From an interview with Open Office contributor Louis Suarez-Potts
(oct 25, 2005)

http://madpenguin.org/cms/index.php/?m=show&id=5370&page=2

We support over 50 language projects. And every major Linux distributor is involved in the project, with companies like Novell, Red Hat, Mandriva, Propylon; organizations like Debian, and so on participating in building the code. I'm not even counting the hundreds of independent groups and individuals localizing and porting the source. And now, governments are getting into the act. I feel immensely proud and optimistic when governments like those of Brazil, Massachusetts, Vienna, and parts of the French administrations adopt Openoffice.org, even though I personally have had little to do in making the code. Being part of the community has never felt so good.

CSS and the Monopoly.

Last weekend, I have played with CSS after a while. Testing some advanced features, in SeaMonkey and Firefox, I found several things that work there, but do not work in Internet explorer. Expected. So I started to Google around for how to fix that. I have done that for a few things, spend half of my weekend googling, and suddenly it hit me: At least one of the things I had clearly not working in IE was CSS1. 1996 stuff. Here we are in 2005, and the world is spending incredible amount of energy, resources and time that could be used creatively, to bypass errors that, under normal competitive situation, would have been fixed years and years ago. Of course they rely on the fact that developers will finally only ever develop and test on Internet Explorer, because it is impossible to write code that adheres to standards, and works on Microsoft stuff, and it is twice the time to write stuff that does both. Another facet of how monopoly is bad for us all.