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kevin@ank.com was there last night when "Max Lanfranconi of the OpenOffice project spoke to the Silicon Valley Linux User Group on Wednesday morning's release 6.0 of the LGPL'd office suite. When the project was opened two years ago, it was missing online help, spell-checking, and printing which had been based on proprietary commercial libraries. With release 6 the open source community has replaced these missing features." Read on for some more information on the new release, courtesy of Kevin.Update: 10/04 22:11 GMT by T : Several readers have pointed out that the 6.0 release is actually the beta of StarOffice 6.0. Though StarOffice is based on OpenOffice code, there's not actually a new build of OpenOffice yet. OpenOffice's is currently at build 638.

"Release 6 also gets rid of the old Star Office desktop of version 5 which was generally disliked for its annoying tendency to cover up all of the other windows you were working with and make it difficult to interact with your X Window Manager.

The application suite has programable APIs for each of the applications, exposed through a custom object request broker named UNO. In an impressive demonstration, Max showed live update of a spreadsheet with real-time stock data, all under the control of a small Java application. Changed data were reflected throughout the spreadsheet table with each update as the sheet recalculated each cell based on the new input.

Max freely admits that there are still weaknesses in the code. He pointed to the ten year lifespan of the mostly C++ code base, and hopes to see the code improved with the use of more modern C++ features. In browsing through the source tree I don't find that the code is in nearly as bad shape as Max portrayed it. Admittedly I've only seen a tiny fraction of the code (at 3.7 million lines, OpenOffice is by far the largest open source project in the world), but my random sampling showed very good coding practises, like preprocessor guards around each header include to reduce compile time due to reopening headers that have already been processed. Even with these measures in place however, the full system takes upwards of 15 hours and 1.5GB of disk to build on currently available hardware.

System load time for the office suite has been significantly reduced (about 20s on Max's 500MHz laptop with 128MB memory) by removing several libraries from the link process and instead loading them on demand. Over the next year or more Max hopes to see more modularization of the code base with the eventual goal of seperating the monolithic program into seperate applications linked together through an object request broker.

Q&A went on until we got kicked out of our room, so there is a lot more that is new about OpenOffice than I've described here. If you are interested you can pick up a copy at OpenOffice.org, or at one of its mirrors around the world."

Chris DiBona, a man of many titles (Linux Community Evangelist, VA Linux Systems; President, Silicon Valley Linux Users Group; Grant Chair, Linux International) passed to us this reminder that for all the (occasionally legitimate) claims of standards compliance out of Redmond, subtly breaking standards in the name of "improvement" can be far worse than more blatant attempts. Hint: supplanting ASCII is a bad idea. (More below.)

Chris writes: " So here's an interesting feature from our friends at MicroSoft. They've decided that Outlook 2000 users by default really don't want to communicate with the rest of the world, preferring to communicate only with other OL2000 users.

Now, while I don't have any problem with people extending the content of an e-mail with attachments, i.e. sending html-ized version and v.cards, it seems downright stupid to make the default behavior of ol2000 to send it's e-mail only in MS's proprietary TNEF format.

Now, It's clear that they've had some support calls on this, as proven by this KB Entry. So that means that they caught some flak for it. But they haven't changed it.

Fun Quotes from the KB entry:

• In addition to the receiving client, it is not uncommon for a mail server to strip out TNEF information from mail messages as it delivers them. If a server option to remove TNEF is turned on, clients will always receive a plain text version of the message. Microsoft Exchange Server is an example of a mail server application that has the option to remove TNEF from messages.

This means in essence that unless you are using a 'TNEF Aware' server -- like, say, hmm, MS Exchange -- you may not be able to read your mail. I may be reading a bit much into this paragraph, but it seems to me that this paragraph says 'if your friends can't get your email, it's their servers fault, not yours.'

And to take this the further, go join the EFF if you haven't already, step, suppose somone were to circumvent the protections on the TNEF format and write a program that could understand it, would you be liable under the DMCA section on anti-circumvention? Admittedly, I'd be surprised if MS took this route, but it's worth considering every single time you think about decoding proprietary formats. Does this mean strings is now a circumvention tool?

Anyhow, if there are any microsofties out there, do the right thing and cut down your support costs by making ascii the ol2000 default transmission behavior for text. And for anyone using Outlook 2000, you should switch to a program that your friends can actually recieve email from. Or at least shut off that option."

Open Source community members breathed a sigh of relief at 4:50 PST today when Santa Clara County Judge William J. Elfving rejected the DVD Copy Control Association's request for a temporary restraining order that would keep Web Sites from linking to information about DeCSS.

