February 20th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
WHDb writes “The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy–and Their Open Source Alternatives.”
Most of these programs are familiar old friends, like Ubuntu and OpenOffice, but the list includes some that are new to me, such as Archimedes CAD.
The list is mostly focused on open source programs to run on Windows, though most (yet, not all) of the key applications are cross-platform for Linux and Mac as well. (I maintain a list of my preferred FOSS programs for Mac OS X here.)
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on 50 Open Source Alternatives
February 15th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
CNet has posted a video of their picks for the Top 5 Downloads of 2007.
I’ll destroy the drama of their countdown to say the number one spot is occupied by OpenOffice. Following that, the list contains several other of my favorite open source applications (in order):
- OpenOffice (office suite)
- Audacity (audio editor)
- Miro (internet video player)
- Pidgin (instant messenger)
It’s notoriously hard to estimate the current number of global OpenOffice users, but it is likely in the range of 100 million, with marketshare/usage share possibly as high as 20%.
After a very strong year in 2007, and recognition like CNET’s, I expect 2008 to be another record-breaking year for the suite.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on CNET’s #1 Download for 2007 is OpenOffice
February 11th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Express Computer reports on “Open Source Rising” in India. Author Prashant Rao begins, “Things are looking good for the proponents of Open Source software on all fronts.”
India is a bellwether for FOSS adoption. While still a developing country, it has a very strong IT sector. Together, this is a perfect storm for the implementation of open source! Rao catalogs the growth of FOSS on servers, but then comes to the really interesting territory, end-user desktops. Of particular interest to me is the rapid adoption of OpenOffice within Indian IT enterprises:
“Coming to Open Source on the desktop, while desktop Linux remains kludgy, OpenOffice.org is doing just fine. Various estimates put it at anything between 10% and 20% of the market. I think that usage is higher. In India, at least, many large organizations have put the bulk of their users on OpenOffice restricting Microsoft Office to a handful of people who interact with the outside world.”
We see news about some of the high-profile corporate migrations to OpenOffice.org in India. Along with others around the world, we try to keep track of these on the Major OpenOffice.org Deployments page on the project wiki.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on “Open Source Rising” in India
February 7th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Mac OS X Aqua port of OpenOffice has been making rapid progress after the addition of several fulltime developers to the team. There’s still a long way to go, but with OOo 3.0 scheduled for this year, OS X will finally be an equally-supported platform. It makes sense to invest in the Mac now, as OS X’s US web usage share reached nearly 8% in December 2007, and continues to increase rapidly.
Download an Aqua OOo development snapshot here.
Posted in Mac, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Mac OpenOffice.org Update
February 5th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
In KDE 4.0’s cross-platform strategy, Mac OS X plays a key role. The KDE TechBase keeps track of KDE on Mac OS X projects here.
While 4.1 will bring the final release for OS X, there are plenty of things to play with now. I’m particularly interested in KStars, the KDE PIM, and KOffice itself.
I’ve long been a proponent of OpenOffice, but I don’t see KOffice as a threat to OOo. Rather, I think the two are complementary, each with a different primary focus, and yet also helping each other by forming a strong argument for ODF. With ODF, there’s no need to fight for sole software hegemony, since we’ll still be compatible with everyone else regardless of our personal application preferences. As OOo and KOffice grow, they bring more users to the ODF file standard. And as ODF grows, it lets more people freely choose OOo, KOffice, or one of the many other compatible programs.
If a politician were discussing this issue, they’d call it “growing the pie,” not just changing the relative sizes of its slices. That’s good for all the communities involved!
Posted in Mac, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
February 4th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Economist.com discusses using Linux to rehabilitate old computers for donating to students. The author has found many school students have no access to a computer at home: “A quarter of the children in your correspondent’s class had nothing at home to research their projects on–not even a parent’s or older sibling’s computer. And it showed in the classroom.”
And his suggestion is to wipe the Microsoft junk off your donation and replace it with a capable and lightweight operating system instead: Linux.
“Apart from being able to run easily on clunky old machines, the great thing about Linux is the way thousands of the world’s most professional programmers have volunteered their spare time to improving the breed–with nothing to gain save personal satisfaction and the respect of their peers. Thanks to their efforts, there’s recently been a flood of slick desktop versions of the rugged open-source operating system.”
