October 6th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Some time ago, Brazil announced it would adopt ODF as a national document storage standard. Now, our friends at North-by-South announce, it has begun implementing ODF within the government:
“The Brasília Protocol (now translated to English) started the process of implementation of the Open Document Format (ODF) within the Brazilian Government. The Protocol was signed during the opening of CONSEGI 2008 by Bank of Brazil, Serpro, Dataprev, Post Office and Telegraph State Company (ECT), INPE (Institute of Spacial Researches), INPI (Institute of Intellectual Property), Ministry of Exterior Relations and others. All the institutions who signed the protocol are assuming the commitment to use the ODF standard, make it available to society-at-large, exchange documents between themselves in this format and to share solutions in open format.”
The original story is posted on the ODF Alliance website, which notes: “This is no small ODF migration, as the Brazilian entities involved have a combined 500,000 desktops.”
Considering the rapid growth of Brazil’s economy (and more importantly, the ongoing rise of many of its poorer citizens into the middle class), and its growing importance on the world stage, Brazil’s implementation of ODF will create waves that travel far and help many other governments around the world to make the same choice in favor of open standards.
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October 2nd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Metamorphosis foundation announces Sweden’s approval of ODF as a national standard. (Originally mentioned by the ODF Alliance in their newsletter, which is archived as PDFs online.)
“Sweden now joins Brazil, Croatia, Italy, South Korea, and South Africa as countries whose national standards bodies have formal approved this standard”, the ODF advocacy organisation writes in this week’s newsletter.”
Numerous other countries also support ODF in various ways, and organization members of the ODF Alliance come from every part of the world.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on Sweden Approves ODF as National Standard
October 1st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Rob Weir discusses the new ODF Interoperability and Conformance Technical Committee he played a part in creating:
“For the past 6 months I’ve been talking to my peers at a number of ODF vendor companies, to fellow standards professionals in OASIS, to ODF adopters, as well as to people who have gone through interoperability efforts like this before. I’ve given a few presentations on ODF interoperability conferences and led a workshop on the topic. I led a 90-day mailing list discussion on the ODF interoperability. Generally, I’ve been trying to find the best place and set of activities needed to bring the interested parties together and achieve the high level of interoperability we all want to see with ODF.”
Participants include individuals and company representatives, including those from IBM, Google, Sun, and Novell, and government agencies from the USA and South Africa. Others are welcomed and encouraged to join.
Clearly, the OIC TC is an important step that will help ODF grow in real-world importance and longterm utility as it becomes the dominant global document format.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on ODF Interoperability Committee
September 30th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
In a nod to the growing importance of OpenOffice.org, Vertex42, “The Guide to Excel in Everything,” has released an OpenDocument version of its Debt Reduction Calculator spreadsheet:
“Download a free credit card Debt Reduction Calculator and Debt Snowball Payment Schedule worksheet for Microsoft® Excel® and OpenOffice.org. This spreadsheet allows you to choose different debt reduction strategies, including the debt snowball effect (paying the lowest balance first) and highest interest first. Just choose the strategy from a dropdown box after you enter your creditor information into the worksheet.”
This particular spreadsheet is very relevant today as economic troubles continue to spread, but a search for “OpenOffice” on Vertex’s site reveals many available OpenOffice-compatible files for download, indicating the site’s commitment to ODF and recognition of its large userbase.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
September 29th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Red Hat released its Linux systems management toolset, Spacewalk, as open source several months ago.
It’s designed for managing installed software applications across a network from within the firewall:
“Spacewalk manages software content updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Linux distributions such as Fedora, CentOS, and Scientific Linux, within your firewall. You can stage software content through different environments, managing the deployment of updates to systems and allowing you to view at which update level any given system is at across your deployment. A clean central web interface allows viewing of systems and their software update status, and initiating update actions.”
I’d like to see it expanded to manage open source applications across platforms, to make it easy to get FOSS onto Windows clients as well (like Project Smith in some ways).
Spacewalk development is hosted in Trac at fedorahosted.org.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Spacewalk: Open Source Systems Management
September 26th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Ubuntu’s implementing another clever idea in the form of its Ubuntu Wanted Project.
