October 9th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
There has been a recent series of discussions and blogs about the relationship of Sun and Novell within the OpenOffice.org community, and the particular roles they play. Some writers have announced the Novell is going to produce a new “fork” of OOo, while others have indicated the current status quo is not going to change much.
Charles H. Schulz, longtime member of the OOo community, attempts to clarify the situation in a piece for Groklaw.
My own opinion is rather relaxed. Sun, the project founder, has discussed their expectation that different “distros” of OOo would emerge over time. In fact, IBM’s Lotus Symphony and Red Flag 2000’s RedOffice are two new distros announced in the past few months. If Novell builds another one, I don’t see a problem. Just as competition among Linux distros has been a major reason for their rapid improvement and encouraged differentiation to serve niche markets, the same will come from a multitude of OOo distros. If each variant can read and write ODF files, compatibility will be maintained and nothing will be sacrificed for the end users.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Sun and Novell and OpenOffice.org
October 8th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
David Pogue reviews the XO for the New York Times.
“The XO laptop, now in final testing, is absolutely amazing, and in my limited tests, a total kid magnet. Both the hardware and the software exhibit breakthrough after breakthrough — some of them not available on any other laptop, for $400 or $4,000.”
Pogue immediately sees the potential of the XO, especially through the way it has created new network- and group-centric paradigms of working and learning.
“Most of the XO’s programs are shareable on the mesh network, which is another ingenious twist. Any time you’re word processing, making music, taking pictures, playing games or reading an e-book, you can click a Share button. Your document shows up next to your icon on the mesh-network map, so that other people can see what you’re doing, or work with you. Teachers can supervise your writing, buddies can collaborate on a document, friends can play you in Connect 4, or someone across the room can add a melody to your drum beat in the music program. You’ve never seen anything like it.”
As many had hoped, developed world customers can now buy one of their own (more accurately, you can buy two, one shipped to you and one to a child in the developing world).
The XO is a formidable testament to the power and promise of open source, and a huge vote of confidence in the potential of millions of people around the world that have so far been left out of the information age. Its release is clearly going to be a world-changing event.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on David Pogue on the OLPC XO
October 3rd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
A thorough review of the upcoming Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” release shows just how polished this distro is. Tolero has written the very popular “Review of Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy) new features and changes” on his blog to cover the new features and other improvements it includes.
See Ubuntu.com for a countdown clock to its final release (15 days from today).
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Ubuntu 7.10 Review
October 2nd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Vietnam will migrate 20,000 of its government office computers to OpenOffice.org, abandoning Microsoft Office in the migration.
“The change from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org is set as a mission in the scheme to computerize operations of Party organs in the 2006-2010 period… Cost savings is only one of the reasons for this change. The major target of the replacement is to improve the ability of the Vietnamese IT circle because the use of open source products like OpenOffice will create a new market for Vietnamese IT companies, according to Mr. Loi.”
Migrations to OpenOffice.org are ever increasing in pace and geographic distribution!
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »
October 1st, 2007 Benjamin Horst
DesktopLinux.com writes “All Macedonian students to use Linux desktops”
“All together Macedonia will deploy 180,000 NComputing-enabled workstation seats, enough to provide virtually every elementary and secondary school student in the nation with his or her own classroom computing device.”
This suddenly becomes one of the largest open source implementations yet undertaken anywhere.
“Besides Ubuntu 7.04, each NComputing server/PC comes with NComputing’s Terminal Server software and OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Evolution, and Wine.”
What a great stack of powerful, free and open source applications. Top shelf quality at a bargain price.
“NComputing claims that the Macedonia project is at the same time, the largest known thin client and desktop Linux deployment ever undertaken. “This project would not have been possible 5 years ago,” said Ivanovski. “Today’s least expensive desktop PCs are so powerful we use less than 10% of their capacity and NComputing’s technology puts this wasted power to work.”
Smart policies like this will help Macedonia and other developing countries leap to the technological forefront quickly, and will result in hundreds of thousands of open source-savvy adults in the coming years. All while saving huge sums of money over the alternative, proprietary software route. This is sure to pay dividends to the country’s economy for decades.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on All Macedonian students to use Linux desktops
September 27th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
I finally met up in person with Alexandro Colorado, Spanish project lead in the Native Language Confederation, at OOo Con this year. We hit it off quite well and had some very interesting discussions. In one of his Conference follow-up posts, Alexandro mentioned my OOo Con talk on his blog.
“Ben’s talk “Case Study: OpenOffice.org Guerrilla Advertising in the New York Metro Newspaper” was simply amazing. Like I said, very little amount of resources were able to pull this through. I actually feel proud I donated to his cause and will definitely donate again. He mentioned also interesting experience of on-line marketing and how most of the people that talk don’t really have an impact and the donors are usually the silent guys of the crowd.”