Open Source community members breathed a sigh of relief at 4:50 PST today, as Santa Clara Judge William J. Elfving rejected DVD Copy Control Association, Inc.'s request for a restraining order.

Robert Jones was Defendant #15 in the filing, and he shared his thoughts after hearing the decision:

"It's good to hear that some sort of sanity won today. I'm sure we're all very appreciative to the EFF and everyone else who showed up to help and advise. I wish to personally thank, especially, all the lawyers who volunteered their advice and services pro bono to the defendants. There is still the hearing on the 14th, so the war is far from over, but the first battle has been won."

In the middle of the day, SVLUG President Chris DiBona called in, letting us know what happened after the courtroom's doors opened this morning:

"The courtroom opened up, we all filed in. we had about 50 people in there, two reporters inside, two waiting outside. [The Plaintiffs are] claiming it's a trade secret thing. They're claiming that to get the Z-key, they had to click on a license agreement. There's no reason why that's true. They inserted their arguments and they said that the hacker in Norway had to use the player, sign the agreement, and therefore it's an illegal thing. There's a law on the books in California that says if you publish a trade secret that is known to be stolen, or could only become available through theft, you have an obligation not to continue with the distribution of the trade secret."

Daniel Silveira, a student at San Jose State University, was also in the courtroom. He said:

"The expression on the judge's face looked rather enlightened when the point was made that you don't need the encryption key in order to make illegal copies of movies or DVD discs."

According to an E-mail we received from Defendant Andrew Bunner, there is no question that Allon Levy, Robin Gross and the rest of the team from the Electronic Frontier Foundation made major contributions to the good fight, but this was a strong community effort. Some of the characteristic playfulness of the community came through during the plaintiff's testimony; when the plaintiff's attorney tried to assert that DeCSS's only purpose was to promote piracy, the gallery laughed out loud.

Hopefully, the community will be able to stage yet another fantastic show on January 14th, the day slated for the hearing during which the DVD CCA will try to get a permanent restraining order preventing Web sites from publishing information about DeCSS.

The time between the recess and the judgment trudged on, as concerned Open Source community members everywhere waited impatiently. Many were hoping for a decision earlier in the afternoon, especially those in Europe who were staying up late to hear the decision.

Fortunately, those who went to sleep before the Judge made his decision will wake up to good news tomorrow. The never-ending war for the recognition of free speech in source code has won a battle today, while championing the efforts of Open Source aficionados the world over.

To be continued January 14th...

Marc Merlin writes "I put a quick web page with a report of the event, along with pictures I took. More updates and info are available on the main svlug page" Looked like a lot of fun. I don't think MS is opening a branch in Sticksville, MI any time soon, so I'll just wish I was in CA... *grin*.

The SVLUG, as usual, has all the really cool Linux events. Anyway, for those of you out there (and for that matter, for those of you who aren't out there, but are looking for your own ides ;) they are having a Tea Party at the opening of the new Silicon Valley MS office. They'll be wearing shirts, passing out CDs, and maybe someone will cover that RMS track that was on all the charts awhile back. It's tonight, so if you're out there, hurry. Thanks to Chris DiBona for letting us know.

Our network of informants let us in on this: Linus was recently interviewed by Boot Magazine, but the interview was only available in the print edition until now. Check out the interview. It's one of the best I've read in a long time. Also, Christopher Blizzard (a truly cool man) wrote in to remind us about the (free) conference between Linus and other prominent figures in the Linux community tomorrow. It will be held in Santa Clara, California, and will be hosted by The Sillicon Valley Linux User's Group.

This link has been coming in all day, so I figured I just had no choice but to share it. The SVLUG will be celebrating the Win98 launch in their Own Special Way. Specifically, by building a rocket using Win98 CDs as fins, and launching it. There be strange folks out there ladies gentleman. Wish I could make it. Oh, and the web page clearly states that they will not be detonating the rocket during flight, or launching it sideways. Too bad.

Nick Moffitt writes "Taos Mountain and The Silicon Valley Linux User Group will be hosting a talk on The Future of Linux on July 14th. Panelists include: Linus Torvalds, Robert Hart, Larry Augustin, and Jeremy Allison. " Why is it that the cool stuff always happens in CA? Oh, wait. Nevermind. I remember.

Jorge G. S. wrote in to remind everyone that tonight (April 1) Marc Andreessen will be at the SVLUGto talk about the release of Communicator Source Code. And this isn't an April Fools day thing *grin*. Just another example of why I need to move somewhere cooler than Sticksville, MI.

Chris DiBona wrote in to say "Linus Torvalds will be appearing wednesday March 4th at the monthly meeting of the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group (http://www.svlug.org) See the web page for more details!"