May 11th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
A new project coming from Red Hat’s skunkworks is Mugshot, an open source social networking tool.
Linux.com reviews Mugshot and finds it an effective meta social networking tool with some interesting and unique characteristics.
“Mugshot provides a single entry point to popular social networking tools such as Flickr, Google Reader, Blogger, Digg, del.icio.us, Picasa, YouTube, and others. Your Mugshot account page allows you to easily add Web services for use with your Mugshot page; all you have to do is to provide your account information for each service. Your Mugshot user page then acts as a kind of aggregator that watches the configured services and provides notifications when they are updated. For example, if you specify the URL of your blog, Mugshot will automatically add the recent blog posts to your Mugshot page. Enable and configure your Flickr account, and Mugshot adds your photos to the Mugshot page and provides notifications when you add new photos. If you choose to enable the Digg and del.icio.us services, your Mugshot page will display the articles you dugg and recent bookmarks.”
ClaimID offers a similar service (in some ways), oriented toward consolidating all of your online identities in one place, with fewer of the social networking tools like Mugshot’s “swarm” feature.
Managing multiple social networking site profiles, and claiming and controlling the constellation of online content you’ve made, looks to be a new opportunity for companies to develop new web applications, tools, and services.
Posted in Open Source, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Open Source Social Networking with Mugshot
May 9th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
This post is the first in a new series of “Wikis at Work,” in which I will highlight the real-world usage of wikis for community-building and project management websites.
The Digital Tipping Point is a documentary film project run by Christian Einfeldt. He is investigating the Tipping Point phenomenon (per Malcolm Gladwell) in the context of the ongoing shift from proprietary software and operating systems to open source software and operating systems.
The project makes heavy use of MediaWiki for online collaboration, including transcription, translation, video editing, and more. It is, to my knowledge, the first film made from a wiki.
Christian’s been working on this project for a few years now, putting in a lot of hours and much travel along the way. His hard work and spirit are the kind of traits that really make the open source community the success it is today.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Wiki | 2 Comments »
May 8th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Morgan Collett, an Ubuntu specialist from South Africa, has posted his impressions of the OLPC XO, which he helped to demo at South Africa’s Digital Freedom Expo.
The hardware design must have been very well received, as Collett was asked whether it had been made by Apple! The videocamera really impressed the crowd (as it has impressed those students around the world who are currently testing units), and the software part of the user interface also seems to be very good.
Collett covers a few points regarding user interface innovations in the XO:
- There are no menus. Functionality is generally implied pictorially by icons. The icons are culture-neutral to some extent – for example the camera is denoted by an eye, rather than a lens or picture of a camera.
- There is no “save.” Work is saved on the fly, and can be accessed by a Journal activity. This means there is no worry about “where” you saved something or whether you remembered to save it at all. Tagging is implemented in the Journal to aid categorizing and finding things.
- There is no “open.” You can resume an activity from the Journal, which acts like a type of version control, so you can go back in time and resume earlier versions of whatever you are working on.
- While Internet is not assumed, the mesh network is always in operation. Most activities can be shared with the child’s group of friends, classmates, or others in the area. Most content, such as pictures, audio or video can be shared.
Posted in Free Culture, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on OLPC at South Africa’s Digital Freedom Expo
May 7th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
The founder and CEO of FON, a wireless networking company, has announced all company computers will migrate from Windows to Ubuntu.
“As of next week Fon will not buy any more Microsoft licenses, nor install, service any new Microsoft programs on any existing computers. All the software we use will be Open Source unless a certain package we need is not easily available in Open Source format.
“There are many reasons at Fon for dropping Microsoft. The first one and by far the most important is to save time… Ubuntu has the look and feel of Microsoft, but it’s like a Microsoft software that works fast, that turns on and off very quickly, that installs programs very easily, that lacks that atmosphere of paranoia that surrounds Microsoft and that is extremely easy to learn and use.”