I’ve put the slides of my talk (zipped ODP file) online for everyone to download and share and remix however you like. If you want a formal license for them, they’re “public domain.” Enjoy, and thanks for helping promote OpenOffice.org!
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Alexandro Colorado on OOo Con
September 26th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Kiberpipa provided video recording services for this year’s OOo Con sessions and contributed other media coverage as well.
“The Kiberpipa team is happy to announce that we recorded all the lectures, and made interviews with OpenOffice.org contributors and the organizers of the conference.”
From Slovenia, Kiberpipa is a not-for-profit organization working with open source software and CC-licensed content that has been filming OOo Cons for the past three years.
In their own words, “Kiberpipa is an NGO multimedia cyber center supporting and promoting opensource and free flow of information and knowledge. Adhering to this idea, we work and strive to work with opensource tools only. For OOoCon 2007, we use Ubuntu Linux distribution on our machines, for video editing we use a free opensource video-editing software called Cinelerra (and we also work on packages for Ubuntu). As you can see, we also support, use and promote Creative Commons licensing.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Kiberpipa’s OOo Con Videos
September 25th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Center Networks published a second story about my time at the Barcelona OpenOffice.org Conference, covering Louis’ keynote on features planned for OpenOffice.org 3.0, scheduled for summer 2008. Among those features long desired by the community, OOo will bundle a personal information manager (Mozilla Thunderbird with the Lightning calendar extension, which Sun engineers have been contributing to for the past few years).
I also presented my own talk on Wednesday of the conference. Quoting what I wrote for Center Networks, “Titled “Case Study: OpenOffice.org Guerrilla Advertising in the New York Metro Newspaper,” I described my effort of July 2006 to collect donations online and purchase a full-page, back cover advertisement to promote OpenOffice.org in the Metro. Reception was good, and I spoke with some other community members interested in carrying out similar promotional campaigns around the world.”
CN also published my recap of the conference from Friday, its last day. While North America is seeing steady growth in the use of OOo and the OpenDocument Format (ODF), it is truly blooming in Europe. A session analyzing data returned from the voluntary user survey reached the conclusion that Europe is at a tipping point, as governments are adopting ODF for storing their data, government agencies are rolling out deployments of OpenOffice.org reaching hundreds of thousands of users at once, and desktop Linux users running OOo as part of their open source stack seem to be appearing almost everywhere.
This year’s OpenOffice.org Conference was a great success. So much progress was made in the global OOo community in the past 12 months, yet the pace is set for even faster growth in the next 12.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »
September 20th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Louis Suarez-Potts and Hu Caiyong started the first day of the OpenOffice.org Conference (Wednesday) with two consecutive keynote presentations.
Louis spoke about the future of OOo in “OpenOffice.org 3.0 and Beyond” (3.0 is scheduled for release in mid-2008 and will include a large batch of new features, including the long-awaited PIM users have been demanding).
Hu Xiansheng discussed the role his company (RedFlag 2000) has taken within the OpenOffice.org ecosystem. They have developed RedOffice, an OOo-derivative with user interface and document format specifically tailored to the Chinese market. (Consisting of 80 million current users, and projected to grow by 20 million per year for the next half-decade.)
These talks and the rest of the conference are being videoed and will be available on the Kiberpipa OpenOffice.org Conference website as soon as they are ready.
My own presentation, “Case Study: OpenOffice.org Guerrilla Advertising in the New York Metro Newspaper,” took place at 4:30 local time in the amazing “Paranimf” room. About 25 attendees joined me, and came up with some interesting follow-up questions at the end. (Download my slides in ODF here.)
I’m also blogging the conference for CenterNetworks. My first post discussed the opening Native Language Confederation party on Tuesday night.
Posted in Announcements, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org Conference Barcelona Begins
September 14th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
The Canadian Labour Congress has migrated its 100+ users from WordPerfect to OpenOffice.org, saving $60,000 in licensing fees over the Microsoft Office 2007 option.
The article, from a mainstream newspaper, serves as an introduction to FOSS for non-tech people:
“But it’s not just about the money,” says Andrew Southworth, the network technician responsible for all IT services at the CLC. In fact, says Mr. Southworth, the philosophy and principles behind open source software also struck a chord with the CLC and aligns with its community-based activities.”
Author Paul Chin recognizes both the financial motivations and the philosophical reasons to adopt and use FOSS for organizations:
“To proponents of open source, it’s not just about the source code that’s freely available to the general public. For many adopters, it’s about freedom. Open source represents minimizing dependence on large software companies that generally prevent users from changing or adapting their products, either by keeping the source code secret or by strict copyright rules. It also allows for greater flexibility and control over customization.”
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »