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The OpenOffice.org project has now launched its own centralized blog aggregationg planet at OpenOffice.org Planet.
This is in addition to two others I know and read, Planet Go-OO.org and PlanetOpenOffice.org.
They do seem to overlap considerably, so perhaps this new official entrant can help to consolidate the environment a bit.
Claudio Filho started and leads BrOffice.org, the project to translate and distribute OpenOffice.org in the Brazilian market. (BrOffice.org is the official Brazilian community of OpenOffice.org, which had to choose a different name because the trademark for “OpenOffice” in Brazil was already held by another company.)
Last fall (August, 2008), North by South interviewed Filho about the BrOffice project. Already one of the largest native language communities, it has also seen great success with wide government and popular support across the country.
One of the motivations is, of course, cost efficiency in economic development:
It becomes absurd when we compare it with practical matters, like how much this means in soy or oranges, products that generates jobs, income and currency to the country. To have an idea., 1 copy of (M$) Office costs the equivalent to 2 tons of soy, or worse, to 7 tons of oranges, approximately. However, these products generates how many jobs?! And how many families are fed with these jobs?! At this first analyzes we see that solutions like BrOffice.org are fundamental to Brazil.
Beyond this, the BrOffice project works toward other important goals that will improve the development of Brazil. Filho predicts that further investment in BrOffice will quickly:
increase the product development, generate jobs inside the community, establishment and expansion of knowledge (know-how) in the country, not to mention things like fighting digital exclusion and evasion of foreign exchange in the country.
s5h.net assembles a collection of links to support its article OpenOffice.org More Popular Than Realised, Even in Education.
The roundup links to seven articles covering the widespread use of OOo in education, the number of downloads achieved by OOo 2.0 (old news now), comparisons between OOo and MSO for new users, the cost advantage of OOo and how its continued growth will impact Microsoft revenues, and also info on NeoOffice and RedOffice.
In response to the title, it is truly a difficult task to estimate OOo (or Linux) usage share. Recent estimates range as high as 200 million OOo users globally and rising fast, but there is no central record-keeping and there are numerous ways to share the code.
Eventually the mainstream media will catch on and report the large number of OOo users, which will cause even more people to switch, but until then all I can say is that when I send ODF files to colleagues, I almost never hear complaints. (Are they not reading my documents? Are they opening them in Google Docs? Or do they use OOo?)
As part of its marketing, outreach, and community support efforts, OpenOffice.org community members are forming groups on various social networking sites to create more communication between existing users and to promote OOo to potential new users.
The latest, as promoted this week by Alexandro Colorado, has been on Identi.ca, an open source competitor to Twitter. I believe you must be logged in before you can see the Identi.ca OpenOffice.org group, but it should grow into a useful real-time place to follow OOo news, so it’s worth signing in (it allows OpenID, so you have no excuse not to do it).
I know there are Facebook, LinkedIn, and many other social network OpenOffice groups out there, so I’ll post them here when I get a chance to catch up (or add a comment yourself, please).
OpenOffice.org 3.1 is the next upcoming release of OOo, and among the new features it will include is a very visible improvement to graphics, in the form of antialiasing support.
Armin Le Grand describes what to expect in his post Finally: Anti Aliasing is Done for OOo 3.1 for the GullFOSS blog. One of the most obvious improvements is in the display of charts:
Antialiasing an OOo Chart
The improvements that allow this attractive antialiasing also bring along other improvements, including better geometric processing for all vector graphics, with further upgrades planned for the future:
The extended DrawingLayer starting from OOo 3.1 will allow more graphical enhancements in the future. As an example, Full Object Drag as a feature for OOo 3.1 is realized using the new functionalities. You may also have noticed the enhanced selection visualizations in the Applications, also a result of those internal changes.
I make heavy use of Draw to create flowcharts and webpage wireframes, so these graphical enhancements will be a welcome enhancement to my work processes.
OpenOffice.org community member and public relations professional Italo Vignoli posts “The Price of Success” on his blog, in which he reveals that OpenOffice.org is being downloaded at a faster rate than new computers are being sold in Italy.
He suspects the same is true in Germany and France, and if Vignoli is correct, than three out of the four biggest national economies in the EU (UK is the fourth) are in the midst of a massive shift toward OpenOffice.org over competing office software suites:
OpenOffice.org 3.0 has been a huge success, and this has raised the awareness of the open source office suite to an unprecedented level. In Europe, where OOo was already quite popular, especially in France, Germany and Italy, download numbers have reached new records. In Italy, they are now higher than the number of new PCs sold in the country, as they probably are in France and Germany (although I don’t have PC figures for these two countries).
