Few weeks ago I forecasted a server-side office suite provided by Google or Yahoo! in less than one year calling it AjaxOffice. I took 6 minutes to register the project on Sourceforge and few days ago it got approuved. So we now have a AjaxOffice project on Sourceforge. The project description starts with:
AjaxOffice: A complete office suite usable via your browser. Your documents are safely stored on a server so that you don’t have to worry about backups and you can access them from every computer in the world!
AJAX OFFICE is to Microsoft Office what GMail (Google Mail) is to Microsoft OutLook
Or the free software version: AJAX OFFICE is to OpenOffice what GMail (Google Mail) is to Mozilla Thunderbird.
In case you are interested in the project, check the project and send me an email to phauly AT users DOT sourceforge DOT net.

What Business Can Learn from Open Source (and blogging) (This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.)
So these, I think, are the three big lessons open source and blogging have to teach business: (1) that people work harder on stuff they like, (2) that the standard office environment is very unproductive, and (3) that bottom-up often works better than top-down.
One of his point is that the emerging investor-investee (horyzontal) relationship is much better than the employer-employee (vertical) relationship. It is much better from everyone’s point of view: the one receiving the money (was employee / is investee [*]) works on stuff she likes and choosed and hence she works more and with greater joy and productivity, the one spending the money (was employer / is investor or founder funder) gets more return of investment and has to care less about keeping the other part productive. It is probably better also for society at large: it is better to have a country of people happy about what they are doing and feeling like they are doing something worthy. From client-server architecture to peer-to-peer also in economy!
[*] I think there is a typo in the essay: he writes “the investor-founder relationship” and, if I’m not wrong, investor and founder are synonyms. I made up the word “investee” for the one receiveing the money but it is probably not the correct word.
UPDATE: thanks to the comment of Francesco, I understood that there was no typo. The correct word is “founder” (as Paul writes) and represents the one who receives the money and founds the company. I confuse “founder” with “funder”. Thanks Francesco!

Ross reports that Jimmy at the Wikimania conference (I should be there!) has presented his list of 10 things that should be free (free as in free speech and not as in free beer).
One of the most asked question (I guess) is “There are people that are living selling what will become free. How will those people survive?”. A point I liked a lot from the Q&A session is “It’s not up to us to answer the question of what happens to the candle makers with the invention of electric lighting.“. Read the all post and ask yourself “why I’m not there?”.

According to Groklaw, Microsoft has filed for a patent on the smiley face. Yes, the emoticon. I have no word for commenting this, I let Donald Knuth, author of “The Art of Programming, doing it:
My personal opinion is that algorithms are like mathematics, i.e. inherently non-patentable. It worries me that most patents are about simple ideas that I would expect my students to develop them as part of their homework. Sometimes there are exceptions, e.g. something as refined as the inner point method of linear programming, where one can really talk about a significant discovery. Yet for me that is still mathematics.
I come from a mathematical culture where we don’t charge money from people who use our theorems. There is the notion that mathematics is discovered rather than invented. If something was already there, how you patent it?
I cannot wait till the day micro$oft will be just history: “do you remember that global monopoly called microsoft?” “which one, the one that tried to patent emoticons?” “yes that one, when did it run out of business? was in 2007, right?” …

In February 2005, Roberto Di Cosmo gave a presentation at my University about “Free Software and Public Administration” (I commented on it at that time). Now, thanks to the work of Marco Cova, the video of that presentation is available on archive.org. Check also the slides of that talk or the collection of his other slides. Di Cosmo’s final point is that the Public Administration is not a big enterprise but that it has specific needs and these needs mandate that the Public Administration chooses Free Software (ALSO if it costs more that proprietary software). His presentation was wonderful, full of real and convincing examples and very very clear: just imagine that he was able to explain to a non-techy audience a concept such as “a compiler used to compile the compiler”!
The talk was in Italian so, if you don’t know it, can you imagine a better reason for learning it than watching this video? ;-)

Some students at Politecnico di Torino translated in Italian TheOpenCD: quality open source for Windows. You can download the Italian version of TheOpenCD. You can also appreciate what you would see if you insert the CD in a Windows machine (open in a new window) and play with the programs (see screenshots, descriptions, installations, …). Letting Windows users understand what Free Software is and how much it is successful is a first step for having them fully embrace a totally free operating system as well. Keep spreading!

I received few days ago 300 CDs from UbuntuLinux (see photos on Flickr).
Our initial idea (as LinuxTrent) was to distribute these CDs in the Fair Trade Shops in Trentino along with TheOpenCD translated in Italian (see project, in Italian). However, there will be a fair in Trento called Fa’ la cosa giusta (Do the right thing), 4-6 november 2005, and we are probably going to distribute the CDs in that occasion. I just wanted to let you know that you can order Ubuntu Linux CDs at shipit.ubuntulinux.org and that this can be a good way to reach people that are not likely to cross their ways with Free Software (and alternatives). Happy spreading!

My little forecast: I think that in less than one year there will be a Suite Office usable “inside” your browser, entirely written in Javascript and AJAX, using the DOM model of XHTML.

UPDATE: AjaxOffice is now on sourceforge.

UPDATE My office mate told me that there are already many Free Software HTML text editors such as FckEditor, TinyMCE (longer list at HTMLArea). So I guess we just need Google (or Yahoo!) to provide the service and the possibility to store files on their disks. END OF UPDATE

Many usable pieces are already there (usually as Free Software javascript libraries): toolbar, menubar, drag-and-drop, edit-in-place, window, resize images.
What is peculiar is that
– writing this suite is not too complicated
– there are so many people (thousands or more) with enough skills for easily doing it
Using “release early, release often” phylosophy and a Free Software licence (such as GPL), we could have a big number of hackers working all together at the “Ajax Office”, adding functionalities, correcting bugs, …
You can easily imagine that having a reliable Office Suite that works inside your browser is a great opportunity for normal users (who will need Microsoft Office? but also OpenOffice…).
But you can also imagine having Google (or Yahoo! or another big player) offering the Ajax Office interface AND the ability to keep your files on their disks and access/modify/print them from every computer in the world just via a browser. And not having to bother with backups. Similar to what happens now with Gmail (almost infinite storage for your emails and the ability to access it via any computer just with a browser). Jeremy already thinks that Gmail is faster and better than Thunderbird (desktop email program). I think one of its next posts will be “Ajax Office (or Goffice) is better than Microsoft Office (and OpenOffice)”. [Oh yes, there are huge privacy issues.]
Anyway that would be killer! A totally new way to use computers and the web. And I want to see Microsoft shares that day! I’m just dreaming or is it a reasonable forecast? My bet is for the second. So, I see you here in less than one year.