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Miro is the internet video player and feed reader, bittorrent sharing, HD-capable open source king of the hill of media applications. Of course it’s available for the three major platforms, has a strong developer and user community, and is beloved by Boing Boing.
See the official release announcement in the Miro blog.
One by one, states and city governments in India are adopting ODF as their standard file format:
“India has already made a lot of progress with regard to ‘open standard.’ There are about 10 states which are fairly pro-active and have made significant progress in implementing e-governance projects.
“For instance, the Department of IT, Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi, adopted the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard, and as a result has saved around 78 percent in costs by eliminating the need to purchase proprietary office suites or licenses. This has encouraged other government departments to adopt open standards instead of proprietary softwares.
“The high court of Allahabad is another case in point. It moved all its electronic documents to ODF because it felt that it was cost-effective and safe to store its documents in a format which is open and also to carry out any kind of information exchange through open standards. So is the case with the West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu governments.
“Even the Election Commission decided to migrate to OpenOffice.org after the elections of May-June 2006.”
This weekend I traveled to Boston to attend FOSScamp, a BarCamp-style event held at the Hotel at MIT. FOSScamp was sponsored by Canonical and led into the Ubuntu Developer Summit, happening this week at the same venue.
I represented the OOo community in an informal way and gave my talk “Guerrilla Marketing OpenOffice.org in the New York Metro Newspaper” in front of a diverse audience including KDE developers, an FSF representative, and a number of others. It was well-received and brought to light the fact that lots of open source projects are working on evangelizing/marketing, but that we could improve our effectiveness by pooling our efforts and sharing our experiences more broadly.
One of the highlights of the weekend was meeting Mark Shuttleworth, whom I had communicated with only once (by email) before. He is a charismatic and well-organized leader, which I think is reflected in the successful, rapid growth of the Ubuntu community.
Lots of other great, intelligent and hard-working people attended FOSScamp, and the atmosphere of collaboration and openly exchanging ideas and knowledge will lead to the continued great success of the open source movement.
Edit: A few other mentions of FOSScamp have popped up today. Ars Technica picks up a quote from Shuttleworth’s introductory remarks about “brilliant flashes of innovation” that occur because of the free sharing of ideas in the open source world, and Corey Burger summarizes FOSScamp on the Ubuntu Fridge.
The Chandler Project has been a long term interest of mine, and it seems the same is true for Robert Scoble. He publishes a long interview “Collaborative Chandler Revealed,” covering the recent preview release of the application and the development process that has brought it to this point.
It’s a 51-minute video, so I haven’t watched it yet… but the text gives a decent overview and also links to Ted Leung’s detailed post on Scoble’s OSAF visit.
I particularly like the section where they discuss “turning email into a wiki,” since this is an idea I also had a few years ago. Basically, I use saved email messages as a database of information, so using the wiki interface to manage and modify that would work very well for me. Chandler developers and Scoble see it in about the same way.
Leung writes,
“In the interview, Robert latched onto the edit/update features of Chandler. These are still in a primitive state, but you can see the value of them already. He had a great summary of how it works – “you turn e-mail into a wiki.” Exactly. You can create and share a collection with any number of people, and they can all edit/update items in that collection and see each other’s changes, without groveling through endless e-mail reply chains. At one point in the interview, Mimi said something about e-mail being the hub of people’s usage. Truth of the matter is that e-mail is more like the glue that holds batches of information together. Collections of items with edit/update is a different kind of glue.”
I’ve been using Chandler on the desktop and via the hub service, and it is useful and very polished for a “preview”-level release. Reading about the capabilities and ideas that will emerge in its future has further reinforced my perception from regular use: this program is a new paradigm that will vastly improve my workflow and reshape the landscape around it.
Projity’s press release announces that OpenProj has already been downloaded 100,000 times, and InfoWorld also covers this milestone in “Preview: OpenProj brings free, robust project management to the desktop.”
I like InfoWorld’s summary of their review:
“OpenProj performs all the essential tasks you’d do with a desktop project management application. That, and cross-platform availability, would justify Projity charging even a portion of Microsoft Project’s $999 price tag. But with OpenProj’s free access, it’s just one more compelling case for going open source on the desktop.”
