July 28th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
In 2007, Macedonia implemented a program to put computers in all its schools, and for price and performance reasons, chose Ubuntu as the operating system for the project. This has led to a high level of literacy in Ubuntu and related open source programs not only in schools, but among the country’s population generally.
Aid Worker Daily provides a snapshot of the current level of Ubuntuphilia in Macedonia, and the positive side effects the school migration is having for the entire population.
“A few weeks ago, while my wife was still in Macedonia, I asked her to install Ubuntu on our old laptop which her parents had been using for years, primarily for Skype. The machine had contracted a bug and I am not a fan of bootleg software. With the popularity of Ubuntu it was easy enough to find someone to handle the installation (the neighbor) and within 24 hours she was back up and running. It seems as if everyone in Macedonia keeps a copy of the ISO in their back pocket.”
And then, he blows apart the argument that Linux is hard to use. His father-in-law had never used the laptop before, either running Windows or Linux: “Shortly after returning to the States my wife called her father and asked him if he had a minute so that she could explain to him how to get online. His response was, “Don’t worry about it. I figured it out on my own.”
It has long been my opinion that Ubuntu (and most other modern Linux distros) are more logical and usable than Windows, and here is another anecdotal confirmation of that.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Ubuntu and Macedonia
July 25th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
We all know the release of Firefox 3 was a huge success, with the attempt to win a Guinness World Record for downloads having been achieved.
But how has it been doing since? One of my favorite sources for open source statistics, XiTi Monitor, analyzes Firefox 3 adoption since its release.
In short, not only are Firefox 2 users upgrading very rapidly, but the Firefox family of browsers continues to gain on its main rival. Its pan-European average usage rate ranges from about 32% on weekdays to over 35% on weekends, and continues to grow each quarter.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on XiTi Monitor on Firefox 3’s Growth
July 23rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
A 2008 International Design Excellence Award was given to the OLPC XO laptop in honor of its hardware, software interface, and overall project design.
Ryan Eder, on behalf of the contest, explains: “Brilliant design for an even better cause. From the physical design to the sociological impact, every element of this laptop is exemplary of true innovation. This product is immensely practical and beneficial to all users across the globe. Design at its best!”
I imagine that as it receives more exposure and real-world use, OLPC will continue to collect accolades like today’s IDEA award.
Posted in Free Culture, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on OLPC XO Receives Design Award
July 21st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Hehe2.net writes a preview of new OOo features in OpenOffice.org 3.0: What to Expect?
The features it covers are probably well-known to readers of this blog, but it includes good screenshots and a great deal of enthusiasm (using far more exclamation points than even I do):
“If you thought 2.4 was major release, then you have seen nothing! Come September, OpenOffice.org will release it’s 3.0 version! That must be quite a big jump!”
The author likes multiple-pages view, the new notes feature, Mac OS X support, Calc’s user interface improvements, tables in Impress, PDF import, and the Presenter Screen extension.
As I, the author is quite pleased with this upgrade:
“OpenOffice 3.0 is a major milestone for the project, there are tons of other new features. I also noticed a great improvement in speed, which has always a bane in previous OpenOffice.org versions.
“If you can’t wait until September, why don’t you download the beta version and try it out, so far it has been very much stable for me. You can download OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta here.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Another OpenOffice 3.0 Preview
July 18th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
451 CAOS Theory has a fun analysis of national open source adoption and support in European countries, written as if it were the soccer European Cup, to declare the “Open Source Champions of Europe.”
Author Matthew Aslett places the teams in qualifying groups, compares their success in moving to open source and open standards, and declares a winner for each matchup. The “teams” proceed through further matches until an overall champion is declared.
The final match occurs between two true heavyweights, and is ultimately determined by the strength and number of open source companies operating successfully in the country determined as champion (and which I won’t spoil here…)
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Open Source Champions of Europe
July 17th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Open Malaysia Blog wrote a good post last month covering Neelie Kroes’ discussion of open standards as a smart business decision, and its relevance to Malaysia.
Yoon Kit writes, “It’s apparent that Malaysian agencies like MAMPU are also doing the right thing in adopting true open standards like ODF as their document file format, despite the fact that Microsoft Malaysia is constantly lobbying and interfering with MAMPU’s decisions. The reaction from Microsoft’s lobbying is certainly interesting. I think people are getting tired of their underhanded tactics, and false cries of “competition” and “fairness”.”
