February 19th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Groklaw interviewed Nicholas Reville about Miro and open online media. Miro, developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation, is an open source video player, BitTorrent client and podcast subscription tool based on the Mozilla platform.
In Reville’s own words, “It’s free; it’s open source; it’s made by a nonprofit which is the organization that I work for. And the idea behind Miro is to give you a comprehensive TV-like experience on your computer. And we’re trying to do that not just because we want to have a great experience for our users, which we do, but also because we’ve built the software in a very open, very democratic, very accessible way. The goal is to open up video online, to not have the same kind of gatekeepers and restrictions that creators face in traditional broadcasting, to not have those as television moves online.”
Miro was downloaded over 2 million times in 2007, and aims for 5 million downloads in 2008.
Reville has an expansive view of the mission of Miro. Beyond its core purpose, Miro also hopes to lift up other open source projects along with its growth: “What we’re really hoping is that open source, various open source projects can find ways of supporting each other, can connect users to other tools and projects that are going to be useful for them and can really raise each other up together. And so our collaboration with Mozilla is certainly doing that for us, and maybe someday we’ll be able to do that for another project.”
What a beautiful, useful program, and a model of the best of open source in its development process and its final product!
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Groklaw Interviews Nicholas Reville About Miro
February 15th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
CNet has posted a video of their picks for the Top 5 Downloads of 2007.
I’ll destroy the drama of their countdown to say the number one spot is occupied by OpenOffice. Following that, the list contains several other of my favorite open source applications (in order):
- OpenOffice (office suite)
- Audacity (audio editor)
- Miro (internet video player)
- Pidgin (instant messenger)
It’s notoriously hard to estimate the current number of global OpenOffice users, but it is likely in the range of 100 million, with marketshare/usage share possibly as high as 20%.
After a very strong year in 2007, and recognition like CNET’s, I expect 2008 to be another record-breaking year for the suite.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on CNET’s #1 Download for 2007 is OpenOffice
February 14th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Sunday Times Online (of Sri Lanka) announces Sri Lanka will join the OLPC project and distribute 2 million XOs to its school children.
To my knowledge, this is the biggest roll-out to date. Further, it is being organized as a collaboration between the Sri Lankan government, world institutions, and private entities. From the article:
“This is being launched by One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a US based organisation in collaboration with the Education Department and several local and foreign financial, technological and academic institutions… Director OLPC Europe, Middle East and Asia Matt Keller, in an interview with The Sunday Times FT, said the World Bank has stepped in to fund a pilot project to introduce laptops as an educational tool in nine provinces in the island.”
Posted in Free Culture, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on Sri Lanka Joins OLPC
February 11th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Express Computer reports on “Open Source Rising” in India. Author Prashant Rao begins, “Things are looking good for the proponents of Open Source software on all fronts.”
India is a bellwether for FOSS adoption. While still a developing country, it has a very strong IT sector. Together, this is a perfect storm for the implementation of open source! Rao catalogs the growth of FOSS on servers, but then comes to the really interesting territory, end-user desktops. Of particular interest to me is the rapid adoption of OpenOffice within Indian IT enterprises:
“Coming to Open Source on the desktop, while desktop Linux remains kludgy, OpenOffice.org is doing just fine. Various estimates put it at anything between 10% and 20% of the market. I think that usage is higher. In India, at least, many large organizations have put the bulk of their users on OpenOffice restricting Microsoft Office to a handful of people who interact with the outside world.”
We see news about some of the high-profile corporate migrations to OpenOffice.org in India. Along with others around the world, we try to keep track of these on the Major OpenOffice.org Deployments page on the project wiki.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on “Open Source Rising” in India
February 8th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
There are at least two revolutionary new portable computers on the market, each of which has the potential to sell several million units, and because each ships with Linux and an open source software stack, together they may change the personal computing landscape more than we have seen in decades.
