July 18th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
451 CAOS Theory has a fun analysis of national open source adoption and support in European countries, written as if it were the soccer European Cup, to declare the “Open Source Champions of Europe.”
Author Matthew Aslett places the teams in qualifying groups, compares their success in moving to open source and open standards, and declares a winner for each matchup. The “teams” proceed through further matches until an overall champion is declared.
The final match occurs between two true heavyweights, and is ultimately determined by the strength and number of open source companies operating successfully in the country determined as champion (and which I won’t spoil here…)
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Open Source Champions of Europe
July 16th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
It’s been a long time since I mentioned OSAF or Chandler here, but the project continues to develop and grow and progress toward a 1.0 release.
The website (built on TWiki) has a section I just noticed called User Stories, which shows how real people are benefiting from Chandler every day. It’s great to see the variety of tasks to which Chandler is suited and it’s also helpful in thinking about how it can fit into your daily work flow.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Wiki | Comments Off on Chandler User Stories
July 15th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
With plenty of beta releases over a long testing cycle, we can expect a polished and stable OpenOffice.org 3.0 this September.
GullFOSS announces OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta 2 was released yesterday.
You can download it for testing here.
I’ve been using the earlier beta with great success on my Mac and some Windows boxes. It seems about ready for primetime use already.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice 3.0 Beta 2
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 25th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Combining two of my interests, Kay Ramme of Sun has created “ODF@WWW,” an ODF Wiki. It includes some of the capabilities I had envisioned in my post about an OpenOffice wiki extension, and adds some cool new ideas of Ramme’s own.
Thinking about the rich editing ability of OpenOffice, and the lightweight collaboration of a wiki, Ramme “understood that these two approaches may be married to become an “ODF Wiki”, combing their strengths – simple editing and simple publishing – while eliminating their weaknesses…”
He jumped right into the project: “I installed an Apache webserver, enabled WebDAV, did some (hacky) bash scripting, and got the following.”
It’s a great start, and I am looking forward to what Ramme develops next with this project.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Wiki | Comments Off on ODF Wiki
June 24th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Frank Mau observes a rapid increase in downloads of OpenOffice.org. He writes, “Looking back on our last download numbers we can see them increasing version by version. We grew over 20% from Version 2.3.1 to 2.4.0. Now the 2.4.1 started and it looks good to beat our own record.”
He credits the quality of the software, and the new, more easily navigated website as major reasons for this increase.
“OpenOffice.org is a good product, for free and localized in many languages. We have extensions to extend office functionality if needed…
“Another factor is the one-download-click that enables the user to get the download starting with one-click from the homepage or the download main-page. In numbers, before we started with the one-click and the redesign of the pages 10% of visitors started a download of OpenOffice.org after visiting the homepage. After the introduction of the one-click and the other web-changes 20%.”
I’d add that OpenOffice is approaching a tipping point. More and more users are telling their friends, requesting it at work, or even standardizing on OOo across their entire company. This creates significant knock-on effects and substantial longterm growth.
With the upcoming release of version 3.0 (beta available now for testing) that includes a native version for Mac OS X, I expect these numbers to reach yet another plateau.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice Download Boom
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 12th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The famous OpenOffice PDF Importer Extension is now available in beta form for OpenOffice.org 3.0, announces Erwin Tenhumberg (among others).
From its home on the extensions website: “The PDF Import Extension allows modifying existing PDF files for which the original source files do not exist anymore. PDF documents are imported in Draw and Impress to preserve the layout and to allow basic editing. It is the perfect solution for changing dates, numbers or small portions of text.”
Not all features are complete yet, but this is a major step forward in providing very useful capabilities to OOo users.
Erwin also highlights the cool Hybrid PDF capability it provides, and which I’ve written about recently:
“Once the extension is installed, the PDF export feature shows a new option at the bottom as well. With the Sun PDF Import Extension, OpenOffice.org allows creating so-called “hybrid files”. These are PDF files that also include the ODF content, i.e. the original source document. As a consequence, everybody can view these hybrid files with a simple PDF viewer. However, OpenOffice.org users can also edit these PDF files without any information loss, since OpenOffice.org will simple recognize and open the ODF content instead of trying to import the PDF information.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
June 11th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
From a post on EdTech, I was introduced to a collection of Success Stories of Free Software in Schools.
They have collected a number of links to articles about Linux adoption in schools, and also note adoptions of Moodle and other FOSS apps.
This reminds me, I have not been keeping my open source adoptions page updated lately, but it’s tough to keep track as so many places are now making the switch! (And there are many listings on the OpenOffice.org major deployments wiki page to keep track of too.)
Posted in Drupal, Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Success Stories of Free Software in Schools