May 6th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Educatorslog.in points out in Kerala Blazing the Trail for FOSS in Schools that Kerala, India’s, support for open source has become extremely strong:
“Kerala is all set to become the first state in the country to completely banish Microsoft and allow only GNU/Linux free software to be used in the mandatory IT test at the state SSLC examinations that half a million students took in March. Till last year, they could take the exam using either free software or the Microsoft platform. Not anymore.”
Kerala is also rolling out broadband internet access to all of its high schools, after its successful introduction of open source over the past year:
“Since last September, some 15 lakh [1,500,000] students have been busy training on or migrating to free software on 40,000 computers put up in 2,832 high schools watched over by over 60,000 IT trained school teachers (some 86 private training institutions train the teachers) besides 161 master trainers and 5,600 school IT coordinators. “We checked. It’s the world’s biggest mobilisation of its kind,” says K Anwar Sadath, executive director of the state government’s IT@Schools mission.”
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May 5th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
XiTi Monitor’s regular browser report has been released, and it shows Firefox at nearly 29% use share in Europe.
“After a slight dip monitored in October 2007, the free browser’s visit share recovered strongly at the end of the year, stabilized in January 2008 and began a new upward trend in February and March 2008. Thus, Mozilla Firefox’s use share, on average for a European country, is 28.8% in March 2008, 0.3 points higher than February and up 0.8 points from January 2008.”
The top countries are Finland at 45.9%, Poland at 44.0% and Slovenia at 43.7%. Two other countries, Slovakia and Hungary, also exceeded 40% use share for Firefox.
In most of the rest of the world, Firefox also keeps growing:
“Although the average visit share for Mozilla Firefox is higher in Oceania (31.2%) than in Europe (28.8%), growth has been flat over this past month, while the European figure has increased.
“The browser lost a small amount of share in North America (-1%), while its trends in South America and Asia are comparable to those in Europe. It was in Africa that Mozilla Firefox posted the strongest gain for March 2008: 17.9% in visit share compared to 17.4% the previous month (+3%).”
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May 2nd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Elgg is a fairly mature, distributed open source social networking application (you can install it on your own server, and your users can connect with those on other servers as well).
A roadmap for Elgg 1.0 has recently been posted:
“To date, Elgg has been a great tool for creating a web-based social network. It was the first social networking platform to include OpenID support, and through its support of standards like RSS, FOAF and XML-RPC, as well as its highly extensible architecture, provides functionality unique to the market. If you want MySpace in a box, you can do it with Elgg; if you want a customised network with functionality specific to your niche requirements, you can do that too.
“Elgg 1.0 takes this flexibility as a starting point and supercharges it… Elgg 1.0 acts as a social application engine; a way to power any socially-aware application, whether it’s on the web or not.”
Elgg has a few open source competitors I know about, including NoseRub and Appleseed. There’s also some other related tools and protocols like OpenID that offer the possibility of the entire web becoming socially-enabled in the future (which I think is inevitable, in fact).
However, Elgg has already been very strong in providing self-hosted social networking sites used by several large UK universities, and seems to be the most complete of the above competitors.
Here’s my profile on Elgg.
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April 25th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Many countries are likely to follow its path, as South Africa has chosen ODF for its national document standard.
However, a national standard does not automatically mean the government will migrate all its data to the format: “While Jolliffe points out that ODF has been made a national standard and not yet a government standard, he says the DST is trying to initiate the conversion process in government. “As far as possible, we should ensure that file format standards used in government are national standards.””
Migrating to ODF for data storage does not necessarily require a shift in software that government employees use day-to-day. (Although a separate, yet sometimes overlapping, group of open source advocates does make the case that open source software is a better tool for governments to use.)
“Jolliffe has challenged Microsoft to stand by its interoperability strategy and provide support in its own products for ODF. “We would like to see Microsoft interoperate with ODF.””
(There is a third-party plugin to let MS Office users read and write ODF documents.)
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April 24th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Ubuntu 8.04, Long-Term Support, was released today.
The press release accompanying it announces: “Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS) provides a stable platform for software and hardware vendors, developers and users. With three years of support and maintenance on the desktop, 8.04 LTS is a great choice for large-scale deployment… This is the eighth desktop release of Ubuntu. Ubuntu’s track record in delivering – on a precise schedule every six months – a commercial operating system that is free, stable, secure and fully supported, remains unique.”
