June 10th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Firefox continues its growth into a true powerhouse. TG Daily writes, “Browser war gets uglier as Firefox is set to grab 20% share.” (By uglier, I interpret the article to mean, “more intense.”)
While Firefox is growing, so too is Safari. Yet Internet Explorer continues to fade:
“The most recent browser market share numbers released by Net Applications confirm further Firefox and Safari gains at the expense of Internet Explorer. According to the research firm, Mozilla is likely to hit a milestone this month by capturing one fifth of the browser market. A closer look, however, reveals that browser makers are using sophisticated strategies to aggressively push their browsers onto computers. It seems that the browser wars are heating up once again.”
In other good news, the browser market shift is also tied to a platform shift. Mac OS X is gaining marketshare against Windows, which brings more users to Safari and Firefox too:
“Another factor contributing to the rise of Safari and Firefox at the expense of IE comes from Mac market share growth. As more people switch to Macs, they use Safari or Firefox. Mac market share gains appear to directly translate to Safari browser gains and, to a smaller part, to Firefox for Mac.”
Posted in Free Culture, Mac, Open Source | Comments Off on Firefox Poised to Take 20% Marketshare
June 5th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Asustek, creator of the innovative and highly-popular ultra mobile Linux-based “Eee PC,” expects to double its sales next year (2009) to 10 million units. (Some models now use Windows XP instead of Linux, unfortunately.)
The Linux versions all include OpenOffice, which means millions of copies being distributed to new users around the world.
The new market it has defined, “ultra mobile PCs” is also set to explode: “The company, which had previously estimated that it would sell 5 million Eee PCs this year, forecasts low-cost PC sales are set to hit 20-30 million units globally in 2009, Asustek’s Chief Executive Jerry Shen told reporters.”
Many other companies have introduced Eee competitors, collecting marketshare on the margins, but the good news is that most of them also offer Linux as the default (or at least an optional) OS.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Eee Could Sell 10 Million Units Next Year
June 4th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Andrew Ziem, of OpenOffice.org Ninja, writes about OpenOffice’s upcoming PDF importing and hybrid PDF capabilities.
The capability will be delivered as an extension and will let you open and edit any PDF. It also supports a new format called a Hybrid PDF, which can be displayed by PDF viewers but edited by ODF editors.
Ziem gives credit where it’s due with regard to editing PDFs: “OpenOffice.org did not pioneer PDF import—not even in the open source market. Some of the work in OpenOffice.org is done by xpdf, a PDF viewer. To import PDFs, open source alternatives include pdftohtml, Abiword, KWord, and Inkscape. Adobe Acrobat Reader includes a text extractor and an image scraper, and there are a host of commercial applications. What makes OpenOffice.org stand out is hybrid PDFs.”
Hybrid PDFs provide the best of both worlds: consistent display anywhere via its PDF component, and editability via its ODF component.
“Most applications (such as Adobe Acrobat Reader) ignore the ODF bits and treat the whole hybrid file as a normal PDF. Presentation is pixel perfect. Wait. That’s not all. OpenOffice.org 3.0 with this extension treats the hybrid as a normal ODF, so the ODF document opens in Writer, Impress, Calc, or Draw according on the original. (You didn’t just expect Writer, did you?) Now you have lossless, editable, round-trip PDFs.”
The extension is still in development, but will be available on the OOo Extensions site when it’s ready for mass deployment.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Import and Edit PDFs with OpenOffice.org
June 3rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
ZaReason‘s weekly newsletter alerted me to two interesting articles on Ubuntu last week.
- “It’s Time to Retire ‘Ready for the Desktop‘” writes Jeremy LaCroix for Linux.com. (“The fact is, there are just as many people out there who have difficulty using Windows as there are who have trouble using Linux.”)
- Joey Stanford writes about his new Eee PC 900, on which ZaReason installed Ubuntu 8.04 for him. (“On the order form it says Xandros but I mentioned in a comment that it would soon be running Ubuntu. Within two minutes of placing the order they replied saying they can put a basic Ubuntu install on it, so I said “heck yeah!”. So, today when I opened it up, it booted Ubuntu out of the box. :-)”
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Two Ubuntu Links from ZaReason
June 2nd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Kazunari Hirano mentions this week’s OpenOffice Migration of the Week: the Aizuwakamatsu City Government in Fukushima Prefecture in Japan, which is moving 850 computers from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org.
The city expects direct savings of 15 million yen over the next five years, and anticipates the benefits will spill over into the private sector, as citizens will also be able to adopt open source instead of expensive applications at home:
“The Mayor said that they can not only cut the cost but also accommodate the long-term preservation of their documents: “We often met problems with the latest office software to open and read our documents created in the past. But now we can use the international standard file format, ODF, so that we will be able to use and preserve our documents over many years.”
