November 20th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
ZDNet UK reports, in Indian OpenOffice Rollout Picks up Pace, that the government has distributed nearly half a million CDs of open source software throughout the country.
“Open source groups are helping the Indian government meet its target of creating open source CDs in all official Indian languages by February 2006.
The open source applications included on the CDs, such as the Firefox browser and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, have already been translated into five Indian languages — Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Punjabi and Urdu…”
“If one person gets the CD, the whole community or [company] department gets the CD,” said Raman. “There are so many channels that people can get it from — the Internet, their friends, from magazines — that we don’t know how many people have access to it.”
You’re thinking that the next step is to distribute open source via OEM deals, right? That’s what made the current market leader dominant, and that’s why it continues to run the show–people will use whatever comes preinstalled, regardless of quality! But soon, in India, they’ll be delighted to find something good preinstalled for once.
ZDNet UK reports again: Open Source PCs Take a Passage to India.
I’m going to quote the majority of this brief article:
“RKVS Raman, a researcher at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, an organisation involved in the production of the free CDs, said on Tuesday a number of vendors, including HCL Technologies, Acer, Zenith and Sahara, will start selling computers pre-installed with localised open source software from December.
The computers will be pre-loaded with either Microsoft Windows or Linux and a number of open source products, including the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, the Firefox browser and the Columba email client, according to Raman.
“Linux is preferred by some vendors because it brings down the cost drastically,” said Raman, although he pointed out that the vendors that “insist” on installing Windows will still save costs by avoiding Microsoft Office.
The PCs will be available in three Indian languages at present — Hindi, Tamil and Telugu — although more languages will be added later. The Indian government hopes that the availability of PCs containing software in native languages will increase the adoption of PCs across India, Raman said.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on India’s OpenOffice & Open Source Rollout Continues
November 18th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
At a UN conference in Tunis, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte debuted a working prototype of the $100 laptop.
A lot of innovative ideas are packed into these small machines, from a complete open source software stack, to a wind-up crank to generate electrical power, the use of wireless mesh networking for communicating with other units, and flash memory instead of delicate hard disks, plus much more!
From the BBC article:
“Every single problem you can think of, poverty, peace, the environment, is solved with education or including education,” said Professor Negroponte.
“So when we make this available, it is an education project, not a laptop project. The digital divide is a learning divide – digital is the means through which children learn leaning. This is, we believe, the way to do it.”
(Solveig’s also got a photo and some interesting commentary on her blog, check it out!)
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on MIT’s $100 Laptop Prototype Debuts
November 9th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
With a new beta of DTV released yesterday, content sites are already adapting to this fascinating application. CommonMedia has put together a special RSS feed of Daily Show clips they’ve collected, which is formatted specifically to work with DTV. (They’ve also created several other interesting feeds available on the linked page.)
DTV is a GPL-licensed application that feels like iTunes, but for internet video. Users can subscribe to feeds or download individual files of interest, as well as save and organize them locally.
Posted in Free Culture, Mac, Open Source | Comments Off on DTV, CommonMedia, and The Daily Show
September 20th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Earlham College, a Quaker college in Richmond, Indiana, has upgraded all of its public computers to OpenOffice. (This upgrade seems to have taken place at the beginning of 2005.)
From the College’s website:
“The point is not that we can’t afford Microsoft Office (it is expensive, but academic discounts make it more affordable for schools and students), the point is that those we serve may not be able to afford it. To the extent we foster the expectation that everyone has access to Microsoft Office we exclude the vast majority of people in the world who don’t have it and probably never will.
The good news is that OpenOffice can do nearly everything Microsoft Office can (and a lot of things it can’t), and once you have learned how to use it you can show others; anyone who can muster the price of a used computer can have access to its power. The great news is that OpenOffice can open Microsoft Office documents just fine and even re-save them in the same format, so there are almost no compatibility issues when collaborating on projects with people who are using Microsoft Office.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Earlham College Moves to OpenOffice
August 23rd, 2005 Benjamin Horst
The Participatory Culture Foundation is launching DTV, an internet TV broadcast framework roughly equivalent to iTunes, but for user-generated and distributed video. The current beta is available for Mac OS X, with other platforms to follow.
Posted in Free Culture, Mac, Open Source | Comments Off on DTV Launch
August 10th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Great piece by Alec Couros entitled, “What Education Can Learn From Open Source.”
Couros writes, “Being involved with open source programming, for most, is not a 9-5 job. It’s a passion, and the ideals of which extend well beyond the act of programming. Whether you are involved in open source programming, involved as a developer of open content or participate in other open publishing activities (e.g., blogging), it’s likely that values involved in such acts extend into your everyday life. Values expressed through sharing, cooperation and lifelong learning are sometimes characteristic of those that develop or publish shared content, and such values often extend into the ‘real’ lives of such individuals.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on What Education Can Learn From Open Source
August 9th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Jimbo Wales, creator of the Wikipedia, proposes a wiki-curriculum for K-12 and university schooling.
“The second thing that will be free is a complete curriculum (in all languages) from Kindergarten through the University level. There are several projects underway to make this a reality, including our own Wikibooks project, but of course this is a much bigger job than the encyclopedia, and it will take much longer.
In the long run, it will be very difficult for proprietary textbook publishers to compete with freely licensed alternatives. An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with. The point is: there are a huge number of people who are qualified to write these books, and the tools are being created to leave them to do that.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Jimbo Wales Guest Writes on Lessig.org
June 9th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
The Politics of Open Source Adoption is a wiki site managed by the Social Science Research Council. Its purpose is to investigate and discuss particular political dimensions of the FOSS phenomenon:
“The political success of open source reflects diverse practices of issue entrepreneurship and evangelization: at a basic level by building awareness of open source options, by broadening understanding of the ways in which software choice embeds social and political values, and by framing discussions of cost or security in ways that take into account complex hypotheticals about the future. We want to learn more about the thick social dimensions of this process as F/OSS advocacy develops within commercial, technical, and NGO communities; as it succeeds or fails in building workable alliances; as it founders on or overcomes internal differences; and ultimately as it bridges out to other communities with less stake in the technical values or development process of open source.”
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June 6th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Downhill Battle is a great site for Free Culture music activists. From their page: “Downhill Battle is a non-profit organization working to support participatory culture and build a fairer music industry… Our plan is to explain how the major (labels) really work, develop software to make filesharing stronger, rally public support for a legal p2p compensation system, and connect independent music scenes with the free culture movement.”
The Participatory Culture Foundation is developing and popularizing “open source TV.” They describe their goal: “Anyone will be able to broadcast full-screen video to thousands of people at virtually no cost, using BitTorrent technology. Viewers get intuitive, elegant software to subscribe to channels, watch video, and organize their video library. The project is non-profit, open source, and built on open standards.”
Posted in Free Culture | Comments Off on Free Culture Media Links
June 3rd, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Linux Journal covers the recent Free Software, Free Society Conference in Kerala, India. Government representatives and private sector participants attended from Brazil, Italy, Venezuela and India.
From the article: “Arun M, arun@gnu.org.in, one of the key organisers of this event, said, ‘The Free Software movement has shown a new way of knowledge creation based on collaboration and social ownership. This conference explores the possibilities of applying the Free Software model in addressing broader questions such as governance, digital inclusion, development and culture.'”
The Conference maintains a website at http://fsfs.hipatia.net/.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Free Software, Free Society Conference in India