September 2nd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Computer users are naturally a bit hesitant to reinstall operating systems, so the strategic impact of having open source pre-installed on consumer PCs is very high. Many folks will happily use whatever comes on their new machines, so it’s a great opportunity to provide high-quality open source solutions instead of the problematic proprietary systems commonplace today.
In this vein, Hugh’s Space notices Ubuntu pre-installed on retail laptops in Poland.
He writes, “I’ve read about many companies doing this but it is the first time I’ve seen it in a shop here. I managed to snap this photo on my camera phone…”
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Ubuntu Pre-installed in Poland
August 22nd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Social networking sites and tools are one of the most fascinating areas online these days. But sharing my information with a company whose goals and intentions I just don’t know makes me somewhat nervous, hence my interest in open source social networking applications and protocols. One of the fastest-growing and best-known, Elgg, has just reached 1.0.
Elgg has already been implemented by several universities and online communities around the world, has a Packt book, and should grow even faster with the 1.0 stamp on its codebase.
See Elgg’s homepage and download the code to get started!
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Elgg 1.0 Arrives
August 20th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Metamorphosis, based in Macedonia, announces that Poland’s Ministry of Education recommends open source software for the country’s schools. As one of the more populous members of the EU with over 40 million people, this could have a big impact!
In addition to general support of open source, the Ministry also specifically recommended OpenOffice.org:
“The Ministry recommended in a statement that schools and universities use OpenOffice. The application suite is sufficiently mature and advanced to be used for teaching and for office use in education and science institutes. “OpenOffice can successfully substitute proprietary applications and will result in significant savings on licenses.”
This recommendation is the culmination of a 10-month project in which 99 schools and over 4,500 students were introduced to FOSS by volunteer members of the Free and Open Software in Schools campaign.
“About 30 percent of the schools visited by the Wioo w Szkole [Free and Open Software in Schools] campaign have switched at least partly to Open Source. Most of these schools configured their PCs to run a GNU/Linux distribution such as Ubuntu, Suse or Mandriva, alongside Windows.”
More information is available at the Open Source Observatory website.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Poland’s Ministry of Education Recommends Open Source
August 19th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Tom’s Guide offers a visual tip collection for OpenOffice 2 and 3.
They noticed something we have long been keeping an eye out for: the early mainstream beginning to adopt OOo.
“We’ve talked up OpenOffice before in other articles, but the software is worth a closer look since more and more companies are beginning to dole it out to employees.”
The premise of the article is to support new OOo users: “Here, we’ll show you some simple tips and tricks so that you can use OpenOffice in the easiest and most efficient way possible. All the information that we’ve included works just as well on OpenOffice 2 as it does on the new beta 3 version. It’s straightforward and easy — we promise.”
Using 20 screenshots and a short descriptive text for each, Tom’s Guide covers lots of basic functionality and helps new users get accustomed to the software. It will make a good reference to help the coming waves of new users get comfortable on their new suite.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »
August 12th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Linux.com interviews David Liu, founder of the gOS distribution, which is focused on simple end-user needs and can be found pre-installed on machines like the gPC and Cloudbook from Everex.
gOS is an operating system, but it’s also the name of the company that develops it, which is already profitable.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Linux.com Interviews gOS Founder David Liu
August 7th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Trolltech Labs Blog announces a new ODF writer module shipping with Qt 4.5. This will make it much easier for applications built on the Qt toolkit to write ODF, as a peer of plain text, HTML and PDF.
Thomas Zander writes, “For end users the biggest advantage of the uptake of ODF is that more and more applications will standardize on this one format and thus applications will be much more interoperable. OpenOffice and KOffice are the early adopters here, I expect that many more applications will start to generate or consume ODF in some form or other. For example to export an abstract dataset to a nicely formatted document ready for printing, or the web.”
Zander also shares the idea that ODF will make a better format for emails than HTML does, since it provides more, and more explicit, layout options. I wonder what email client will first adopt this? It seems natural to first write a plugin for Thunderbird, and then if it gains traction, it could become a core part of that and other email applications.
