely and be accountable, it must often also
produce files that are designed to be available to a large public.
It makes, that is, public documents. And using proprietary formats,
even formats that are ubiquitous (or nearly), and even those that
pretend to be "open"" (but are not quite there and would still require a large outlay of money to read them or edit them), undermines the very point of public openness and the nonprofit ethos. Once, this
didn't matter as much: we used typewriters or even wrote things by
hand. For a short period, from the early 90s to about now, we've
relied on a single vendor, but there are real options now that allow
us to read and edit all that we have previously created while saving
it and new material in a format that is truly public.

Marshall:

You've said elsewhere that when it comes to the spread of free and
open source software, it's advance cannot be taken for granted and
that ""cold realism is better than hot romance." What are some of the most important things that can be considered within this approach by a. organizations and b. FOSS [Free and Open Source Software] advocates?

Louis:

Until some time last year, well before the point when the NY _Times_
wrote that Linux was no longer a gee-whiz kind of thing (everyone
else had already figured this out--simply counting the suits at
LinuxWorld was a good enough indicator), FOSS was attracting a lot of
attention on the strength of its apparent novelty; shortcomings were
forgiven. But now that FOSS, as a production and marketing strategy,
and Linux, as a particular instance that has been heavily
commoditized, are normal and increasingly accepted as obvious
alternatives to established software by small companies, enterprises,
governments, and individuals, a different strategy comes into play.
It's absurd now to rely on the pure interest [enthusiasm] of geeks--not that one ever did, especially outside the U.S.

Essentially, we are now competing directly with Microsoft and other
established software companies; we are no longer just a niche player.
What's more, the competition is complex. On the one hand,
applications like OpenOffice.org and its derivatives compete head to
head with Microsoft Office for the same markets. That we are gaining
hugely at Microsoft's expense is a testament to the quality of the
application and also to the amazing ability Microsoft has so amply
demonstrated to fail and fail again at responding to what people need
and want. On the other, we are programmatically undermining the
economic structure that Microsoft silently set up over the last
fifteen years, the one where there is one vendor providing the
application, services and support, and enhancing it with a more open
market.

I write "enhancing" instead of "replacing" because we are not set on so radically changing a contractual model right now. In fact, I've been acting to form consortia of FOSS groups that could insinuate themselves into the single-vendor model. But FOSS is intrinsically a freer system and links to a necessarily more open market--that's its promise and its virtue--so changes are inevitable, if not
immediately. The most obvious change could be that one company or
project provides the application, the other support; another
training, a third services, and so on. What it will require from
buyers is more involvement, and this could be risky, if the buyers
lack enough information and if they are seen as vulnerable to monied
lobbying--as inevitably they will be (think of doctors today vs big
pharma reps).

So, dealing with these more or less banal market forces is now a fact
of FOSS. We see some of this in the very dubious reports that are
spit out from time to time about the supposed costs of Linux and
other FOSS products, and in other veiled attacks by the establishment
on the supposedly insuperable methodologies and grandiose aims of
FOSS (for the record, FOSS has no exact methodology; it is radically
pragmatic).

But, in counterpoint, I remain pretty optimistic while still being a
cold realist that not only can FOSS overcome the expected attacks by
the obvious dinosaurs of proprietary software but can and will also
mobilize new ways of creating and distributing software that is made
by the people who use it for the people who use it and not by remote
hegemonic enterprises--who must first and foremost satisfy their
equally remote shareholders.

Marshall:

What are Open Office's priorities in terms of internationalization
and language support?

Louis:

OpenOffice.org is a community project: its goals, especially in the
field of localization and internationalization, are the community's,
which in plain speaking, is to say that there are two parts to this
answer. First: to make it easy to localize OOo. [Open Office.org] We have taken great strides in this direction, and the community has responded: there are now probably over 70 localizations (I lost count) and that number is bound to grow as the process is streamlined....

...And also as more communities join in. The second part is thus
reaching out to communities throughout the world. Charles Schulz, the
lead of the Native Language Confederation, and I, have made it a
mission to bring in as many groups as possible, especially those
groups who have been historically "orphaned" by software companies because they do not embody a market.

