Belgian government choses Open Document as standard

The government of Belgium ahead of any nation chose to have Open Office their standard and official software instead of Microsoft’s Office Suit. This decision came after the Open Document format was ratified by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) ahead of Microsoft’s XML format that probably needs to wait still some years to get the same rate as OD.

This is a great news for freebee lovers, as I am. I don’t really buy softwares because usually all paying software has a free alternative. I pay only for Windows operating system because I don’t get along with Linux. And I paid for Vegas Video software because there was no really good free alternative for video editing and production. The rest is all freeware. I have a bunch of them and with most of them I am very satisfied. They served me well thoughout the years.

In US, the Obama administration also asked about the benefits of open source software in governmental institutes, but I don’t know if they adopted it as Belgium did. Anyway, Belgian people shook down the mess from the freeware and through a cake into the face of the old age Microsoft Office standard. And that’s great news. I also use Open Office myself for years and I’m just satisfied with it. The software had some lacks of features and their look was not as Word or Excel. This changed over the year as they partnered up with Sun Microsystems and  their latest version is not far from Microsoft Office’s usability and look.

Tipd.com moderator discussion continues..

When I first emailed you, I noted that you submitted 5 stories all from your domain. I emailed you about the 2 Zemanta submissions and noticed that you had also submitted 3 more stories from your domain introducing your blog as a design blog and another submission entitled “Hello World!” (which in case you didn’t realize, both have no relevance to Business or Finance).

I sent you a polite warning to not submit your sites as such and you took this as an argument. We strive to provide good content to our users and you are clearly polluting the site with only your own submissions. FULL ARTICLE +

Open Source and freeware because it is protected?

I just again was curious so I checked out a link called CiteULike. I found it still at the touchscreen section of my reading tour. “Accidentally” I hovered over the share button and then I was keen on checking what’s there – somehow I’m really doing this collecting as many social sharing sites in order to boost my traffic, though I did not have yet much boost. Anyway, I checked CiteULike what I met already once and at that time I decided to leave out from my social networking bookmarking or how to say, sites. It’s an awful design and – I design websites – as you may know it for now… So as I gave it another chance I clicked on the browse button to see what’s in and I found this: FULL ARTICLE +