Back to the heart of the matter, Zander explains what the new Qt module does:
“To speed up ODF recognition, Qt 4.5 will ship with an ODF writer. Qt’s text module turns into a one-stop document generation API where you can use QTextCursor to create your document via a nice API and you can then export the created QTextDocument to ODF, ready to be opened by any opendocument implementation. Naturally exporting to plain text and html are still supported, as is printing to PDF… Support for writing ODF in Qt sets a trend that we believe in the OpenDocument Format and we think its useful to have for our customers, the open source community and all end-users out there.”
Broad-brush conclusion: lots of effort is being put into ways to read and write ODF files, meaning the format continues to build momentum and will become an ever-better solution for communication with people around the world.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on ODF in KDE’s Qt
August 5th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Readers of The Diamond Age and viewers of Star Trek: The Next Generation are familiar with the idea of replicators. Indeed, architects and product designers have been working them into their design and rapid prototyping processes already, yet the home market is still nascent.
A big step in making replicators as ubiquitous as personal computers was taken by tinkerers Adrian Bowyer and Vik Olliver when they built the RepRap, a rapid-prototyper capable of replicating itself.
A particularly great feature of their work is the licensing model they have chosen: open source. Their stated goal is “to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €500). That way it’s accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can make another and give it to a friend…”
This is going to be extraordinary!
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Uncategorized | Comments Off on RepRap: Open Source Meets Hardware
August 1st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Two great news bites from Firefox in the past few days:
As recently predicted, Firefox’s browser use share has surpassed 20%, while IE has dropped below 70% and continues its gradual demise.
TG Daily writes, “According to the most recent data made available by the market research firm [NetApplications] today, Internet Explorer stands at 69.88% today, while Firefox 2 and 3 account for a combined market share of 20.68% (Firefox 2: 13.75%, Firefox 3: 6.92%.)”
The second is that Firefox will soon support the HTML 5 media elements, which means native support for Theora video and Vorbis audio in the browser, with no plugins. These are open formats like HTML itself, free from the control and maneuverings of any single company. When these catch on, we’ll hopefully see them replace Flash video (too CPU intensive) and broaden free access to open media on the web.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Firefox Achieves 20% Share, Free Video Codec Support Coming
July 30th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Gregdek writes a post to reassure the world of the strength of the relationship between OLPC and Fedora, and to point out that despite news mentions of Windows forcing its way onto OLPCs, that has not happened yet in the real world:
“OLPC has shipped over 300,000 units to kids around the world. They plan to ship at least another 50,000 more each month, and very likely more than that. It’s entirely possible that by the end of 2008, there will be a million OLPC systems deployed worldwide.
“Of those systems, 100% of them currently run Fedora, and 0% of them currently run Windows — despite the press clippings you may have read.
“The OLPC project is based on Fedora. The engineers at OLPC have invested thousands of person-hours in making Fedora a successful base for OLPC deployments. Fedora is now, and will continue to be, the base operating system for the OLPC project. Period.”
300,000 units distributed is a large number, but it hasn’t impressed the media as much as I would have expected. Nevertheless, I expect growth to continue at a healthy rate, especially as we see successes coming from the current adopters, and over time the project will come to receive its due recognition.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on OLPC and Fedora’s Strong Relationship
July 29th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
OpenOffice has won in three categories at the Sourceforge 2008 Community Choice Awards!
This puts it far ahead of any other single project, reflecting the open source community’s understanding of the strategic importance of an open source, open standards-based office suite. This product category, after all, is where Microsoft continues to earn billions of dollars it funnels into attacks on every other open source program and project, as well as stymieing efforts to create true open standards and level playing fields.
Before I get carried away, what were the three categories? They were: Best Project, Best Project for the Enterprise, and Best Project for Educators.
I would have to agree!
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org Wins Three Sourceforge Awards