August 21st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
InformationWeek tries to guess what Linux will look like in another four years in “What Linux Will Look Like In 2012.”
The most interesting and important issue will be continued efforts, and successes, in simplifying Linux for use by regular people who don’t care that much about computers.
IW emphasizes this first in its piece: “The single biggest change you’ll see is the way Linux evolves to meet the growing market of users who are not themselves Linux-savvy, but are looking for a low-cost alternative to Microsoft (or even the Mac). That alone will stimulate enormous changes across the board, but there are many other things coming down the pike in the next four years, all well worth looking forward to.”
The growing wave of ultra-mobile PCs (or “netbooks”), inspired by the OLPC XO and led by Asus’ Eee PC, may prove to be the first foothold Linux makes in its assault on the end-user space. “By 2012, it’ll be a brand name unto itself, thanks to the exploding netbook market, where Linux has proven itself to be a solid way to build an inexpensive computing platform. By that time, many first-tier manufacturers like Dell ought to be offering such devices — and those that already do (like HP) will probably be looking seriously at offering more Linux-based gear.”
(Ubuntu also sees the potential of netbooks, and has launched “Ubuntu Netbook Remix” to address this market.)
In conlusion, IW sees Linux increasing its technical strengths, consolidating its current markets, and successfully branching out to new areas. Better usability and pricing will ensure it rapid and sustainable growth.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on InformationWeek Predicts Linux’s Future
August 20th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Metamorphosis, based in Macedonia, announces that Poland’s Ministry of Education recommends open source software for the country’s schools. As one of the more populous members of the EU with over 40 million people, this could have a big impact!
In addition to general support of open source, the Ministry also specifically recommended OpenOffice.org:
“The Ministry recommended in a statement that schools and universities use OpenOffice. The application suite is sufficiently mature and advanced to be used for teaching and for office use in education and science institutes. “OpenOffice can successfully substitute proprietary applications and will result in significant savings on licenses.”
This recommendation is the culmination of a 10-month project in which 99 schools and over 4,500 students were introduced to FOSS by volunteer members of the Free and Open Software in Schools campaign.
“About 30 percent of the schools visited by the Wioo w Szkole [Free and Open Software in Schools] campaign have switched at least partly to Open Source. Most of these schools configured their PCs to run a GNU/Linux distribution such as Ubuntu, Suse or Mandriva, alongside Windows.”
More information is available at the Open Source Observatory website.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Poland’s Ministry of Education Recommends Open Source
August 19th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Tom’s Guide offers a visual tip collection for OpenOffice 2 and 3.
They noticed something we have long been keeping an eye out for: the early mainstream beginning to adopt OOo.
“We’ve talked up OpenOffice before in other articles, but the software is worth a closer look since more and more companies are beginning to dole it out to employees.”
The premise of the article is to support new OOo users: “Here, we’ll show you some simple tips and tricks so that you can use OpenOffice in the easiest and most efficient way possible. All the information that we’ve included works just as well on OpenOffice 2 as it does on the new beta 3 version. It’s straightforward and easy — we promise.”
Using 20 screenshots and a short descriptive text for each, Tom’s Guide covers lots of basic functionality and helps new users get accustomed to the software. It will make a good reference to help the coming waves of new users get comfortable on their new suite.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »
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 13th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Open Malaysia Blog announces a major OpenOffice migration: the Malaysian state of Pahang will move all its computers to OpenOffice.
“The driving force for this migration seems to be cost of proprietary software and the fear of unlicensed software. OpenOffice.org is the obvious solution to these two pressing problems (thanks, BSA!) What is good is that they have chosen ODF by default, and they are not changing the file format to the binary proprietary ones.
“What is interesting is that the public sector in Malaysia is moving towards FOSS independently from any government directive or mandate, so no amount of whining would derail our government from choosing and making their choice. Its a simple business decision, and the market has decided.”
Nowhere could I find how many computers will be involved or other details, but this is yet another promising development in Malaysia, which seems to be growing into an open source stronghold year by year.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Malaysian State of Pahang Adopts OpenOffice.org
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 11th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
On Friday of last week, Chandler 1.0 was released:
“We are pleased to announce the release of Chandler 1.0, a “Note-to-Self Organizer” designed for personal and small-group task management and calendaring.
“Chandler consists of a desktop application and Chandler Hub, a free sharing service and web application. You can also download and run your own Chandler Server.
“Chandler is open source and standards-based.”
Congratulations to the development team! It’s been a long trip, breaking new ground in software concepts (both development-side and user interface), and they deserve a lot of credit for what they’ve built.
Posted in Open Source | Comments Off on Chandler 1.0 Released
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 7th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Trolltech Labs Blog announces a new ODF writer module shipping with Qt 4.5. This will make it much easier for applications built on the Qt toolkit to write ODF, as a peer of plain text, HTML and PDF.
Thomas Zander writes, “For end users the biggest advantage of the uptake of ODF is that more and more applications will standardize on this one format and thus applications will be much more interoperable. OpenOffice and KOffice are the early adopters here, I expect that many more applications will start to generate or consume ODF in some form or other. For example to export an abstract dataset to a nicely formatted document ready for printing, or the web.”
Zander also shares the idea that ODF will make a better format for emails than HTML does, since it provides more, and more explicit, layout options. I wonder what email client will first adopt this? It seems natural to first write a plugin for Thunderbird, and then if it gains traction, it could become a core part of that and other email applications.
Back to the heart of the matter, Zander explains what the new Qt module does:
“To speed up ODF recognition, Qt 4.5 will ship with an ODF writer. Qt’s text module turns into a one-stop document generation API where you can use QTextCursor to create your document via a nice API and you can then export the created QTextDocument to ODF, ready to be opened by any opendocument implementation. Naturally exporting to plain text and html are still supported, as is printing to PDF… Support for writing ODF in Qt sets a trend that we believe in the OpenDocument Format and we think its useful to have for our customers, the open source community and all end-users out there.”
Broad-brush conclusion: lots of effort is being put into ways to read and write ODF files, meaning the format continues to build momentum and will become an ever-better solution for communication with people around the world.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on ODF in KDE’s Qt
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