And InfoWorld’s final verdict,
“OpenProj, an excellent open source desktop alternative to Microsoft Project, reads native Project files while providing an especially precise scheduling engine. The OpenProj solution has essential project management tools, including Gantt Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, Earned Value costing – all surrounded by a customized user interface.”
You can download OpenProj for all platforms from Sourceforge.
David Pogue reviews the XO for the New York Times.
“The XO laptop, now in final testing, is absolutely amazing, and in my limited tests, a total kid magnet. Both the hardware and the software exhibit breakthrough after breakthrough — some of them not available on any other laptop, for $400 or $4,000.”
Pogue immediately sees the potential of the XO, especially through the way it has created new network- and group-centric paradigms of working and learning.
“Most of the XO’s programs are shareable on the mesh network, which is another ingenious twist. Any time you’re word processing, making music, taking pictures, playing games or reading an e-book, you can click a Share button. Your document shows up next to your icon on the mesh-network map, so that other people can see what you’re doing, or work with you. Teachers can supervise your writing, buddies can collaborate on a document, friends can play you in Connect 4, or someone across the room can add a melody to your drum beat in the music program. You’ve never seen anything like it.”
As many had hoped, developed world customers can now buy one of their own (more accurately, you can buy two, one shipped to you and one to a child in the developing world).
The XO is a formidable testament to the power and promise of open source, and a huge vote of confidence in the potential of millions of people around the world that have so far been left out of the information age. Its release is clearly going to be a world-changing event.
I finally met up in person with Alexandro Colorado, Spanish project lead in the Native Language Confederation, at OOo Con this year. We hit it off quite well and had some very interesting discussions. In one of his Conference follow-up posts, Alexandro mentioned my OOo Con talk on his blog.
“Ben’s talk “Case Study: OpenOffice.org Guerrilla Advertising in the New York Metro Newspaper” was simply amazing. Like I said, very little amount of resources were able to pull this through. I actually feel proud I donated to his cause and will definitely donate again. He mentioned also interesting experience of on-line marketing and how most of the people that talk don’t really have an impact and the donors are usually the silent guys of the crowd.”
I’ve put the slides of my talk (zipped ODP file) online for everyone to download and share and remix however you like. If you want a formal license for them, they’re “public domain.” Enjoy, and thanks for helping promote OpenOffice.org!
Kiberpipa provided video recording services for this year’s OOo Con sessions and contributed other media coverage as well.
“The Kiberpipa team is happy to announce that we recorded all the lectures, and made interviews with OpenOffice.org contributors and the organizers of the conference.”
From Slovenia, Kiberpipa is a not-for-profit organization working with open source software and CC-licensed content that has been filming OOo Cons for the past three years.
In their own words, “Kiberpipa is an NGO multimedia cyber center supporting and promoting opensource and free flow of information and knowledge. Adhering to this idea, we work and strive to work with opensource tools only. For OOoCon 2007, we use Ubuntu Linux distribution on our machines, for video editing we use a free opensource video-editing software called Cinelerra (and we also work on packages for Ubuntu). As you can see, we also support, use and promote Creative Commons licensing.”
Bruce Byfield writes European Union sponsors new FOSS education portal for Linux.com.
“Heavily funded by the European Union, the Science, Education, and Learning in Freedom (SELF) consortium launched the beta version of its site this week with the motto, “Be SELFish, share your knowledge!” By the end of the year, SELF hopes to develop into the Wikipedia of free learning materials, with a heavy emphasis on material about open standards and free and open source software (FOSS).”
The program is pan-EU, but also pan-Earth: “The original consortium consisted of the Internet Society Netherlands; the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (University of Catalonia) in Spain; Free Software Foundation Europe; the University of Gothenburg in Sweden; the Internet Society Bulgaria; the Fundación Vía Libre of Argentina, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India.”
A cool project, and I wish them great success!
After years of searching for software to help organize me, and watching Chandler grow and evolve, the Open Source Applications Foundation has released Chandler Preview (version 0.7). (Download page is here.) I haven’t seen a formal release announcement for it yet, but this version was posted on Friday and today is the previously-declared release date.
I’ve got high hopes for this application as a new paradigm in organization that will replace my Inbox with something more effective… and in some ways its design concepts seem to have already influenced other applications, with even Apple’s website mentioning Chandler in several places!