October 31st, 2007 Benjamin Horst
While it hasn’t been kept secret, to my knowledge the first public mention of Thunderbird inclusion with OpenOffice.org 3.0 was made at this year’s OOoCon. CyberNet News is impressed with OOo’s plans to include Thunderbird and Lightning as its default PIM next year:
“One thing that really caught my attention was their reference to including a Personal Information Manager (PIM). More specifically the presentation mentions bundling Thunderbird with their Office Suite, and refers to it as an “Outlook replacement.”
For savvy users, it’s no effort at all to install OOo and Thunderbird/Evolution/KMail/etc on a computer. But for whatever reason, many users still ask for a PIM to be “included” with OpenOffice. If it helps, why not go for it! (Plus, Sun has standardized its 36,000 users on OOo and Thunderbird already, so might as well roll that out to the world!)
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org 3.0’s PIM Plan Gets Noticed
October 29th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
This weekend I traveled to Boston to attend FOSScamp, a BarCamp-style event held at the Hotel at MIT. FOSScamp was sponsored by Canonical and led into the Ubuntu Developer Summit, happening this week at the same venue.
I represented the OOo community in an informal way and gave my talk “Guerrilla Marketing OpenOffice.org in the New York Metro Newspaper” in front of a diverse audience including KDE developers, an FSF representative, and a number of others. It was well-received and brought to light the fact that lots of open source projects are working on evangelizing/marketing, but that we could improve our effectiveness by pooling our efforts and sharing our experiences more broadly.
One of the highlights of the weekend was meeting Mark Shuttleworth, whom I had communicated with only once (by email) before. He is a charismatic and well-organized leader, which I think is reflected in the successful, rapid growth of the Ubuntu community.
Lots of other great, intelligent and hard-working people attended FOSScamp, and the atmosphere of collaboration and openly exchanging ideas and knowledge will lead to the continued great success of the open source movement.
Edit: A few other mentions of FOSScamp have popped up today. Ars Technica picks up a quote from Shuttleworth’s introductory remarks about “brilliant flashes of innovation” that occur because of the free sharing of ideas in the open source world, and Corey Burger summarizes FOSScamp on the Ubuntu Fridge.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on FOSScamp Boston
October 26th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Tectonic breaks the good news: South Africa has adopted ODF as its government standard data format!
“Tectonic spoke to Bob Jolliffe of the department of science and technology who was part of the working group that compiled the document. He was optimistic about the MIOS document’s implementation, saying that it now cleared the playing field for the adoption of government’s free and open source software policy.
“Jolliffe noted two key features of the document, that of what defines an open standard and the inclusion of the ODF standard.”
The South Africa plan is to adopt ODF as its open data format standard now, and then use the freedom that allows to migrate its software applications to open source options over the next two years.
Its own definition of an open standard requires multiple implementations be available, which rules out MSOOXML immediately.
Posted in ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on South Africa Adopts ODF
October 23rd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
The GullFOSS blog discusses some of the fruits of RedFlag’s participation in the OpenOffice.org community. A handful of new features will make their appearance in OOo 2.4, and it is planned for the process to accelerate from there.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on RedFlag 2000’s Contributions to OOo 2.4
October 22nd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
At Web 2.0 last week, Nokia announced its forthcoming N810, the successor to the N800 Internet Tablet.
New features include a hardware slideout keyboard, built-in GPS, and 2GB of Flash memory.
A new OS update will be released with it, which will also be installable on N800s. Screenshots from Ari Jaaksi’s blog show it to be quite attractive.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Maemo, Open Source | 1 Comment »
October 18th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
The official announcement from Canonical states that Ubuntu 7.10, “Gutsy Gibbon,” is now available.