After sampling several Linux distros, gOS catches the author’s eye:
“Spurred on by Everex, a PC maker in Fremont, California, the gOS distribution encases the rock-solid Ubuntu 7.10 in an exceptionally rich graphical shell known as E17 from an outfit called Enlightenment. For sheer beauty and intuitiveness, the gOS interface out-Macs even Apple’s superb OS X.
“But the real magic behind gOS is its use of Google Apps, the search company’s free online alternative to Microsoft Office. Computer pundits have talked endlessly about “software as a service”—using software applications that reside permanently on the internet rather than on your local hard-drive—but nothing much has come of it. Suddenly, out of the blue, gOS has made it a reality.
“Unquestionably, gOS is the operating system for the YouTube generation. Like the Mac, you just switch it on and start uploading videos, downloading tunes and doing other good things with the click of a mouse.”
For situations where online office applications are not ideal, the author matter-of-factly mentions OpenOffice as the pre-installed desktop office suite on gOS machines (casually expressing what many mainstream publications have not yet recognized: its complete suitability as a replacement for heavy, expensive MS Office). He doesn’t even explain OpenOffice.org, confident that everyone already knows what it is!
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on gOS Catches The Economist’s Eye
January 31st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Yahoo News reports that France’s Gendarmerie will migrate its 70,000 computers from Windows to Ubuntu Linux.
The Gendarmerie has been gradually and methodically moving to open source since 2005, when it replaced 70,000 copies of Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org. In 2006, it adopted Firefox and Thunderbird, and now it plans to complete the migration with Ubuntu Linux.
“The gendarmerie’s 70,000 desktops currently use Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system. But these will progressively change over to the Linux system distributed by Ubuntu, explained Colonel Nicolas Geraud, deputy director of the gendarmerie’s IT department.
“We will introduce Linux every time we have to replace a desktop computer,” he said, “so this year we expect to change 5,000-8,000 to Ubuntu and then 12,000-15,000 over the next four years so that every desktop uses the Linux operating system by 2013-2014.”
Cost is the third in their list of reasons for making the move to open source, but it really does add up. “The move away from licensed products is saving the gendarmerie about seven million euros (10.3 million dollars) a year for all its PCs.”
It’s clear that open source is making rapid progress in Europe, and government investment is starting a virtuous cycle that will increase the pace of its adoption. While Firefox is still the highly visible success story, it can be seen as a proxy for the OpenOffice.org and Linux adoptions that are following along but are often harder to track.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on 70,000 Ubuntu Linux PC Rollout in France
January 29th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The OpenOffice.org Marketing Project has recently launched a Marketing Blog Planet to follow the varied activities of project members around the world. This should provide a good new focal point for people interested in following the project’s diverse efforts, and encourage more to get involved where they can!
Posted in OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice Marketing Planet
January 23rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Lotus Symphony, IBM’s new derivative of OpenOffice built on Eclipse technology and first released as a beta in September, has been updated with support for 24 languages.
The press release announces: “Downloaded for use in English by more than 400,000 individuals at work and at home, IBM’s Lotus Symphony suite (www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony) of desktop office software is now available in 24 languages serving major markets worldwide.”
For a beta that’s only 4 months old, these are impressive download numbers. I expect that Symphony, with its native use of ODF, will help to grow the overall market of ODF-capable applications more than it will cannibalize OOo’s marketshare. (I believe Symphony is not open source, so many users will want to stick with OOo. But Symphony is free of cost, and has a very attractive UI, which will entice many others to adopt it.)
Not only is Symphony designed for a global market, but it’s also engineered as a global product: “IBM has employed innovative development techniques in the development and translation of Lotus Symphony. Lotus Symphony was developed by a global network of IBM laboratories led by a core team in Beijing, China using agile development techniques that allow work to continue seamlessly and in parallel on components of the product at all times.”
If I were IBM, my strategy to spread Symphony now would be to leverage OEM bundling. Clearly there’s a lot of interest from end users who are downloading it, but to really impact the market, IBM should enlist their old friends at Lenovo to install Symphony on every computer they ship. Leverage that to encourage other PC makers to follow suit, and then marketshare will climb extremely fast! IBM, and all users of ODF, will benefit.
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on More News on Lotus Symphony
January 22nd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
To help keep track of marketing project activities, Florian has recently launched the new OpenOffice.org Marketing Blog. I’m looking forward to seeing it grow into a central space for OOo marketing news; I think it will be a valuable resource. And you just might see the occasional post from me appear there, as well!
Posted in OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org Marketing Blog