“It happened that our citizens had to buy the office software when they received documents from the city government.”
“ODF, which can be used from the free software, OpenOffice.org, will help reduce the burden on our citizens,” he said.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice Migration of the Week: Aizuwakamatsu City, Japan
May 30th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The BBC reports “Colombia Signs Up for XO Laptop.”
Initially, 65,000 children in the Caldas region will receive XO laptops, while the project will be expanded to other regions later.
BBC writes, “In a statement announcing the deal, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said the organisation was starting to get “good traction” from countries keen to sign up and buy the distinctive green and white XO laptops in large numbers.
“Currently each machine costs $188 and OLPC has sold about 600,000 of them.”
Posted in Free Culture, OLPC, Open Source | 1 Comment »
May 29th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Lots of open source and open standards tech people, including me, have long anticipated this, but now a mainstream financial site, Motley Fool, is predicting “The Fall of Microsoft Office.”
Microsoft has publicly announced it will support ODF in its Office suite. If implemented honestly (a big question for Microsoft), this throws open the doors to competition in a way MSO has never had to deal with before.
“I can’t say that Google or Sun or anybody else just won a bigger share of the office software market, and if they did, it won’t help their revenue or profits directly anyway. But it’s clear as day that Microsoft just took a serious hit, and the impact may take a long time to make itself felt but it will come.
“The company’s biggest revenue generator may be a shadow of its former self in a few years. I just hope that Microsoft has some alternative business prospects on tap — and no, tackling Google’s search hulk head-on doesn’t count.”
Microsoft’s Office is going to lose marketshare, and Motley Fool sees this as having a big impact on Microsoft’s core profitability.
From the perspective of open source users, it means Microsoft will have less money to spend on attacking us, which is a good thing.
From the perspective of all computer users, especially small businesses, it means costs will decline as the $400 price for Microsoft Office is no longer a required expense–using the free OpenOffice.org instead will be an easy alternative.
With OpenOffice 3.0 coming this fall, it’s time to expect another big jump in its user share. Let’s watch!
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Motley Fool: “The Fall of Microsoft Office”
May 28th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
In what he calls the The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment, Content Consumer created a series of normal computer tasks and asked his girlfriend to perform them on Ubuntu with no guidance from him. Her ability (and occasional inability) to complete the tasks, plus her relative frustration or comfort with them, gives a rough guide of what users may experience when using Ubuntu for the first time. Matching my expectations, she was able to accomplish most of the tasks without overlarge difficulty.
The post, as of this writing, has accumulated 3,543 diggs and 577 comments. Clearly, it has resonated. And the discussion it’s generated is also informative. End user testing is an important tool to continue to improve the usability of Ubuntu, other FOSS programs, and indeed, any software, so we should always encourage more of it.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Ubuntu End-User Testing
May 23rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Sun’s coders have developed yet another killer extension for OpenOffice.org: the Sun Presenter Screen.
Andre Fischer announces the Presenter Screen’s (beta) release on GullFOSS:
“The Presenter Screen extension supports presenters by showing information that is not visible to the audience. A typical environment would be a laptop showing the Presenter Screen and a connected beamer showing the actual presentation to the audience. Initially the Presenter Screen extension shows a live preview of the current slide, a preview of the next slide and tool bar with navigational buttons and the current and elapsed time.”
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org Extensions: Sun Presenter Screen
May 21st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
North-by-South, the open source nearshore development firm I’ve been following, has just closed a funding round with Launch Capital.
In other NxS news, they interviewed Marcos Mazoni about FOSS’ continuing expansion in Brazilian government agencies, showing once again how Brazil is becoming an open source superpower.
Mazoni discusses the different method used to select an open source program from the analytical method used when purchasing a commercial, off-the-shelf program: “To choose the product I’m going to put in my network, I’m going to see which one more fits my needs and I’ll also find myself as an active element in the construction of the product, returning these changes to the community as well. So, we focus on more than just technological metrics, sometimes it isn’t about which product does more. This difference — of creating things together, sharing and non-competition is the big change that comes with the free software philosophy.”
Government agencies in Brazil have moved from developing many of their core technologies exclusively in-house, to cooperating across disparate groups of government, private sector, and individual collaborators. This lets their projects progress faster and introduce innovative new features that otherwise might never have been invented.
“We also started to introduce the thought that cooperation is the best thing in the free software world. It’s not the matter of the technology itself, but the co-operation, working together beyond the boundaries of my organization, and that I don’t need to have the brand of my organization on every product. I have to have a good product that works, that has a permanent life cycle. This is the logic that free software shows us as a great organizational innovation.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on North-by-South Captures Funding