February 20th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
WHDb writes “The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy–and Their Open Source Alternatives.”
Most of these programs are familiar old friends, like Ubuntu and OpenOffice, but the list includes some that are new to me, such as Archimedes CAD.
The list is mostly focused on open source programs to run on Windows, though most (yet, not all) of the key applications are cross-platform for Linux and Mac as well. (I maintain a list of my preferred FOSS programs for Mac OS X here.)
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on 50 Open Source Alternatives
February 19th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Groklaw interviewed Nicholas Reville about Miro and open online media. Miro, developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation, is an open source video player, BitTorrent client and podcast subscription tool based on the Mozilla platform.
In Reville’s own words, “It’s free; it’s open source; it’s made by a nonprofit which is the organization that I work for. And the idea behind Miro is to give you a comprehensive TV-like experience on your computer. And we’re trying to do that not just because we want to have a great experience for our users, which we do, but also because we’ve built the software in a very open, very democratic, very accessible way. The goal is to open up video online, to not have the same kind of gatekeepers and restrictions that creators face in traditional broadcasting, to not have those as television moves online.”
Miro was downloaded over 2 million times in 2007, and aims for 5 million downloads in 2008.
Reville has an expansive view of the mission of Miro. Beyond its core purpose, Miro also hopes to lift up other open source projects along with its growth: “What we’re really hoping is that open source, various open source projects can find ways of supporting each other, can connect users to other tools and projects that are going to be useful for them and can really raise each other up together. And so our collaboration with Mozilla is certainly doing that for us, and maybe someday we’ll be able to do that for another project.”
What a beautiful, useful program, and a model of the best of open source in its development process and its final product!
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Groklaw Interviews Nicholas Reville About Miro
February 14th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Sunday Times Online (of Sri Lanka) announces Sri Lanka will join the OLPC project and distribute 2 million XOs to its school children.
To my knowledge, this is the biggest roll-out to date. Further, it is being organized as a collaboration between the Sri Lankan government, world institutions, and private entities. From the article:
“This is being launched by One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a US based organisation in collaboration with the Education Department and several local and foreign financial, technological and academic institutions… Director OLPC Europe, Middle East and Asia Matt Keller, in an interview with The Sunday Times FT, said the World Bank has stepped in to fund a pilot project to introduce laptops as an educational tool in nine provinces in the island.”
Posted in Free Culture, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on Sri Lanka Joins OLPC
February 13th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Thankfully, the EU’s antitrust office functions much more effectively than does the US DOJ’s!
Groklaw reports on a new investigation the EU has begun into Microsoft’s tactics in promoting its MSOOXML file format, in EU Commission Investigating Microsoft’s MSOOXML Push. Beyond that, Groklaw has collected a large number of resources following the ODF vs MSOOXML contest:
“Now that it’s making headlines in the mainstream press that the EU Commission is investigating Microsoft’s behavior in trying to get MSOOXML accepted as an ISO “standard”, I want to simply remind the world that Groklaw has a permanent ODF/MSOOXML page, including a chronology, where all the events can be tracked, month by month, since the Massachusetts events began in January of 2005.”
Groklaw links to Andy Updegrove’s detailed article of a similar title, EU Initiates Investigation Against Microsoft OOXML Push. When companies try to corrupt and interfere with government bodies, as Microsoft did to Sweden during the initial MSOOXML standardization attempt last year, it’s clear the EU will come to their defense.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on Groklaw: “EU Commission Investigating Microsoft’s MSOOXML Push”
February 12th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
IBM is a staunch defender of open standards in IT these days, and has been one of the big supports of ODF (OpenDocument Format), the XML-based specification that should do for “office” documents what HTML has done for the web: make it totally agnostic to the software you use to create and consume data. ODF could break up another monopoly and bring a new wave of innovation to the realm of desktop and net-based computing.
Ars Technica reports on IBM’s announcement that ODF is superior to Microsoft’s MSOOXML:
“As governments around the world begin to establish IT procurement policies that favor open standards, the stakes in the document format dispute are rising. The trend towards mandatory standards adoption in government IT has led some to speculate that government agencies and companies that work closely with the public sector will begin to turn away from Microsoft’s deeply entrenched office offerings, instead adopting alternatives like IBM’s Lotus Notes, Sun’s StarOffice, or OpenOffice.org which use the OpenDocument Format (ODF). Microsoft has been seeking ISO approval for its own OOXML format in order to ensure that its software remains competitive.”
The strategic and market reasons are clear why an open standard (ODF) is better for customers than a closed standard, even one that masquerades as open (MSOOXML). But the issue is greater than that. The open standard, in this case, is also the technologically more advanced of the two.
“Citing technical and intellectual property issues, a growing number of critics believe that Microsoft’s standards are flawed, restrictive, not adequately aligned with existing standards, or not conducive to broad third-party support. They argue that Microsoft should adopt ODF rather than fragmenting the office document space with its own alternative.”
After years of dragging their heels, Microsoft has slowly moved toward supporting standard HTML, so we should demand the same with ODF. It’s best for customers, and any business that wants to thrive should do right by its customers.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on Ars Technica: IBM Calls MSOOXML Inferior
February 6th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Wade Roush writes about the OLPC XO for Xconomy.com in The XO Laptop: It’s the Software, Stupid.
