Ismael's blog

The FOSS Observatory (Observatoire du logiciel libre (french link)) has published a report (the PDF document) concerning the progress of the adoption of some FOSS. Their study is based on the demand of training instead of the number of licenses sold, which is more interesting for this type of software and which allows to measure the interest of companies and administrations for them. This report points out that Openoffice.org use has increased of 30% in one year (2005 to 2006), like linux. The best progression is for MySQL (+50%). For the others: PHP +20% and Java +5%.

The document says:

L’open source, une banalité pour les entreprises. Cette progression du nombre de formations open source est liée au recours de plus en plus systématique des entreprises aux logiciels libres, et à l’arrivée à maturité des éditeurs open source. Dans l’ensemble, les entreprises sont motivées par la plus grande indépendance vis à vis des éditeurs qu’apportent les logiciels libres et l’aspect économique (coût d’acquisition plus faible). Depuis quelques années elles se sont formées et disposent désormais d’un personnel qualifié sur certains outils open source.

Free translation:

Open source, a banality for companies. This progress of the number of training for open source software is due to the more and more systematic use of FOSS in companies, but also to the arrival of mature FOSS. On the whole, companies are motivated by the greater independence towards software editors, which is what FOSS provide. But also for economical reasons (buying costs are lower for FOSS). For few years, they have trained themselves and have now a skilled staff on some FOSS.

The major interest of FOSS is the independence towards editors by open formats and standards compliance. And what is great, is that companies and some (1) administrations start to understand this important thing. For office, as ODF is now an ISO standard, which moreover is open, companies and administrations have to think before using MS Office and OpenXML, its proprietary format. Here, FOSS have a great advantage, and i hope people will understand the importance of standards and switch to FOSS or at least standard compliant softwares.

1: The french department of education considers OpenOffice as a way to have cheaper licenses of MS Office (<40 euros). Here's a link in French which contains the letter of the ministry and an analyse Framablog

Eric Bachard (his blog) found a bug in aqua contextual menus, few weeks ago: images weren't transparent.
I firstly thought it came from native contextual menus implementation as it couldn't come from the CreateWithMask function because menu images were correctly drawn. After some investigations, i found that the AquaSalGraphics::drawAlphaBitmap function (located in salgdi.cxx) was the function used to draw bitmaps for contextual menus but also for toolbars and some images, and this function wasn't implemented. This explains why images weren't transparent. So i decided to implement it. I read the unix implementation of this function to have a starting base.
Once implemented, this function seemed to work. But for some images, i encountered a bug. It concerns images which have an X or Y position in the context which differs from 0. After hard work, i found that the bug came a bit from the current function and mainly from the AquaSalBitmap::CreateWithMask function which is called in drawAlphaBitmap. These two functions didn't work with an X or Y different from 0. I fixed it and here's the result:



Images in toolbar and in contextual menus have now a transparent background

And here are the patches: http://lebasket.free.fr/OOo/20_01_07/

I improved the code of the function AquaSalBitmap::CreateWithMask. The code is now cleaner.

I also wrote doc about this function on my wiki page: i explain how the CreateWithMask function works, i talk about the bug(s) which still exist in AquaSalBitmap::CreateMask (which is, i think, not used now). I also explain how image masks works, and how to use them with the Quartz API.

So here's the updated patch