You are currently browsing the SolidOffice weblog archives for July, 2006.
The OpenOffice.org Metro ad is running today in New York City. I saw many people holding Metro papers on the subway, and the ad is clearly visible on the back page! It looks really good.
You can download a PDF. (Click on July 31 in the calendar, then press the “Get Your Metro” button, and it’ll download for you.)
The Register reports: “Ubuntu heads for the mainstream”
“Mark Shuttleworth, millionaire cosmonaut and self-funded Linux guru, has managed to make his Ubuntu project the Linux distribution of choice in just two years. But now the friendly brown OS with the cute drumming noises faces an awkward journey towards the commercial mainstream.
Ubuntu has had quite a ride in those two years. By many benchmarks, it’s the most popular Linux flavour there is. It’s top of the Distrowatch download chart, and it’s the distro most frequently installed on Dell PCs – according to Michael Dell himself…
Ubuntu has also started to appear pre-installed on PCs – from the Singapore-based company, Esys – which will be a crucial step in taking Ubuntu to people who don’t have the skills to install it themselves.”
According to a 2004 article (“Laptops pre-loaded with Linux getting popular“) in India’s “The Hindu,” HP India’s country manager for consumer portables, Rajiv Grover, said “between 20 and 22 per cent of our laptop business came from notebooks loaded with Linux.”
That was just over two years ago; what is the status today? More large corporate migrations, particularly in India, continue to make the news, but little effort has been made (of which I am aware) to calculate the current sales, usage, and marketshare figures for Windows vs. Linux in India.
As a rising giant, India is an exceptionally important market battlefield. If Linux was so popular two years ago, I can only imagine it has grown a great deal since then–I really must find more data on the Linux-in-India situation!
This past weekend saw the successful conclusion of the fundraising campaign, and the date for the OpenOffice.org Metro Ad is set for Monday, July 31.
Many thanks to John Kakoulides, who designed the ad (which looks great), as well as to all the donors and others who helped promote the effort.
Next step: to get other media interested in the process so that a ripple effect develops around the initial ad placement…
Today is a good day for software migration news.
This is our final week of fundraising, and luckily for us, Boing Boing linked to the Metro Ads project this Tuesday morning!
The project will also be featured Wednesday on Italy’s daily IT news site Punto Informatico.
The OpenOffice.org Metro Ads project homepage can be found at http://homepage.mac.com/bhorst/
Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Geekcorps, thoroughly reviews the prototype of the One Laptop Per Child notebook computer on his blog.
Computerworld reports Google has joined the ODF Alliance.
“The Mountain View, Calif., search engine company officially became a member of the Washington-based ODF Alliance on Saturday, according to Marino Marcich, managing director of the group… Marcich called Google’s decision to join ‘a natural fit, given Writely’s support for ODF and further indication of momentum behind ODF.'”
The article also contains some useful background info that bears repeating:
“The ODF Alliance claims more than 240 members. Half are technology vendors, including founding members IBM, Oracle Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc. The other half comprise government bodies, nonprofit groups and academic institutions, according to Marcich. Companies can join the alliance without donating money.
ODF is an open XML file format that was accepted by the International Standards Organization as a standard in May. It is being adopted by the state government in Massachusetts, and in Denmark and Belgium for official governmental use.”
Computer Business Review’s Open Source Weblog reports on a recent US Department of Defense report [PDF link] which “recommends that the DoD move to a roadmap to adopt open source and open standards, maintaining that such a move is not only in the US national interest, but in the interests of US national security.”
ChipIn, a team fundraising collection site similar to Fundable.org, has launched.
According to their homepage: “ChipIn automates the time-consuming task of organizing people to give together. Connect with friends and collect funds for a birthday gift, office pool, neighborhood fundraiser or any other group purchase.”
ChipIn has some cool and unique features, including “widgets,” which are snippets of code you can add to any website to show a live window into the progress of your group action. Check out a sample widget here.