When it comes down to it, a migration from Windows to Linux is simple. The boss says “do it,” and everybody learns fast. After a transition period, they’ll come to see that Linux is indeed a better platform, and that will be that.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on FON Migrates to Ubuntu
April 23rd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
To recap some important news from last week, Google has accepted 10 OpenOffice-related projects for the Summer of Code 2007!
Some really cool ideas in here, from general UI improvements, to improved Aqua support on OS X, to integrating R with Calc, to SVG import (I’ve wanted this for a while), RTF support, and others.
Thanks, Google, and good luck to all the participants!
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Google Summer of Code and OOo
April 16th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Louis Suarez-Potts blogs about his experience at FISL 8.0 in Brazil this year.
He sees several corporations in Brazil, including IBM, are beginning to “tell employees and would-be employees that knowing about free software, Linux, OOo, etc., is a real advantage, not just a gesture of personal (and possibly useful, but probably indifferent) accomplishment, but rather something that can lead directly to a job, middle-class things, security. Free software comes of age when the knowledge itself of how to use it is itself a commodity, something that can be exchanged, ultimately, for money.”
Louis feels the growth of FOSS is particularly important in Brazil and other rapidly-growing economies, “fisl is the most important free software event of the year, for the future lies, in development and distribution and use, not with the developed nations but the developing…”
A perfect illustration of this is the Brazilian distribution of OpenOffice.org, “BrOffice.org,” which is at the forefront of OOo development in a number of areas. CoGroo, a grammar checker for Brazilian Portuguese, was developed by this team and is presently being expanded to support English and other languages.
Free and open source software showcases the talents of the world, illustrating that great code can be developed outside of the “developed world” and can compete with software made anywhere.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Louis in Brazil
April 13th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Linux Format Magazine (from the UK) and Novell are running a contest to gather ideas for new software applications to be written in Mono and distributed as open source code, called “Make it with Mono“.
I submitted two ideas: an OpenOffice.org Wiki Extension, and the Smith Package Manager.
Please vote to support my ideas!
OOo Wiki Extension: http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/makeitwithmono/entries.php?entry=265
Smith Package Manager: http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/makeitwithmono/entries.php?entry=242
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Make it with Mono Contest Ideas
April 12th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Solveig links to a post on “50 Open Source Success Stories” from CRMchump.
Lots of talk about governments adopting open source tools, including SugarCRM at the Oregon Department of Human Services, Moodle at the Open University in London and the University of Illinois, mentions of OSAF, Ubuntu, MIT, Sun, various FOSS databases, the Google Summer of Code, and Zimbra’s increasing success.
Posted in Open Source | Comments Off on 50 Open Source Success Stories
April 10th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Hasan, of the Open Malaysia blog, posts the latest edition (April 9) of the ODF Alliance Newsletter.
Lots of important news about migrations to ODF and OpenOffice (“The German City of Freiburg will deploy OpenOffice.org on 2,000 desktops and expects to save Euro 0.5m (USD 0.7m) over the next two years compared to a migration to Microsoft Office 2007.”), national and regional governments adopting ODF, applications supporting ODF, the OpenOffice.org conference in Barcelona this summer, new ODF Alliance members, and a long list of ODF-related news.
The momentum continues to build each month, but in particular, I am looking forward to this summer’s Barcelona conference, which I hope to attend!
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on ODF Alliance Newsletter for April 2007
April 9th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
As we know, a bill has been put forward in California that would require state data be created and stored in an open format like ODF. (Slashdot reports on MSFT’s efforts to lobby, via astroturfing, against this bill.)
Walt Hucks lives in California and has been communicating with his representatives about this new bill. He’s written a very strong, very detailed essay in support of the California open format bill.
While we’re on the subject, I want to point out another of Hucks’ posts in which he describes how to use, write, edit and share ODF files. He provides a fairly comprehensive list of ODF-capable applications.
And, finally, Hucks finds that lots of people are searching for ODF, and arriving at his site: “65 to 70% of people that arrive from Web search engines are asking how do I open [.odt|.odp|.ods] files?.”
Okay, one more thing: video footage from Oregon showing Peter Buckley testifying in favor of his open formats bill for his state. Cool!
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on Walt Hucks on ODF and California