Groklaw provides a photo gallery comparing the XO and Asus Eee (and some other ordinary computers to give scale).
“One of the happy buyers of a One Laptop Per Child XO laptop is Groklaw member Jerry van Baren. He asked me if it would be useful to show a comparison between the screen sizes and keyboards of the XO and the Asus Eee PC. I thought that was a grand idea.”
The new form factor they share is ultra-portability, and along with it, their success can be attributed to their extremely affordable pricing (each machine is cheaper than Windows or Microsoft Office by itself). As predicted by the theory of The Innovator’s Dilemma, a traditional market is once again being upset by cheaper competition from below. These machines, and others that will follow, are providing a strong beachhead for open source on the normal end user’s personal computer. This trend is only going to accelerate from here.
Posted in GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on OLPC XO and Asus Eee Pictorial Comparison
February 6th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Wade Roush writes about the OLPC XO for Xconomy.com in The XO Laptop: It’s the Software, Stupid.
“On YouTube, there is an 11-minute video of the veterinarian-assisted birth of a calf on a farm in Villa Cardal, Uruguay, a small town in a dairy-rich region four hours north of the capital, Montevideo… But what makes this particular video remarkable is that it was shot by a fourth-year student at Villa Cardal’s Public School 24, using the built-in camera and recording software on the student’s XO Laptop, within weeks of the machine’s arrival at the school last year.”
The OLPC project predicted students would use their XOs for numerous creative purposes and did not expect to know everything they would devise. This could be one of the first shining examples of how quickly the students will use their new tools to participate in the global cultural interchange on the internet.
It has been a key tenet that OLPC is a learning project, not a hardware project. “Almost every piece of software on the XO is designed to advance the constructivist belief that learning occurs most efficiently when it’s active, social, and exploratory, with constant feedback between instructors and learners and between learners themselves.”
Another tenet is the centrality of open source, in both hardware and software used by the project. “Virtually everything on the laptop, right down to the hardware drivers, is open-source–so that it can be shared and so that, ultimately, responsibility for maintaining the platform can be transferred from the foundation itself to the community of educators, students, and developers using the XO. “In open-source you strive to push everything upstream, because as soon as it’s upstream, it’s not your problem anymore, it’s the community’s problem,” says Bender. “That’s a great place to be. And we are trying to push as much upstream as possible, because we won’t be successful otherwise.”
In other words, they are not delivering a product, they are seeding the creation of a self-sustaining community of learners. This is the key to economic development just as it is to successful education. And it is going to have a huge cumulative impact on global well-being.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on XO Laptop: It’s the Software
February 5th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
In KDE 4.0’s cross-platform strategy, Mac OS X plays a key role. The KDE TechBase keeps track of KDE on Mac OS X projects here.
While 4.1 will bring the final release for OS X, there are plenty of things to play with now. I’m particularly interested in KStars, the KDE PIM, and KOffice itself.
I’ve long been a proponent of OpenOffice, but I don’t see KOffice as a threat to OOo. Rather, I think the two are complementary, each with a different primary focus, and yet also helping each other by forming a strong argument for ODF. With ODF, there’s no need to fight for sole software hegemony, since we’ll still be compatible with everyone else regardless of our personal application preferences. As OOo and KOffice grow, they bring more users to the ODF file standard. And as ODF grows, it lets more people freely choose OOo, KOffice, or one of the many other compatible programs.
If a politician were discussing this issue, they’d call it “growing the pie,” not just changing the relative sizes of its slices. That’s good for all the communities involved!
Posted in Mac, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
February 4th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Economist.com discusses using Linux to rehabilitate old computers for donating to students. The author has found many school students have no access to a computer at home: “A quarter of the children in your correspondent’s class had nothing at home to research their projects on–not even a parent’s or older sibling’s computer. And it showed in the classroom.”
And his suggestion is to wipe the Microsoft junk off your donation and replace it with a capable and lightweight operating system instead: Linux.
