April 23rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Collanos Workplace is a really interesting peer-to-peer application for creating ad-hoc project workspaces to store files, notes and other shared data. You can invite other users into your workspaces and maintain a common repository of documents.
Collanos is built on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform and is thus inherently cross-platform, like most teams today. Apple even featured Collanos in its list of OS X applications yesterday.
Sad to say, Collanos is not open source, but it is free of charge and promises to remain so forever.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Mac, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Collanos Workplace
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.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org at FISL 9.0
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.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Mark Shuttleworth on Wubi and Open Source on Windows and Mac
March 17th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Swapnil Bhartiya, of the EFY News Network, interviews Matthias Ettrich, the founder of KDE.
Ettrich talks about how he started KDE in 1996 to provide a Free Software answer to Windows 95, and how it has grown until today, when KDE offers a generally superior environment to Microsoft’s: “Try to compare Windows XP with KDE 3: nobody in their right mind would choose Windows over GNU/Linux based on the desktop experience alone.” (Why he specifically mentions the previous version of each desktop environment, I’m not sure.)
He also points out some of the remaining obstacles for Free Software: “Microsoft Office is still a major hurdle; we need more governments and companies to have the bravery to standardise on truly open formats. A proprietary undocumented text format as the de facto standard — and that’s what .doc is — is a shame for all parties involved. It’s like using a special patented ink that can only be read with special patented sun glasses.” (KDE is promoting ODF, as one of its earliest and strongest backers.)
He’s also optimistic about India’s future as an open source powerhouse. “India is a major commercial software development centre, home to some of the world’s largest software companies, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t play a similar role in the Free Software space.”
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on EFYtimes Interviews Matthias Ettrich
March 13th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Jim Zemlin interviews Mark Shuttleworth for the Linux Foundation.
It’s a very thorough and valuable interview. A few choice quotes:
Shuttleworth on his decision to start Ubuntu: “I had sort of assumed that Linux would power ahead to become more part of the every day sort of computing experience and when I saw the folks who were driving Linux at the time in 2004 weren’t really interested in taking Linux to the mass market, I thought there was an opportunity to do that… And that then led to the genesis of Ubuntu.”
Shuttleworth also explains what he thinks it takes to create a successful open source community: “If you look at the projects that are successful, that produce inspiring work and that produce it predictably and address issues and manage change well, I think they do two things very well and the first is, obviously, they have very good technical leadership.
“Whether that comes from a company, whether it comes from an individual or whether it comes from a collection of individuals, it’s really important that there be a meritocratic process of letting the best thinker, the best idea, the best work effectively bubble to the top.
“But they also do something else and that is that they manage a very positive social process. I think the best projects recognize that they have to maintain really constructive, positive relationships internally and with other projects if they want to continue to have really good ideas and get really good input.”
Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu project has mastered both sides of the open source coin, and it shows in the quality of Ubuntu releases and the enthusiasm community members and Ubuntu users share for the software.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Linux Foundation Interviews Mark Shuttleworth
March 7th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Ubuntu has launched a new public feedback website called Ubuntu Brainstorm. Based in part on Dell’s IdeaStorm website (which led to great public demand for Dell to ship Ubuntu-based computers), Ubuntu Brainstorm is an easy way for people to submit suggestions and ideas to the project, to comment on other submitted ideas, and to vote for those they would like to support.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Ubuntu’s Brainstorm
February 28th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
LinuxWorld calls SCaLE 6x the “Best Yet.”
SCaLE is a very community-oriented event that fosters a lot of nuts-and-bolts interaction. “The goal of SCaLE has always been to serve Southern California by bringing together as many regionally relevant community groups, Open Source project advocates and enthusiasts, plus curious outsiders, to Open Source together as possible. SCaLE is a local tradition, organized and managed year around by a core committee of dedicated local volunteers…”
I attended SCaLE 4x, two years ago, and had a great time. It’s great to see non-profit projects with booths just as big and given equal treatment among those of large companies like Google and IBM. And it’s good to see the big company booths happily coexisting and attracting lots of attention from the individual open source enthusiasts and project developers, just like the small project booths do.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | 1 Comment »
February 27th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Jessica Hupp writes “Top 5 Sub-$300 Laptops Compared” on the Virtual Hosting Blog. “Armed with efficiency, open source software, and durable design, these devices have a lot to offer. Children, road warriors, and curious gadget freaks would love any one of these laptops.”
The OLPC XO and the Asus Eee have been on my radar for a while now, but the Elonex ONE is completely new to me. The Intel Classmate PC and Zonbu round out the group of five.
As a category, very low cost subnotebooks running Linux and open source are a major development of the last few years. The XO created this market and still leads it, with the best hardware and an extremely innovative software platform. However, since almost all of these run Linux, it is clearly the start of a new market that will eat into sales of PCs for many home users, and gradually displace Windows from below.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on 5 Sub-$300 Laptops Compared
February 21st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
A few old news articles that I’d nevertheless like to catalog here today:
InformationWeek writes, in mid-January, of Lenovo preinstalling Linux:
“Starting Jan. 14, the T61 and R16 Centrino ThinkPads will have the option of shipping with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, with OpenOffice.org included. A news item over at DesktopLinux.com revealed that the T61 will sport a Core 2 Duo T7205 2.0-GHz processor, 1 Gbyte of DDR2 RAM, an 80-Gbyte 5400 RPM hard drive — all for $949.” (Incidentally, choosing Linux will save a buyer $20 over Windows on the same hardware.)
Erwin Tenhumberg writes a status report on ODF that he titles “Dispelling Myths Around ODF.”
A very thorough article that debunks some of the FUD Microsoft has been spreading around ODF (though personally, I have not seen as much MS FUD as I expected–maybe their energy isn’t what it once was).
My favorite section is where Erwin lists some of the prominent applications that use ODF as their default, or one of their primary, formats. These include KOffice, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, IBM Lotus Symphony, Corel WordPerfect, Apple TextEdit, Google Docs, and plenty more.
Posted in GNU/Linux, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »