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Wikimedia (the force behind the MediaWiki software that runs Wikipedia and Wikipages) was represented with a booth at SCALE, staffed by Brion Vibber himself. Vibber showed off some of the DVDs and books that have been printed by the German language Wikipedia, which looked great.
Andy Updegrove welcomes Louis Gutierrez to his new post as CIO of Massachusetts.
Updegrove also quotes Computerworld in its welcome:
“Tennant [Don Tennant, the Editor-in-Chief] adds his voice to the growing number of experts, politicians and others that are urging CIOs in other jurisdictions not to be put off by the “tawdry politics” of Massachusetts. Tennant makes this point in his closing paragraph: “With Gutierrez in his new position, other state governments will have any number of reasons to emulate Massachusetts.” So here’s to Louis Gutierrez – may he flourish in his new position, and may he indeed be successful in getting “Massachusetts’ IT priorities back on track.”
PJ of Groklaw interviews the CTO of the French Tax Agency, IT Dept, Jean-Marie Lapeyre. It is an excellent article and clearly shows the real world business case for the use of FOSS.
PJ asks Lapeyre how he first learned about FOSS, and his response is powerful: “When in college, I discovered it and quickly became convinced that behind this philosophy, there is a strong model for mutualization of software costs (design, development and, more important, long-term maintainance), much better than the proprietary model. In fact, it is a realization of knowledge propagation and sharing (better to exchange than to hide).”
PJ also lands the first interview with Peter Quinn since he resigned from Massachusetts’ employ.
The article closes with this Quinn quotation, responding to several of PJ’s questions at once: “I think people are beginning to understand how desktops are being used in the Commonwealth which means that the vast majority of folks are content consumers. They require readers, a robust browser, email and maybe calendaring. Given that reality, it seems to be a blatant waste of the taxpayers’ money to continue to buy MS Office when in fact most people use a very small piece of its functionality. And, as a user of OpenOffice myself for both professional and personal use, it certainly does fulfill all my requirements. And I use more of a suite’s functionality than most folks in the Commonwealth.
So given ODF is the accepted standard and the changing face of desktop utilization, I think it has a real chance to prevail. And I would hope that ECMA would force one standard (not likely as noted above). That is not the Commonwealth’s fight but the world benefits with only one standard. And yes, the MS monoculture is and will continue to be a security risk.”
Linux Watch reports Corel pussyfoots on WordPerfect ODF.
SJVN writes, “In particular, the renewed office suite boasts of its ability to import and export documents, spreadsheets, and presentations to Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format). What it doesn’t have, however, is the ability to import or export to the open-standard ODF (Open Document Format).
This is somewhat surprising, since Greg Wood, communications manager for Corel WordPerfect, recently pointed out that, “Corel is an original member of the OASIS Technical Committee on the OpenDocument format, and one of Corel’s senior developers is among the original four authors of the ODF specification.”
So, I wonder why Corel hasn’t implemented ODF in its new WordPerfect Office X3. Does Microsoft still own a part of Corel? (Remember how Corel Linux was cancelled after MS stepped in…) Or is this just paranoia?
Their official answer is that they haven’t received enough demand from their customers. However, I think this is a strategic decision that Corel should take—there are 50,000 desktops up for grabs in Massachusetts to any company that will implement ODF. There are probably going to be many more organizations making the same decision in the next few years, and Corel could position itself for strong growth, if they’re willing to take this risk! They are sabotaging their chance for greater future success by not supporting ODF now, and it’s a shame.
I’m excited to announce the launch of Wikipages.com, my new wiki yellow pages website.
Everything is under heavy development, but being a wiki, that’s expected! This release is not quite a beta, so maybe we can call it Wikipages Alpha.
For now, New York City, San Francisco and Philadelphia are covered. Soon to be added are Los Angeles and Boston.
Please take a look and feel free to add your wisdom and experience to its pages. The whole point is to build a self-sustaining community! Comments and suggestions are very welcome. (bhorst at mac dot com)
Groklaw summarizes an EU report in Survey of EU Government FLOSS Use Rebuts MS TCO FUD.
PJ writes, “Look at this EU FLOSSpols survey of FLOSS use by 955 European local governments, which found that “FLOSS users administer 35% more PCs per IT administrator than non-users – FLOSS use appears to reduce administrator workload per PC, and IT departments with high workloads are more likely to want a future increase in FLOSS use.” The survey was done in March of 2005.”
SCALE 4x will include an OpenDocument Format in Government Workshop, to be keynoted by Peter Quinn!
I’ve been invited to this workshop (cool, a personal invite!), and though it’s on the other side of the country, I would really like to be there. Don’t know yet if I can make it though.
Part of the press release reads,
“Peter Quinn served as Chief Information Officer and Director of the Massachusetts Information Technology division for 4 years. (2002 – 2006). As CIO, Quinn was responsible for setting information technology standards and policy for the state of Massachusetts. Quinn is most well known for initiating Massachusetts’ transition to OpenDocument Format. Mr. Quinn came to public service following a successful career in private sector IT, most recently as the CIO for Boston Financial Data Services.
SCALE’s workshop on OpenDocument format will take place on February 10, 2006. The event will begin at 1 pm with Mr. Quinn’s keynote presentation. Other speakers in the workshop will include:
HP signs a deal with Mandriva to preinstall Linux on desktop systems it sells throughout Latin America and Brazil. (Matched with all the support Brazil and its neighboring countries are giving to FOSS, this part of the world is becoming Linux country.)
Novell makes a formal announcement reaffirming its support of the OpenDocument Format and will even increase support for it in the next version of Suse Linux. “In addition, Novell is working to promote ODF along with Sun Microsystems–the company that launched OpenOffice.org–Google, IBM and Red Hat. And Novell is a member of OASIS technical committee that publishes and governs the ODF standard.”
John Battelle’s Searchblog covers the new Google Pack.
At the bottom of the post:
“I spoke to Marissa Mayer about Pack, and she had some fun stuff to say about it. I noticed no version of OpenOffice in the Pack, and she reminded me this is just the first version of the Pack, and since it updates itself automatically, why, there might be OpenOffice in an update shortly. They are in active discussions, I was told.”
This reminds me of an idea I had a few months back, for a “Synaptic for Windows.” Synaptic is the GUI tool used on Debian, Ubuntu and others to keep the OS and applications up to date, and to install or remove programs. Google Pack is similar to the applications side of this, because it automatically updates the apps that a user has installed on his system, and it appears to be managed through a web page configuration tool. Your apps can always be up-to-date, even if you use an obsolete platform like Windows! Keep expanding this concept and it could become a very powerful idea, even a store like Linspire’s Click N Run warehouse of apps.
At any university, college or school, there are open source advocates who see the advantages FOSS can bring to their institutions. They are common “in the trenches,” but in a Dilbert-esque twist, are rare among the decision-making elite. Over time and as their careers advance, I think we’ll see the inexorable increase in use of Firefox, OpenOffice.org, and other FOSS applications as formal policy. Until then, I’m watching the subtle clues that tell us what’s hiding out there. Here’s a good example from Zane State College in Ohio:
“I have dominion over a handful of laptops that faculty can check out of the IDEA Center. After MIS puts the base image on the laptop (operating system, Novell stuff, MS Office) they hand it over to me to add whatever I want. Then MIS captures the image and pushes it down to the other laptops and we end up with five identical images.
So what did I put on the image?”
Hit the link above to see the chosen apps.