“Apart from being able to run easily on clunky old machines, the great thing about Linux is the way thousands of the world’s most professional programmers have volunteered their spare time to improving the breed–with nothing to gain save personal satisfaction and the respect of their peers. Thanks to their efforts, there’s recently been a flood of slick desktop versions of the rugged open-source operating system.”
After sampling several Linux distros, gOS catches the author’s eye:
“Spurred on by Everex, a PC maker in Fremont, California, the gOS distribution encases the rock-solid Ubuntu 7.10 in an exceptionally rich graphical shell known as E17 from an outfit called Enlightenment. For sheer beauty and intuitiveness, the gOS interface out-Macs even Apple’s superb OS X.
“But the real magic behind gOS is its use of Google Apps, the search company’s free online alternative to Microsoft Office. Computer pundits have talked endlessly about “software as a service”—using software applications that reside permanently on the internet rather than on your local hard-drive—but nothing much has come of it. Suddenly, out of the blue, gOS has made it a reality.
“Unquestionably, gOS is the operating system for the YouTube generation. Like the Mac, you just switch it on and start uploading videos, downloading tunes and doing other good things with the click of a mouse.”
For situations where online office applications are not ideal, the author matter-of-factly mentions OpenOffice as the pre-installed desktop office suite on gOS machines (casually expressing what many mainstream publications have not yet recognized: its complete suitability as a replacement for heavy, expensive MS Office). He doesn’t even explain OpenOffice.org, confident that everyone already knows what it is!
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on gOS Catches The Economist’s Eye
February 1st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Computerworld Australia reports on a rollout of 23,000 computers in schools in the Philippines.
“Providing high school students with PCs is seen as a first step to preparing them for a technology-literate future, but in the Philippines many schools cannot afford to provide computing facilities so after a successful deployment of 13,000 Fedora Linux systems from a government grant, plans are underway to roll out another 10,000 based on Ubuntu.”
Cost may be the primary reason for this migration, but just like France’s Gendarmerie, the Philippines will reap many other benefits from the adoption of Linux and open source.
“(IT Consultant) Gonzalez believes the project has helped begin a mindset revolution for accepting the power of free software: ‘People in the government now understand Linux can do so much for so little outlay,’ he said. ‘In a brand new computer 50 percent goes to the operating system and office suite, so how many people can afford that?'”
Adopting Linux at an early stage of its computer and internet growth will allow the Philippines a much easier migration path. Instead of replacing existing infrastructure, they will start fresh, using open source, and the population will be trained on it from the beginning.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on 23,000 Linux Computers in Philippine Schools
January 31st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Yahoo News reports that France’s Gendarmerie will migrate its 70,000 computers from Windows to Ubuntu Linux.
The Gendarmerie has been gradually and methodically moving to open source since 2005, when it replaced 70,000 copies of Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org. In 2006, it adopted Firefox and Thunderbird, and now it plans to complete the migration with Ubuntu Linux.
“The gendarmerie’s 70,000 desktops currently use Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system. But these will progressively change over to the Linux system distributed by Ubuntu, explained Colonel Nicolas Geraud, deputy director of the gendarmerie’s IT department.
“We will introduce Linux every time we have to replace a desktop computer,” he said, “so this year we expect to change 5,000-8,000 to Ubuntu and then 12,000-15,000 over the next four years so that every desktop uses the Linux operating system by 2013-2014.”
Cost is the third in their list of reasons for making the move to open source, but it really does add up. “The move away from licensed products is saving the gendarmerie about seven million euros (10.3 million dollars) a year for all its PCs.”
It’s clear that open source is making rapid progress in Europe, and government investment is starting a virtuous cycle that will increase the pace of its adoption. While Firefox is still the highly visible success story, it can be seen as a proxy for the OpenOffice.org and Linux adoptions that are following along but are often harder to track.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on 70,000 Ubuntu Linux PC Rollout in France