November 18th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
With Appleseed, Elgg, Mugshot, BuddyPress and others, I’m seeing a lot of development activity around open source social networking.
Following this back to Appleseed, the very first attempt at an open source social networking platform that I personally discovered, brought me to a post on Marc’s Voice blog titled “How to Build the Open Mesh.”
A broad treatise on the subject and a strategic map, the linked post is actually a table of contents to ten detailed chapters on the topic:
“I have created a series of blog posts which attempts to map out many of the issues, constructs, technologies and standards required to build out the open mesh.
“Each post has a chart showing how the particular area I’m focusing on – looks vis a vis one’s ID and profile record. Then I started to imagine what these charts would look like – overlaid on top of each other.
“Each one of the posts maps out who the major players are, who are the dudes and dudesses down in the trenches doing the work and how do I see all these areas meshing together.
“So here is the Table of Content on the series. Please send me any input, feedback, corrections, additional names and players and lets all build the open mesh – together.”
When people talk about “Web3.0,” I imagine this is what they mean. Not just the read/write web, not just a giant semantic database like the Semantic Web, but rather the combination of both those things with a layer of personal human data and relationship graphs. It’s huge, fascinating, and will keep us busy for the next decade or more.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Social Software | Comments Off on Open Source Social Networking: The Open Mesh
November 17th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
ODF@WWW, Kay Ramme’s wiki project built on OpenOffice and ODF, has been accepted as an official incubator project, Ramme announces.
He presented it at the recently-concluded OpenOffice.org Conference in Beijing and writes, “Since last week ODF@WWW is an Official Incubator Project 🙂 You find it’s home page at http://odf-at-www.openoffice.org.”
Integration with and adoption of Web 2.0 concepts has been an important development strategy for OOo, and this is a strong adaptation of wiki concepts into the familiar word processor paradigm. Its growth should be interesting to observe and groundbreaking in many ways.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Wiki | Comments Off on ODF@WWW Wiki Becomes an Official Incubator Project
November 13th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Ian Lynch, a longtime OOo community member and founder of The INGOTs project, recently returned from Malaysia, where he studied the government’s strategy to adopt open source. He describes his experience in “Malaysian Government’s World Leading Open Source Strategy“:
“My recent trip to Malaysia at the invitation of Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI) provided a great insight into the Malaysian Government’s strategy to move all public administration to Open Source software. The Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) and the Open Source Competency Center (OSCC) published implementation guidelines in August 2008. In contrast with political strategies that are more about presentation and spin, this publication is a refreshing object lesson in planning for change, taking into account the existing position and infrastructure.”
Malaysia has been talking about migrating to open source for several years now. Unlike some other countries, however, Malaysia has also taken concrete steps in the form of pilot projects. It has reached some very positive conclusions:
“In 5 pilots across 4 ministries, savings reported were
- 80% on software licensing costs
- 58% in development and consultancy
- 7% in software support
- 31% overall.”
Lynch concludes “Malaysia shows that… putting the needs of the tax payer before those of shareholders of private companies is a responsibility governments ought to be taking more seriously.” He describes Malaysia’s growth toward a technology leadership position in Southeast Asia, and how open source has played a key role in that process.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Ian Lynch on Malaysia’s Open Source Strategy
November 12th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
BuddyPress is a collection of plugins for WordPress Multi-User edition that provides social profiles and networking features. Users, groups, blogs, activity, friends, and all the normal features are included, with a very clean user interface.
A BuddyPress test site is online to let interested parties see how it works in action. (It even includes a group interested in open source social networking, including competitors like Elgg and others, which is cool.)
Just as WordPress itself brought open source blogging to the mainstream, it looks like BuddyPress could do the same for distributed, open source social networking. This will be a fascinating, innovative, and in my mind, long-awaited development.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on BuddyPress: Open Source Social Networking
November 11th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
An OpenOffice.org press release on PRWeb announces, “The OpenOffice.org Community passed the ten million downloads mark for the latest version of its software, just four weeks after the launch on October 13th.”
John McCreesh elaborates: “We were delighted to hit a million downloads in the first two days. Four weeks later, we have hit ten million, and we are still seeing an amazing 250,000 – 350,000 downloads a day. For a community with no advertising budget, this is an astonishing level of product awareness around the world.”
This is the fastest download rate of any version of OpenOffice to date, and has probably only been exceeded by Firefox 3 among all open source software downloads. (See more download statistics here.)
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org 3.0 Achieves 10 Million Downloads
November 10th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Adrian Try has launched a new blog, Using a Different Office, to document his experiences with new office suite options, particularly focused on OpenOffice.org and Google Docs.