Because of the slippery nature of download statistics as a measure of a software program’s usage share, Vignoli and his team in Italy have developed statistical methods to eliminate false data and better estimate the true impact OOo is having there.
Downloads are a key measurement of OpenOffice.org success, although they represent a trend and can’t be compared with licenses. This means that I am extremely careful in picking numbers when they don’t follow a logical trend (i.e., an increase – not a jump – after the announcement of each new version, and then a slow decrease)… Most of the time, we ignore the numbers that we don’t trust, even if this means that we ignore several “real” downloads.
Even so, generally accepted knowledge indicates the number of OOo users exceeds the number of measured downloads, due to distribution through other methods like peer-to-peer networks, CDs, flash media (thumb or key drives), and others.
Submissions for this year’s upcoming OOoCon 2009 have been received from a number of great teams in cities around the world, and voting is now open for OOo site members to select the host city.
The candidate cities for 2009 and 2010 (both will be simultaneously selected and begin their planning this year, in a change of procedure) are:
I can think of good reasons to choose any, and am impressed by the arguments put forth from each one of the candidates. It will be interesting and exciting to see what the final choice is for hopeful conference attendees.
It’s always instructive to see what other open source fans consider their most useful FOSS applications. Generally, this tracks well with their occupation, where developers will choose text editors and Linux distros, designers will choose graphics applications and page design programs, while others will choose communication and media distribution programs.
I came across a blog post by SnowWrite titled, “In Open Source I Trust: Top 5 Projects for Daily Use.”
As a web designer and developer, she chooses the following:
I agree that each one of these is a great and essential program (except TweetDeck, which I have not used myself and cannot comment on).
Her runners-up are GIMP, Amarok, and OpenOffice.
My own top five list would look pretty similar and include the following (but not in a particular order, and I listed seven or eight, depending on how you count):
OpenOffice (Useful every day, and important strategically as an introduction to FOSS for many users, as well as significant cost savings for students and small business owners.)
Firefox (The guardian of open web standards, and flat-out great as a browser.)
Miro (A vanguard in open media access and standards. If I had time to watch videos, I’d love it.)
Eclipse and Aptana (Text editors useful or optimized for website development.)
Drupal (My equivalent to SnowWrite’s choice of Plone. Both good CMSs, but I found installing Drupal on web hosts much easier to get me started.)
GIMP (Unique user interface, but very useful for lots of image editing tasks, and it can read Photoshop PSD files.)
Adium (Cross-network IM client.)
What are your top five open source apps for your personal use?
Dmitri Popov, frequent author on open source and OpenOffice.org topics, has released a new guide to using the Sun Report Builder extension for OOo.
Called Sun Report Builder Guidebook, it’s released under the GNU FDL license and available as a free PDF download, as well as a paperback from Lulu.com.
Popov introduces his text thus:
Sun Report Builder gives you powerful tools to make sense of the data stored in a Base database by presenting them in a variety of ways. True, you can create a simple report with Sun Report Builder in a matter of minutes, but if you want to make the most out of this extension, you have to understand its more advanced features. And this is where this guidebook comes into the picture. It will help you get to grips with basic Sun Report Builder features as well as master the extension’s more advanced functionality.
RedOffice is one of the “distros” of OpenOffice.org, along with Go-OOo, Lotus Symphony, OxygenOffice, NeoOffice, EuroOffice, and probably some others.
RedOffice is developed by a company in Beijing and specifically addresses the Chinese-language market.
More than just translating and cloning OOo, however, RedOffice has introduced a well-designed new user interface for their version of the suite.
Johannes Eva analyzes RedOffice’s user interface innovations on his blog. Its biggest departure from the standard OOo is (no, not that it only comes in Chinese, but) its persistent tool palette column on the left side of the document window. Eva calls this a “vertical ribbon,” but since I do not like the MS Office 2007 ribbon, I’ll stick with the older term “tool palette” instead.
He’s impressed also by the included templates which are displayed in the palette, and the live preview of each template when you mouse over each one’s icon.
Eva concludes his review impressed and inspired by the application:
RedOffice 4.0 beta new UI is really intuitive and useful. The “Live Preview” function is great and should definitively be adopted in OOo after 3.0. Though slower than OOo 3.0 beta, RedOffice runs at an acceptable speed on my old hardware.
I have to agree with his analysis. To see more of it, and all the screenshots he took of RedOffice, hop on over to the original RedOffice UI post.