The post led to an interesting discussion/debate in his comments that is worth reading as well. (I like that Yoon Kit stands by his positions and thoroughly defends each of his remarks when challenged!)
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on Open Malaysia Blog on EU Competition
July 16th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
It’s been a long time since I mentioned OSAF or Chandler here, but the project continues to develop and grow and progress toward a 1.0 release.
The website (built on TWiki) has a section I just noticed called User Stories, which shows how real people are benefiting from Chandler every day. It’s great to see the variety of tasks to which Chandler is suited and it’s also helpful in thinking about how it can fit into your daily work flow.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Wiki | Comments Off on Chandler User Stories
July 14th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
While I was in Istanbul last week, so too was the GUADEC conference, though I was not able to attend any of it. A few interesting interviews with Mark Shuttleworth came out of the GUADEC event, but I’ll have to report on them secondhand.
Matthew Helmke interviewed Shuttleworth yesterday on his blog. They speak of many things, including Shuttleworth’s start in technology and a little bit about his other interests.
On Ubuntu, Shuttleworth says, “The key values were that it should be released on a predictable schedule, should be part of the Debian family, should always deliver the very best of the free software stack in a nicely integrated stack, should be governed as a community independent of the company(s) that back it, and should be available free of charge, with all security updates, for a long enough period that it’s actually useful as a commercial, production platform. I would credit the whole Ubuntu community with helping to turn those ideals into a real, and quite remarkable, product.”
derStandard.at focuses much more on the technical side of running the Ubuntu project in
Shuttleworth: “Apple is Driving the Innovation”. Shuttleworth is very interested in collaboration between projects, between Linux distros, between KDE and GNOME, and between companies working in the space.
And the title? It comes from this Shuttleworth quotation: “The fact that OS X is growing, tells us that Windows is weakening. The fact that OS X is growing and Linux isn’t, tells you that OS X is offering things that Linux is not. One of those is the pace of change, the level of innovation. You really have to give credit to Apple for driving innovation. Another of those things is their focus on the web as an experience. They recognize very strongly that the web is the killer application of the PC today and not Microsoft today.”
Good insight, and it proves once again why Shuttleworth is an important leader in the open source world. He takes inspiration from everywhere and channels it effectively into Ubuntu and his other projects, creating high-quality software for everyone.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Interviews with Mark Shuttleworth
July 10th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
HTML validation services have long been available for web developers to guarantee the sites they create follow the latest W3C standards. This has made it easier for web browser creators, site developers and web visitors to all keep coordinated and offer the best experience across the web. If something isn’t working, running the pages through an HTML validator helps to pinpoint whether the problem is in the code or browser, and then it can be fixed by the appropriate party.
In the same way, the open standard ODF format now has an online ODF validator service.
Michael Brauer, its creator, announces the service on the GullFOSS blog:
“What is it? It is actually a web page where you can check whether an ODF file meets some basic conformance or validation requirements defined by the ODF specification. This service is in particular useful for developers that want to test their implementations, but it may also be used to check if a particular file is a valid ODF file.”
My take is that this will be a very handy tool once Microsoft Office starts producing ODF files, since it will offer an independent service verifying whether those files are valid ODF or have been corrupted in some way. Based on Microsoft’s track record in failing to properly support open standards, we should expect major difficulties with the ODFs they produce. And the ODF validator service will let us pinpoint the cause of the problem. Surely Microsoft will claim that ODF is a broken file format, but users will be able to run the files through this validator and prove that is is MS Office, in fact, that is broken. (All this is conjecture at this point, but past experience suggests we’ll see it come true yet again.)
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | 1 Comment »
June 25th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Combining two of my interests, Kay Ramme of Sun has created “ODF@WWW,” an ODF Wiki. It includes some of the capabilities I had envisioned in my post about an OpenOffice wiki extension, and adds some cool new ideas of Ramme’s own.
Thinking about the rich editing ability of OpenOffice, and the lightweight collaboration of a wiki, Ramme “understood that these two approaches may be married to become an “ODF Wiki”, combing their strengths – simple editing and simple publishing – while eliminating their weaknesses…”
He jumped right into the project: “I installed an Apache webserver, enabled WebDAV, did some (hacky) bash scripting, and got the following.”
It’s a great start, and I am looking forward to what Ramme develops next with this project.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Wiki | Comments Off on ODF Wiki