“On YouTube, there is an 11-minute video of the veterinarian-assisted birth of a calf on a farm in Villa Cardal, Uruguay, a small town in a dairy-rich region four hours north of the capital, Montevideo… But what makes this particular video remarkable is that it was shot by a fourth-year student at Villa Cardal’s Public School 24, using the built-in camera and recording software on the student’s XO Laptop, within weeks of the machine’s arrival at the school last year.”
The OLPC project predicted students would use their XOs for numerous creative purposes and did not expect to know everything they would devise. This could be one of the first shining examples of how quickly the students will use their new tools to participate in the global cultural interchange on the internet.
It has been a key tenet that OLPC is a learning project, not a hardware project. “Almost every piece of software on the XO is designed to advance the constructivist belief that learning occurs most efficiently when it’s active, social, and exploratory, with constant feedback between instructors and learners and between learners themselves.”
Another tenet is the centrality of open source, in both hardware and software used by the project. “Virtually everything on the laptop, right down to the hardware drivers, is open-source–so that it can be shared and so that, ultimately, responsibility for maintaining the platform can be transferred from the foundation itself to the community of educators, students, and developers using the XO. “In open-source you strive to push everything upstream, because as soon as it’s upstream, it’s not your problem anymore, it’s the community’s problem,” says Bender. “That’s a great place to be. And we are trying to push as much upstream as possible, because we won’t be successful otherwise.”
In other words, they are not delivering a product, they are seeding the creation of a self-sustaining community of learners. This is the key to economic development just as it is to successful education. And it is going to have a huge cumulative impact on global well-being.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on XO Laptop: It’s the Software
January 30th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
XiTi Monitor provides the latest statistics for web browser usage share: Firefox continues to gain in Europe and everywhere else in the world.
While just a slight rise in the past few months, it reverses the slowdown in growth from the previous quarter. It was also enough to add another country to the 40% or higher club, which now includes Finland, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia. (Several other countries are close to reaching this plateau as well.)
XiTi reports, “After a period of stabilization from June to September 2007, Mozilla Firefox’s visit share, for the average of European countries of the XiTi perimeter, is again growing at the end of the year. Thus, over a one year vision, it gains 5 points in order to reach 28% in December 2007.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on XiTi Monitor: Firefox Usage Grows Again
January 18th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Today at the Googleplex in Silicon Valley is the largest day of presentations and meetings for the KDE 4.0 Release Party.
We flew in from New York to participate in the conference sessions, invited to help cement the collaboration efforts between many projects around the ODF standard. (Used by OpenOffice and KOffice, among many others, ODF provides a shared meeting ground for many open source communities, as well as corporate entities.)
Aaron Seigo’s presentation gave us an overview of the new additions to KDE. One of the features that I was most interested in learning about is the cross-platform capability of KDE 4.0 applications. With 4.0, Mac and Windows users will be able to run KDE applications natively on their platforms. Demos of Marble, KStar and a few other apps really impressed me–and I’m very much looking forward to using KOffice on my MacBook in the near future.
Memory footprint is also much more efficient in KDE 4.0. The Eee PC, with 512 MB of RAM and a 1 Ghz processor, can run KDE 4.0 with all the visual extras turned on. Aaron said many applications will run with 30-40% less RAM using KDE 4 than they did with KDE 3.
KDE 4.0 is targeted primarily at early adopters, distributions, testers and developers. KDE 4.1, scheduled for the middle of this year, will focus on end users and is clearly going to be a watershed in the global move to open source.
Posted in Announcements, Free Culture, ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on KDE 4.0 Release Party at Google
January 14th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization responsible for the Wikipedia, has announced plans to support ODF export from the MediaWiki wiki engine.
From the press release:
“This technology is of key strategic importance to the cause of free education world-wide,” said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “It will make it possible to use and remix wiki content for a variety of purposes, both in the developing and the developed world, in areas with connectivity and without.”
In this multi-stage project, the last will bring support for ODF.
“The third stage, planned for mid-2008, will be the addition of the OpenDocument format for word processors to the list of export formats. “Imagine that you want to use a set of wiki articles in the classroom. By supporting the OpenDocument format, we will make it easy for educators to customize and remix content before printing and distributing it from any desktop computer,” Sue Gardner explained. This work is funded through a US$40,000 grant by the Open Society Institute.
“The technology developed through this cooperation will be available under an open source license, free for anyone to use for any purpose. It ties into the MediaWiki platform, the open source technology that runs Wikipedia. As a result, thousands of wiki platforms around the world will have the option of providing the same services to their users.”
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, Wiki | Comments Off on Wikipedia to Support ODF
January 11th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Mary Lou Jepsen, the founding CTO of OLPC, recently left the project to help commercialize some of its innovative hardware in a new company she founded, Pixel Qi. One of its goals is to produce a laptop for $50 to $75!
Groklaw runs an interview with Jepsen about her plans.
Jepsen explains her plan: “I’m starting a company called Pixel Qi. Pixel Qi is currently pursuing the $75 laptop, while also aiming to bring sunlight readable, low-cost and low-power screens into mainstream laptops, cellphones and digital cameras. Spinning out from OLPC enables the development of a new machine, beyond the XO, while leveraging a larger market for new technologies, beyond just OLPC: prices for next-generation hardware can be brought down by allowing multiple uses of the key technology advances. Pixel Qi will give OLPC products at cost, while also selling the sub-systems and devices at a profit for commercial use.”
A great article, a fascinating person, and a world-changing idea!
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | 2 Comments »