The BBC also reports on the Ubuntu “Hardy Heron” release, and interviews founder Mark Shuttleworth about the Linux dividend: “Mr Shuttleworth said ordinary consumers were beginning to turn to Ubuntu, and to Linux more generally, to improve their daily computing experience.”
With the improved features and ease-of-use in Ubuntu 8.04, this trend should continue to accelerate.
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April 18th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Louis Suarez-Potts, Community Manager for OpenOffice.org, writes about OpenOffice.org at FISL 9.0, which is happening right now in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
It sounds like a wonderful event, and I hope to attend one someday.
Louis introduces the event and its importance, writing, “It’s hard not to be enthusiastic about fisl, or to expand the acronym, the 9th Fórum International Software Livre, held each year in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In part, my enthusiasm stems from the energy and commitment to free software shown by the government; and in part, from the warmth and friendship demonstrated by the Brazilians.”
Brazil is known as a major center for open source software, and the government has been a strong supporter for a very long time, recognizing the key role FOSS can play in enhancing economic and human development. Brazil has been a role model for many other developing countries to follow, and FISL is one of the key events that helps expand the FOSS community in Brazil each year.
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April 17th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Solveig Haugland has another great article at K-12 Open Technologies. This one’s “The World of OpenOffice.org Extensions,” covering the fast-growing ecosystem of extensions you can install to add functionality to your installation of OpenOffice.
OpenOffice extensions were inspired by Firefox’s success with them, and became available in recent versions of OOo (2.3, I think, and then were beefed up in 2.4). They are an easy way for programmers and companies to participate in the community, to introduce their products to OpenOffice users, and to customize OOo to better suit specific niche market needs.
Solveig’s article explains how to install extensions and then lists some of her favorites, such as Pagination, the Sun Report Builder, GoogleDocs integration, eFax, templates and clipart from OxygenOffice, and more.
It’s a great starting point for learning about and using the wealth of extensions out there.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
April 16th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Solveig Haugland has published a great article for companies, schools and other organizations preparing to transition from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org, “Five Principles for a Successful OpenOffice.org Transition.”
She’s been a premier consultant in this field for 6 years now and has seen many migrations, both good and bad. It’s easy to forget sometimes that not everyone transfers seamlessly from one software program to another, since most people just want to get their jobs done. End users often don’t care about the cost savings or longterm benefits of open source: “The big picture of saving hundreds of thousands of dollars and the principles of open source don’t seem to matter as much to the soldiers on the ground who at 7 PM are wondering why that text box is overlapping their graphic when it looked fine in Word.”
Change management is more about people than it is about technology. Solveig suggests the following principals for your best chance of a successful migration: a good pilot program, support from the top, tough love, proactive support and training, and providing templates, clip art and fonts.
She summarizes, “Switching to an entirely different piece of software is a big deal. The interface is similar and the price is free, so it seems at an unconscious level like it ought to be just a matter of installing new software. It won’t be. But if you want to save a huge amount of money; if you want to use software that everyone can install at home for free; if you think that saving the soccer program or the music program is important; then it’s worth it.”
See Solveig Haugland’s GetOpenOffice.org site for her training and support services.
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April 15th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Ecuador’s president signed a decree the government will adopt open source software for its administration, writes The Digital Standards Organization.
“On April 10, 2008, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa Delgado signed a decree ordering that the software used by public administrations in the country be free software (and implicitly based on open standards).”
The remainder is in Spanish, but this seems an adequate summary.
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April 12th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Mark Shuttleworth blogs about Wubi, a new tool for easily installing Ubuntu on a Windows machine.
He points out the value of making it easy for users to access Free Software, even if they run it on Windows: “I believe in bringing free software to people in a way that is exciting and empowering to them, and one of the key ways to do that is to show them amazing free software running on their familiar platform, whether that’s Windows or the Mac OS.”
Once again, Firefox has broken ground for the cause of all open source software. Shuttleworth writes, “Firefox, for example, is an inspiring free software success story, and I’m certain that a key driver of that success is their excellent support for the Windows environment. It’s a quick download and an easy install that Just Works, after which people can actually FEEL that free software delivers an innovative and powerful browsing experience that is plainly better than the proprietary alternatives… And users love it – users that may then be willing to take a step closer to living in the GNU world entirely.”
This gives me a renewed impetus for Project Smith, which I have picked up to work on once again.
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