On using both OOo and Google Docs, Try describes his typical use pattern:
“At this point in time there is definitely a place for both installed and online office suites. I use both OpenOffice.org and Google Docs on a daily basis.
“Whenever I am creating a document that will ultimately be printed, I tend to use OpenOffice.org. Especially if the formatting is tricky or complicated…
“I use Google mainly for documents that are for information and reference. Its excellent search is very suitable for finding information stored in reference documents. I also use it for documents that are going to be used in email newsletters, web pages and blog posts (like this one). And I definitely use Google Docs whenever I want to collaborate with others on a document. I think this is Google Docs’ greatest strength.
“I often move the information I have been storing for reference into OpenOffice.org for consolidating, formatting and printing. I find by doing this I am helping me develop the valuable habit of separating content from formatting.”
In another interesting anecdote, Try describes how he migrated a small business from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org in one day without any advanced planning. It was a risky approach, but he was constrained when he learned the company already was running more copies of MS Office than they owned in licenses, and the management wanted to resolve that issue pronto:
“Despite the uncertainty of using unfamiliar software, and being thrown in the deep end, the staff handled the change well. Much better than I expected. On the second day one of the staff had a question about something that worked a little differently. The question was easily answered, and there were no more questions. Some staff preferred some of the differences.”
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
November 6th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
IBM’s Lotus Symphony was developed based on OpenOffice.org’s codebase and uses the same ODF (OpenDocument Format) as its standard file format.
To help users create attractive documents, IBM has released a number of ODF file templates for things like schedules, invoices, budgets, memos, letters and presentations. While promoted on Symphony’s website, these standard ODF files can be used in any compatible software suite, including OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice, KOffice and many others.
Download and enjoy!
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on ODF Templates from IBM
November 5th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Estimating the usage of most open source programs is difficult, if not impossible. However, it’s important to try to understand the size of the userbase and what their greatest needs are.
InternetNews.com reports that Ubuntu Linux has 8 million active users:
“In terms of numbers we’re very confident this is an 8 million plus user base of active users,” Chris Kenyon, director of business development at Canonical told InternetNews.com. “That is a hard thing to count and there are lots of issues about methodology for counting but I have seen nothing that sheds doubts on that.”
Ubuntu and Canonical are also healthy and growing in terms of their developer communities:
“There are other key metrics that Canonical is keen to point out, among them is their growing headcount of contributors and staff. Kenyon claimed that the number of people that are actually contributing lines of code continues to grow.
“We now have over 400 active contributors,” Kenyon said. “That’s on top of our own internal development team that is now at 120 plus developers.”
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Ubuntu Linux’s 8 Million Users
November 4th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
After reaching the 3 million mark in its first week, OpenOffice.org 3.0 exceeded 5 million downloads after two weeks, announces Meall Dubh.
5,290,166 to be exact. 83.8% of them for Windows, with a very strong showing for Mac and Linux (despite the fact that most Linux users get OOo from the built-in package managers, and lots of Mac users already run NeoOffice).
Another week has elapsed since these numbers were collected, so it will be interesting to see where the weekly download plateau ultimately settles.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OOo: 5 Million Downloads in Two Weeks
November 3rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Fortune Magazine’s Big Tech blog predicts the coming decline of Windows in “PC makers move closer to a post-Windows world“:
“In January, Hewlett-Packard will introduce a glossy black mini-laptop at retail for a mere $379. When it does, it will become the first major computer maker this decade (besides Apple, of course) to push a non-Windows PC in stores… This Linux-based version of the HP Mini 1000 will not slay Microsoft Windows. But it will add to a growing sense that the iconic operating system’s best days are behind it.”
Author Jon Fortt credits the “Windows Vista flop,” Apple’s enormous growth, competitors in the smartphone market and mini-laptops (“netbooks”) for breaking open major cracks in the Microsoft fortress. Specifically regarding netbooks, Fortt writes, “more than 35% of today’s mini-laptops run a non-Windows operating system,” which means this new fast-growing market segment will probably never come under the thumb of Microsoft. HP sees it as an opportunity to develop its own brand, instead of just the brands of others that make processors and operating systems, putting them in a better longterm position in the market.
“This is the part of the Windows Vista backlash that really matters,” said IDC analyst Richard Shim, who had recently seen HP’s Linux mini-laptop.”
A newly competitive marketplace for operating systems will bring out much more rapid innovation (look to the smartphone industry for a precedent), lower prices and more opportunity for new startups and existing companies to grow. I expect it also to boost open source, as a great way to quickly implement new products and services.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Mac, Open Source | 1 Comment »