August 4th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier of Newsforge interviews Louis Suárez-Potts about The State of OpenOffice.org:
“Suárez-Potts says that OpenOffice.org is concentrating on smaller releases that add features to the OpenOffice.org 2.0 architecture. He says that 3.0 is “on the drawing board,” but that the project is moving away from the “proprietary logic” of “big” releases, and focusing on incremental releases instead…
ODF is also pushing adoption of OpenOffice.org, according to Suárez-Potts. He says that many governments are looking to ODF as a way to ensure that they are able to access their data in the long run, and showing particular interest in OpenOffice.org as the “reference implementation” for ODF support. Suárez-Potts also says that OpenOffice.org is starting to get attention from third-party vendors who have traditionally provided add-on applications, such as accounting packages and accessibility support, for Microsoft Office…
One of the features that has contributed greatly to Firefox’s popularity is the ability to add new functionality through Firefox extensions. Suárez-Potts says that OpenOffice.org too has made it possible for developers to add functionality through extensions. The idea, says Suárez-Potts, is for OpenOffice.org to be “lean and capable, and added to easily,” rather than trying to add every feature directly to the OpenOffice.org codebase.”
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on “The State of OpenOffice.org”
August 3rd, 2006 Benjamin Horst
The Register reports the One Laptop Per Child Project has collected 80% of the orders necessary to begin production:
“The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme is just one million laptops away from beginning production, as the group confirmed that Brazil, Argentina and Thailand have each placed orders for a million machines, according to DesktopLinux.com.
OLPC says it will begin production when it has orders for between five million and 10m laptops. Last week, it announced that Nigeria had signed on to the scheme, taking the total pre-ordered to four million.”
Meanwhile, java programmer John O’Conner writes in his blog (okay, almost a year ago) that he’d like to see a blogging extension for OpenOffice.org. I agree it would be handy, in particular because some competitors are touting the feature now (and because it would be helpful for the legions of computer-using folks who still prefer the desktop software paradigm over working through a browser).
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, Uncategorized | Comments Off on One Laptop Per Child Update and Request for OOo Blog Extension
August 2nd, 2006 Benjamin Horst
According to Heise Online, Extremadura completely switches to Linux and OpenDocument.
Extremadura, a region in Spain, switched all of the computers in its educational systems to a customized version of Debian–and OpenOffice–in early 2003 (including 80,000 machines in all), and has been working to expand the use of FOSS ever since.
“A Linux distribution called gnuLinEx, which was developed in-house as a derivative of Debian, will be used as the operating system. In addition, freely available office applications running on Open Source licenses will be used. All of the staff in the administration are obligated to use the ISO standards ODF and PDF/A to share and archive documents. ODF was originally developed from within the Open Source community OpenOffice.org as a vendor-independent document format based on XML…
Vázquez de Miguel says that the region will “no longer be so exposed to the problems caused by forced migrations” after this switchover. Furthermore, he says the administration will have more input in the selection of software and be able to reduce support costs… In addition, the region expects free software to increase security and autonomy in addition to making public expenditures easier to calculate and track.”
Posted in GNU/Linux, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Heise: “Extremadura completely switches to Linux and OpenDocument”
August 1st, 2006 Benjamin Horst
The Open Malaysia Blog reports ODF proposed to become Malaysian Standard by year-end 2006.
From the post: “I remember meeting Yoon Kit for the first time at the 21 April 2006 meeting of the SIRIM TC4 (Technical Committee on E-Commerce) when the vote by the committee members was unanimously YES to approve the then ISO/IEC JTC1 DIS 26300, i.e. the OpenDocument Format (ODF), and in turn for Malaysia to vote YES to ISO for it to become an ISO/IEC international standard. Since then, Yoon Kit became a fellow blogger here!
Today, Yoon Kit and I, together with another fellow blogger here, Ditesh, each of us representing different organizations, were part of another historic SIRIM TC4 meeting, because the meeting now unanimously voted YES to proceed with the “project” for ODF (now ISO/IEC 26300) to be made a Malaysian Standard (acronym “MS”).
The project now will proceed to the next step of approval from the higher-level committee in SIRIM that TC4 is under, i.e. Industry Standards Committee Group “G” (or ISC G), after which there is a public comment period from September to October 2006. ISC G will look at any comments after that and raise it to the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation for sign-off to become an MS. So, I expect ODF to become MS 26300 by year-end 2006.”
They also have a cool picture of one of the bloggers, Hasan, reading a copy of Metro with our OpenOffice ad on the back!
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Malaysia May Adopt ODF by Year End