The idea is to build a web collaboration space for users to submit ideas for improvements and new features that developers could then implement for Ubuntu:
“What do we need to get innovative stuff implemented?
- A great idea
- The manpower
- The infrastructure and toolset
(1) is now more or less successfully covered by Ubuntu Brainstorm. Concerning (3), some good infrastructures exists around here, such as Launchpad, and development toolsets are good but not yet optimal IMO (I’ll keep that for later). (2) is much more tricky.”
There’s been a discussion at OpenOffice.org of the need for something similar, as lots of people have good ideas for extensions, and lots of developers capable of making extensions are looking for popular user demands to satisfy. Maybe it’s time to build an “OpenOffice.org Brainstorm” site!
Posted in Extensions, Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on The Ubuntu Wanted Project
September 25th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Seneca College in Toronto, Canada has announced its intention to get involved in OpenOffice development through the Education Project.
Seneca employee Fardad has launched an entire blog on Seneca’s OOo experiment:
“I had the pleasure of meeting Eric Bachard. He is the leader of the Education Project in OOo. He also has been doing core development for Mac OS X for more than 4 years. He also did mentoring for Google Summer of Code twice and he is a professor of Applied Physics at UTBM France.”
It’s great to see the Education Project continue to prosper (and reach out to a new continent), as this is an important vector for future OOo adoption.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice in Education: Seneca College
September 23rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
A new non-profit organization has grown out of the OLPC project, by the name of Sugar Labs.
Sugar Labs’ mission statement: “Sugar provides a simple yet powerful means of engaging young children in the world of learning that is opened up by computing and the Internet. Sugar promotes sharing, collaborative learning, and reflection. Through Sugar’s clarity of design, children and their teachers use computation on their own terms; they are free to reshape, reinvent, and reapply both software and content into powerful learning activities. Sugar is a community project; it is based on GNU/Linux, a free and open-source operating system.”
Groklaw interviews Sugar Labs’ founder Walter Bender about the project.
Bender says, “I think that Sugar, while still a relatively new project, has already shown great impact and even greater potential for learners. There is a growing community of Sugar users, developers, and supporters. New activites are being written on a regular basis. There have been aggressive efforts by the community to document Sugar and translate it into local languages (there was just a sprint to translate Sugar into Aymará). And as I mentioned, dialog with teachers is growing, especially in Latin America. So while there may be some loss of support for OLPC within the FOSS community, the support for Sugar seems to be growing. (I should point out that there is a dedicated team of developers at OLPC who believe deeply in the importance of FOSS to learning.)”
Great interview and a great project!
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on Groklaw Interviews Sugar Labs
September 19th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Ever since I first learned of GRASS GIS many years ago, I’ve been interested in open source GIS, partly as a way to achieve liberation from the Windows platform where most commercial GIS apps are mired, and partly because of the extra innovation and broader use of GIS that open source could engender.
Enter the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, created a few years ago, and dedicated to supporting and promoting open source GIS applications, data and systems.
With an active community, informative website, and legal and organizational structure, OSGeo.org’s mission statement reads:
“The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo, is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The foundation provides financial, organizational and legal support to the broader open source geospatial community. It also serves as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources, secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for public benefit. OSGeo also serves as an outreach and advocacy organization for the open source geospatial community, and provides a common forum and shared infrastructure for improving cross-project collaboration.”
Posted in Drupal, Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Open Source Geospatial Foundation
September 18th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
This week Tim Berners-Lee announced the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation, with a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation. It has a truly important mission:
“The World Wide Web Foundation seeks to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand the Web’s capability and robustness, and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet.”
CNET also announced the launch, explaining:
“The Web Foundation will seek to foster collaboration among business leaders, technologists, government, academia, and nongovernmental organizations. The mission is to:
- advance One Web that is free and open
- expand the Web’s capability and robustness
- extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet”
Read the transcript of Tim Berners-Lee’s speech launching the project.
Posted in Free Culture | 1 Comment »
