March 8th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
OpenOffice.org 3.0 is coming this fall, and many people are already starting to get excited about it. VentureCake is excited about its PDF import, native Mac OS X Aqua interface, and more:
“We love OpenOffice.org, hereby referred to as OpenOffice like normal people do. We like the fact it does pretty much everything we need for free, we like the out-of-the box PDF and Flash support, its better-than-Word ability to work with large documents, and the joys of using a standard file format that’s actually, you know, a standard.”
The article lists a boatload of planned new features that will be really cool, including the PIM (Thunderbird + Sunbird), support for saving files in wiki syntax (MediaWiki is already supported), hybrid PDFs, and others.
Hybrid PDFs in particular seem interesting. VentureCake states “The whole Openoffice suite can save ‘hybrid’ PDF documents that can be viewed as PDFs or edited as OpenDocument files.” This should bring even greater compatibility to the suite and make it much easier to work with companies still using legacy applications like Microsoft Office…
Finally, the extensions user experience will be upgraded to make it feel much more like Firefox’s, which I think will make it far more popular among OOo users.
This is going to be a major upgrade, possibly as significant as the move from 1.x to 2.0, and it should bring legions of new users along with it.
Posted in Mac, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Wiki | 3 Comments »
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
March 6th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
My friend and former intern Matt Leung hosts a weekly radio show on Vassar’s WVKR radio station called “The Technology Beat.”
He interviewed me recently to discuss open source software for musicians and students, and we discussed applications including OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Miro, Jokosher and others. (See the site above to listen online, or download an MP3 of the interview here.)
Matt’s show has focused on open source software and Creative Commons licensing for creating and sharing music. I’m the first interviewee who is not a musician, so check out some of the other shows to hear a lot of great songs from smart bands, including my friends Dave Michalak and Jay Olin’s band “Toxic Waste.”
Posted in Announcements, Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Interviewed on “The Technology Beat”
March 4th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Today is day two of Drupalcon Boston, at the new Boston Convention and Expo Center in South Boston. Sessions are just getting started today, but yesterday had a really great keynote by Dries Buytaert about the Drupal “State of the Union.”
Drupal 7 will be developed over the course of 2008, and will focus on making Drupal fit into the semantic web in a very natural way. In fact, Drupal’s embrace of semantic web principles could really help to accelerate the emergence of the semantic web itself, especially as “taking Drupal mainstream” is another goal of the Drupal 7 release.
According to Dries’ interpretation of Tim Berners-Lee, the WWW is evolving into the “GGG,” the Giant Global Graph. The GGG is like the social graph Google, Facebook and others are working on, but instead of connecting people to each other, it connects people and everything else (data and so much more), using semantic web concepts and tools like RDF, FOAF and others.
Posted in Drupal, Open Source | Comments Off on Drupalcon Boston’s “State of the Union”
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 25th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Ian Lynch, creator of the INGOTs, recently emailed one of the OpenOffice.org mailing lists to give a little update on the project.
INGOTs stands for “International Grades – Open Technologies” and describes itself as “qualifications designed to motivate students and reduce administration through innovative use of the internet. Ingots are accredited in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.”
By encouraging students to participate in web 2.0 communities, the INGOTs helps them learn new software skills, as well as the ability to be self-directed in their learning experiences, something extremely valuable in a field with the innovation and rapid change of internet software and open source tools. On top of this, the students receive accreditation that can be used toward their school requirements.
Lynch’s latest email alerted us to student blogs about learning and teaching younger students OpenOffice skills. This demonstrates the project functioning as a self-sustaining community, as well as reinforcing students’ learning process as they go on to share it with others.
And building a business on top of open source software helps expand the software’s community as well as make an ongoing living for the business. It’s a great project, and I am glad to see it thriving.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Students Blogging about OpenOffice
February 23rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
FOSDEM, in Brussels, EU, is a huge and important annual open source conference happening this weekend. According to its site, “FOSDEM ’08 is a free and non-commercial event organised by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet.”
OpenOffice.org is at FOSDEM with a developer room for hacking, and plenty of coders and others to represent it and work together on projects small and large. It’s a great opportunity to start or increase your involvement with the OOo project.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org at FOSDEM
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 »
February 20th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
WHDb writes “The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy–and Their Open Source Alternatives.”
Most of these programs are familiar old friends, like Ubuntu and OpenOffice, but the list includes some that are new to me, such as Archimedes CAD.
The list is mostly focused on open source programs to run on Windows, though most (yet, not all) of the key applications are cross-platform for Linux and Mac as well. (I maintain a list of my preferred FOSS programs for Mac OS X here.)
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on 50 Open Source Alternatives