August 14th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
KDE 4.0 was designed to be a watershed rethink of the technologies providing the graphical user interface, and now KDE 4.1 will help to finish the transition to the new paradigm. North Davis Road describes some of the details in the post “Reimagining the Desktop.”
“Disruptive change comes from the unlikeliest of sources at times. It rarely, if ever, comes from established players in a space particularly commercial ones.”
The writing is a bit ill-organized, but the information in the article and the saga of KDE 4.x remain quite interesting.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on On KDE 4.1
August 12th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Linux.com interviews David Liu, founder of the gOS distribution, which is focused on simple end-user needs and can be found pre-installed on machines like the gPC and Cloudbook from Everex.
gOS is an operating system, but it’s also the name of the company that develops it, which is already profitable.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Linux.com Interviews gOS Founder David Liu
August 8th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The VAR Guy has been following Canonical/Ubuntu’s presence at the current LinuxWorld event, and predicts several possible moves for Canonical in the near future.
He sees Canonical developing server-oriented application relationships with vendors like IBM, Alfresco, and others, creating an appliance business, and promoting new Ubuntu netbooks (I’d love to see one that ships with stock Ubuntu, rather than the tweaked Linux versions most are offering now).
“Netbooks and MIDs [Mobile Internet Devices] are both important to Canonical, but company insiders say getting Netbooks into retail stores is a much bigger opportunity—since consumers already understand the sub-notebook market that Netbooks target.”
I see a nicely diversified revenue strategy emerging. Coupled with its current business of support, Canonical should see solid sustainable growth from these new initiatives.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Canonical and Ubuntu at LinuxWorld
August 6th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Wall Street Journal’s online MarketWatch announces a new IBM effort to promote open source desktops running its Notes and Symphony packages in “IBM, Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat to Deliver Microsoft-Free Desktops Worldwide“.
From the article, “Citing shifting market forces and the growing demand for economical alternatives to costly Windows and Office-based computers, the four leaders sense an ideal set of circumstances allowing Linux-based desktops to proliferate in the coming year. Linux is far more profitable for a PC vendor and the operating system is better equipped to work with lower cost hardware than new Microsoft technology.”
Greater profitability for PC vendors should be a significant factor for them to promote Linux-based computers, while the technical advantages of the open source platform, on cheap as well as expensive hardware, has long been clear already.
Further, every new Lotus Symphony user is compatible with the ODF standard, which means interoperability with OpenOffice.org and the entire constellation of other compatible applications. The more adoption IBM and the Linux vendors achieve here, the better for everyone.
Posted in GNU/Linux, ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on IBM Partners With Linux Distros to Deliver Notes, Symphony
July 30th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Gregdek writes a post to reassure the world of the strength of the relationship between OLPC and Fedora, and to point out that despite news mentions of Windows forcing its way onto OLPCs, that has not happened yet in the real world:
“OLPC has shipped over 300,000 units to kids around the world. They plan to ship at least another 50,000 more each month, and very likely more than that. It’s entirely possible that by the end of 2008, there will be a million OLPC systems deployed worldwide.
“Of those systems, 100% of them currently run Fedora, and 0% of them currently run Windows — despite the press clippings you may have read.
“The OLPC project is based on Fedora. The engineers at OLPC have invested thousands of person-hours in making Fedora a successful base for OLPC deployments. Fedora is now, and will continue to be, the base operating system for the OLPC project. Period.”
300,000 units distributed is a large number, but it hasn’t impressed the media as much as I would have expected. Nevertheless, I expect growth to continue at a healthy rate, especially as we see successes coming from the current adopters, and over time the project will come to receive its due recognition.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on OLPC and Fedora’s Strong Relationship
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 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
June 23rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Erwin Tenhumberg is (sadly) leaving Sun and this may be his last blog post there. It looks like he’s following a good opportunity at another company, and he hopes to continue blogging about open source in some form.
Today, he points out a number of ODF and OpenOffice.org successes, such as a download average in 2008 of 1.2 million copies of OOo per week (with recent weeks averaging closer to 2 million). He also writes:
“In addition, Asus, Acer and HP are now shipping laptops with OpenOffice.org pre-installed, and more and more organizations deploy OpenOffice.org in a large scale. Finally, according to Google file type searches like this one and this one, ODF is still clearly the market leading editable XML document file format. Thus, I’m sure ODF and OpenOffice.org have a bright future!”
All this he reports in the context of an “ODF Workshop” Microsoft will hold at its headquarters in the near future. Skepticism is healthy with Microsoft, but if they implement ODF honestly and completely (with none of their “embrace, extend, extinguish” behavior), this really is the victory bell for the ODF format.
Posted in GNU/Linux, ODF, OLPC, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on ODF Victory News Roundup
June 16th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The OLPC project has an active community right here in New York City. This past weekend they held a “Grassroots Jam” event including a code sprint to develop a new server for the platform:
“According to LXNY secretary Jay Sulzberger, the server will provide “automatic backups, end-to-end encryption and authentication of email, extra processing power for individual and group tasks, convenient Bitfrosting (working with the default OLPC security platform), and [working] with programs which today do not yet run on the XO-1 [laptop].”
See more information on the Grassroots Jam at the OLPC wiki site.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on OLPC in NYC
June 13th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Neelie Kroes is an EU bureaucrat well-known to the open source and tech communities, because she is the relentless force bringing Microsoft’s monopolistic abuses to justice:
“Ms. Kroes has fought bitterly with Microsoft over the last four years, accusing the company of defying her orders and fining it nearly 1.7 billion euros, or $2.7 billion, on the grounds of violating European competition rules.”
The New York Times reports on Kroes’ recent suggestion that businesses and governments use open standards and avoid being tied to a single software supplier:
“Her comments were the strongest recommendation yet by Ms. Kroes to jettison Microsoft products, which are based on proprietary standards, and to use rival operating systems to run computers.
“I know a smart business decision when I see one — choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed,” Ms. Kroes told a conference in Brussels. “No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one.”
She also encouraged the Netherlands (her home country) to continue moving toward open standards, and praised government agencies in Germany and France that have already done so (by migrating to Linux and/or OpenOffice.org).
The EU is fast escaping Microsoft’s orbit, and they may leapfrog the USA in this round of global techno-competition. Their large-scale adoption of open source will strengthen many software projects, and that will benefit software users around the world.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Neelie Kroes on Open Standards