March 26th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
John McCreesh sent a note and blogged this morning to highlight the ongoing success of OpenOffice.org 3.0: it has been downloaded over 50 million times since its release last fall:
Yesterday – Document Freedom Day 2009 – we reached our 50 millionth download of OpenOffice.org from http://download.openoffice.org since 3.0 was released. Celebrate!
Interest in OpenOffice and its exposure to more users continues to increase, building a positive upward spiral of adoption and development of the application suite.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice 3.0 Exceeds 50 Million Downloads
March 24th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
For ZDNet, Joe Brockmeier writes Firefox Inches Toward 50%, Safari Holds Steady.
Brockmeier reviewed the statistics from W3Schools, which draws a developer crowd and thus tends to skew more toward Firefox than many sites.
Firefox climbed to 46.4% in February, while the various versions of IE dropped by 1.2% to 43.6%.
Looking at other sites that track browser usage, the numbers for Firefox were lower, but the trend was identical. Firefox and Safari are growing in use share, while MS IE is shrinking every month.
This means the task of developing websites will get easier over time, as the standards become stronger and IE, which ignores many of the web standards, will fade to the point it can be safely ignored.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Firefox Inches Toward 50% Share
March 19th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Several years ago, the French Gendarmerie police force began its migration to open source for the 90,000 desktop computers used by its 105,000 police officers. In a recent followup (Gendarmerie Saves Millions With Open Desktop and Web Applications), OSOR.eu finds the Gendarmerie continues to succeed with its open source strategy:
The French Gendarmerie’s gradual migration to a complete open source desktop and web applications has saved millions of euro, says Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard. “This year the IT budget will be reduced by 70 percent. This will not affect our IT systems.”
The migration still continues now, as new systems are bought to replace older machines. In this way, change is managed as a gradual process, while the general rule against buying new software licenses (using legacy licenses until they are replaced with open source) means that money is being saved immediately.
“If one of us wants a new PC, it comes with Ubuntu. This encourages our users to migrate.” Guimard estimates Gendarmerie since 2004 has saved 50 million euro on licences for standard office applications, hardware and maintenance.
The decision in 2004 to move to open source, was raised by one of the Gendarmerie’s accountants. “Microsoft was forcing us to buy new software licences. This annoyed our accountant, who tried OpenOffice.” According to Guimard the proprietary software maker then started lobbying the Gendarmerie, which is how the general manager found out about the experiments. “When he saw OpenOffice worked just as well and was available for free, it was he that decided it should be installed on all 90,000 desktops.”
After sampling open source with OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird, the Gendarmerie took another step and migrated to Linux as well.
In 2007 the Gendarmerie decided to replace even the desktop operating system. Guimard: “Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users. Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »
March 17th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
An open source lifestream software, Sweetcron, has been created by Tokyo-based web producer Yong Fook. Sweetcron can be seen in use on his site YongFook.com.
Similar to FriendFeed, Facebook’s activity stream, Twitter, Mugshot, and other services, it’s great to see a fully open source, distributed version of the concept arise. I am looking forward to experimenting with it further.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Social Software | Comments Off on Sweetcron
March 13th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Miro and Songbird have both received updates in the past week. Both are projects inspired by Firefox (and both are or were built on Firefox’s coding platform XULRunner), and each one takes the open web concept into new territory–Miro to open video, and Songbird to music.
Miro announced it has reached approximately one million users, and Songbird has recorded nearly one million downloads of its latest version.
Miro has also announced its co-sponsorship of the Open Video Conference, to be held in New York City on June 19 and 20 this year. (When I will probably be out of town for a family wedding, alas.)
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Miro and Songbird Updates
March 12th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Wired’s blog reports that Freescale is developing ARM-based netbooks with planned retail prices of about $200:
Freescale is racing to get netbooks out this summer, featuring the company’s chips, that would offer up to eight hours of battery life, be significantly thinner than existing designs and priced under $200.
“We are taking dead aim at the netbook space,” says Glen Burchers, marketing director at Freescale.”The value proposition that Freescale brings is dramatically lower power consumption and even lower prices.”
The price and features should attract great interest from consumers. Even more interesting in terms of computing paradigms is the fact that Windows cannot run on ARM chips, while Linux and Google Android will be perfectly suited for the platform.
Linux is already growing quickly due to pre-installation on netbooks, but Freescale machines will further accelerate its rise, since the temptation to install Windows won’t exist at all due to these technical limitations.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on $200 Netbooks on the Horizon?
March 6th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
According to the latest ODF Alliance Newsletter, the UK and Latvia have made moves in support of OpenDocument Format (ODF).
The CIO’s office in the UK has created a new page called Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan. The ODF Alliance summarizes the UK CIO’s position as follows:
The United Kingdom has joined the growing ranks of governments that have now endorsed the use of ODF. Under the “Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan” the UK government will specify requirements by reference to open standards and require compliance with open standards in solutions where feasible. The government indicated it will support the use of ODF. It will also work to ensure that government information is available in open formats, and it will make this a required standard for government websites.
Earlier, Latvia made its decision to endorse and adopt ODF:
Latvia’s standards body, Latvian Standard (LVS), has officially approved ODF as a national standard. Latvia now joins Sweden, Brazil, Croatia, Italy, South Korea, and South Africa as countries whose national standards bodies have formally approved ODF. Taiwan’s approval of ODF by its Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection (BSMI) was announced 21 January 2009.
Still waiting for something formal to be announced by the US Federal Government, but here’s hoping!
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | 2 Comments »
March 5th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
The OpenOffice.org project has now launched its own centralized blog aggregationg planet at OpenOffice.org Planet.
This is in addition to two others I know and read, Planet Go-OO.org and PlanetOpenOffice.org.
They do seem to overlap considerably, so perhaps this new official entrant can help to consolidate the environment a bit.
Posted in Free Culture, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on New OpenOffice Planet Aggregator
March 4th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Today is the first full day of DrupalCon DC, by far the largest DrupalCon to date. Last year’s US conference in Boston had 800 attendees, and this year over 1,300 tickets sold out a month before the event.
This morning Dries gave his keynote on the state of Drupal, including plans for Drupal 7 and how Drupal and its community can contribute to the future of the internet (the “semantic web”, “web 3.0”, the “giant global graph” or whatever else it may be called).
He also reviewed the history of Drupal, which stood out because it illustrated just how quickly the community and the power of the software have grown.
Many many Drupal experts and development companies are in attendance, and all of them seem to be quite busy–converting most of the web to Drupal, it seems!
Posted in Drupal, Free Culture, Open Source, Social Software | Comments Off on DrupalCon DC 2009
March 3rd, 2009 Benjamin Horst
On Saturday February 28th the New York City Drupal users’ group held its sixth DrupalCamp NYC at NYU Poly in Brooklyn.
I’ve been to four or five so far and each one was great. Following the unconference format of a BarCamp, DrupalCamps always teach me something new and useful, as well as provide an opportunity to enhance the social and business ties of the community.
Unique to this latest camp, a New York Times reporter and photographer wrote a piece on DrupalCamp 6. (Yes, I am visible in the extreme top-left of the photo.) They did a good job understanding what goes on at DrupalCamp and some of the core motivations of the community, pulling some good quotes from interviewees:
Andy Thornton, 36, a programmer from Astoria, Queens, who works at the United Nations, said the egalitarian nature of Drupal was “almost the epitome of what the Web promised at the beginning. This is very much a democracy. It doesn’t have a top-down authority.”
Posted in Drupal, Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on DrupalCamp in the NY Times