I’ve been using the beta for a few weeks now, and it is a beautiful, polished, full-featured operating system, that I think handily outdoes Windows. I’ve been very pleased with it and expect Ubuntu’s marketshare to continue its rapid rise with this update.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Ubuntu 7.10 Released Today
October 17th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
The Chandler Project has been a long term interest of mine, and it seems the same is true for Robert Scoble. He publishes a long interview “Collaborative Chandler Revealed,” covering the recent preview release of the application and the development process that has brought it to this point.
It’s a 51-minute video, so I haven’t watched it yet… but the text gives a decent overview and also links to Ted Leung’s detailed post on Scoble’s OSAF visit.
I particularly like the section where they discuss “turning email into a wiki,” since this is an idea I also had a few years ago. Basically, I use saved email messages as a database of information, so using the wiki interface to manage and modify that would work very well for me. Chandler developers and Scoble see it in about the same way.
Leung writes,
“In the interview, Robert latched onto the edit/update features of Chandler. These are still in a primitive state, but you can see the value of them already. He had a great summary of how it works – “you turn e-mail into a wiki.” Exactly. You can create and share a collection with any number of people, and they can all edit/update items in that collection and see each other’s changes, without groveling through endless e-mail reply chains. At one point in the interview, Mimi said something about e-mail being the hub of people’s usage. Truth of the matter is that e-mail is more like the glue that holds batches of information together. Collections of items with edit/update is a different kind of glue.”
I’ve been using Chandler on the desktop and via the hub service, and it is useful and very polished for a “preview”-level release. Reading about the capabilities and ideas that will emerge in its future has further reinforced my perception from regular use: this program is a new paradigm that will vastly improve my workflow and reshape the landscape around it.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Scoble Interviews Chandler Team
October 16th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Some time ago, the National Archives of Australia made the decision to use open standard, XML file formats for longterm preservation of digital data. Naturally, they chose ODF.
They developed a custom tool to help manage the archival process, named it Xena, and released it as open source using Sourceforge.
It’s a great example of the ecosystem growing around the ODF format, as well as how an open source tool developed for one organization’s needs can be shared online to help many others, without additional cost or effort.
Posted in ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on Xena is Released
October 15th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Bruce Byfield cuts through some of the recent confusion about whether Novell is going to fork OpenOffice.org in “Novell is not forking OpenOffice“.
I am glad to see vigorous debate within the OOo community, as it means there are a lot of passionate concerned members who want the best for the project overall.
In general, in fact, it seems the OOo community has gotten a lot stronger recently, with new members IBM and Beijing RedFlag 2000, and Sun implementing new processes to better communicate with community members:
“According to Meeks, Novell is not stopping cooperation with Sun. “We contribute more than half our code to what we see as the core of OpenOffice,” Meek says, referring to bug-fixes and revisions of existing applications and subsystems. He also acknowledges that, recently, “Sun has really been improving how they deal with the community,” citing such improvements as an engineering steering committee that he says has resulted in “much faster patch turnarounds. So, on one level, that’s really encouraging.”
There is room for improvement in the way the community operates, but there is reason for strong optimism too, as the future looks ever brighter for the OpenOffice.org project.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Byfield on Rumors of a Fork
October 10th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Projity’s press release announces that OpenProj has already been downloaded 100,000 times, and InfoWorld also covers this milestone in “Preview: OpenProj brings free, robust project management to the desktop.”
I like InfoWorld’s summary of their review:
“OpenProj performs all the essential tasks you’d do with a desktop project management application. That, and cross-platform availability, would justify Projity charging even a portion of Microsoft Project’s $999 price tag. But with OpenProj’s free access, it’s just one more compelling case for going open source on the desktop.”
And InfoWorld’s final verdict,
“OpenProj, an excellent open source desktop alternative to Microsoft Project, reads native Project files while providing an especially precise scheduling engine. The OpenProj solution has essential project management tools, including Gantt Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, Earned Value costing – all surrounded by a customized user interface.”
You can download OpenProj for all platforms from Sourceforge.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on OpenProj Exceeds 100,000 Downloads