But FOSS works on the principle of community interest as well as the
market, and there is lots of community interest (and even markets,
albeit small, for now) for localizations not only in languages that
to me are wonderfully exotic, like Xhosa, or Swahili, but also all
the horribly marginalized indigenous languages of the world, in North
and South America, Australia, Japan, China, Asia. All these, if they
can be represented in unicode, can be included in our repertory.
What matters is getting the communities--by which I include local
businesses and governments--to make the effort to localize OOo to
their language.

And as I mentioned, that is happening now and its just really
started. I'm trying now to get speakers of North American indigenous
languages to work with us, especially those in Canada, where I live.
Beautiful and ancient American languages exist but if you use these
in writing you are barred from so much because of the great lack of
applications localized to them. OOo is changing that. To wax a little
oratorical: I believe we are giving speech to those silenced.

Marshall:

Though Open Office is free, what kinds of support and service
contracts do organizations commonly enter into and how widely
available are contractors for these purposes?

Louis:

Most organizations enter into fairly standard support contracts. We
list options on our Support page (http://support.openoffice.org/),
and these include professional, for fee support (offered by Sun and
others) and also free, community support. For enterprises and public
sector orgs., other companies may offer support that are not listed
here, like Novell.

The contractors and companies are globally available. It is a fatal
myth that FOSS has no support: OOo has tons, and most of it is very
good indeed.

Marshall:

What role does documentation play in Open Office's activities?

Louis:

Depends on what you mean by documentation. We have a huge
Documentation Project--http://documentation.openoffice.org/--and it
houses an enormous quantity of end user material, including how-tos,
guides, etc. All this work is free to download. The role it plays
is quite important in fleshing out users' experience of OOo. What's
more much of this work is available in dozens of languages. Our
Native Language Confederation projects have been busy indeed, and
have created or translated guides in a user's native tongue.

Marshall:

Based on an interview you performed and posted on the Open Office site (with Jacqueline Rahemipour, Lead, German Language Project) I gather that you have some thoughts about the role of women in the open source community. Could you share some of those with us?

Louis:

Well, the topic is an interesting one because women in software
generally represent a far larger percentage than women in FOSS, and
the reasons for this are not obvious, assuming the data are correct.
There are several possible reasons, the most obvious being that few
sane women really want to hang out online with the mythic FOSS
denizen: a geeky, immature, obnoxious and vain guy. In reality,
contemporary FOSS projects are hardly like that at all: OOo, for
instance, prides itself on being friendly to all and on frowning on
immature behaviour, and we are not unique here. So, I think other
issues are at play, and I think that law, as a profession, can give
us some pointers. After all, the law is but another professional
system based on code and is famously adversarial and competitive;
lawyers demand (or at any rate are famous for demanding) not only
smarts but also the ability to stand up for oneself.

At first, as we all know, it was rare to find a woman in a law firm.
That has changed. But what has not changed, as the New York _Times_
recently reported, (19/3/06), is the presence of women partners: it's
still rare. The conclusion of the article was that the inflexible
billable hour structure is hostile not just to women but to men, as
well; but that women, with different familial responsibilities, are
more likely to stop in their trajectory. Now, in FOSS, at least
among voluntary programmers, overwork, incessant work, is par for the
course: it's called having a life. So, this is pure speculation, as I
do not have any real data, but I'd not be surprised if at a certain
point women may be under similar pressures, between life's
responsibilities and online rewards.

But that is assuming a lot and it's also imagining the FOSS woman as
being a pure volunteer. In fact, as the case of OOo illustrates, many
of the people (the majority) working on coding OOo are paid employees
and they work regular hours. OOo has charted new territory here but
it is not alone any longer. FOSS work is effectively industrial and
for many projects, the only real differentiator is the license under
which the code is made available to the public. So, in this modern
case, I'd expect that there will be the same number of women working
on FOSS projects as on proprietary, for there won't be that much of a
difference in work environments.