March 10th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Now that the avalanche is picking up speed, it’s interesting to observe the manner in which different countries’ governments migrate toward open source software. (At least, from the articles I read in the press. Certainly there must be many exceptions and smaller implementations that don’t make it to the international headlines.)
In France, a strongly-centralized government is adopting OpenOffice.org and other FOSS programs in its central government agencies (well over 300,000 systems have been migrated to OpenOffice already, for example).
On the other hand, a much more federalist country, Germany, is moving city-by-city and state-by-state. In this we have some news for today: Erwin Tenhumberg announces that Freiburg, Germany, will upgrade 2,000 municipal computers to OpenOffice.org, and save €500,000 over the next two years compared to what moving to MSO 2007 would cost. (He also provides a link to the original article in German.)
The USA is also moving in a federalist manner. Four states have so far made commitments or begun legal proceedings to migrate to ODF (though not explicitly to OpenOffice yet): Massachusetts, Minnesota, Texas, and California, in that chronological order.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Freiburg, Germany, Adopts OpenOffice
March 6th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
I’m in Israel for work this week, so I won’t be able to keep my usual schedule of posting here at SolidOffice. However, bandwidth is good and most of the internet’s activity is unconstrained by physical-world geography.
The OpenOffice.org project publishes an interview with BharateeyaOO.o, the team responsible for OOo development in India, and translation into numerous Indian languages.
RKVS Raman, head of BharateeyaOO.o, describes the project’s history, milestones, community development, and future goals in this interview. His team has already translated OpenOffice into 15 of India’s 22 official languages, and is scheduled to complete the remainder by December 2007.
Raman’s organization is pragmatic and effective in its work, and also strives toward a very idealistic purpose: “Long term goals involve studying the cultural aspects of Indic computing; create sturdy speech recognition engines for Indian languages; continuously create/explore avenues for wide adoption of FOSS in various sectors by active promotion and support, and to become an instrument in the proliferation of ICT in rural and underprivileged areas.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Interview with BharateeyaOO.o: OpenOffice.org for India
March 2nd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Linux Today announces that Zaragoza, Spain will migrate to FOSS:
“The City Council of Zaragoza has decided to abandon the Windows operating system and move to open source systems that should save the Aragon capital city nearly €1M per year.”
The migration will be carried out in two phases, scheduled to be finished by the end of 2008. Phase 1 involves a move to OpenOffice.org, and Phase 2 is the adoption of Novell SUSE Linux.
According to the article, “The Press Office and the Office of Citizen Relations already are using OpenOffice.org, and will be followed by the Municipal Registry office,” which means the migration’s in full implementation mode! (Eliminating the specious argument they’re just aiming for price concessions from Microsoft. We never believed those allegations regarding other announced FOSS migrations anyway.)
National and EU recommendations promote the use of Free Software and open standards across the European continent, so Zaragoza is almost certainly going to be surrounded and supported by many others riding the same wave. Good luck to them and their neighbors! (Now please help us out in New York City!)
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Zaragoza, Spain Adopting OpenOffice and Linux
March 1st, 2007 Benjamin Horst
ThisWeek Community Newspapers announces that Bexley City Schools, a district in Ohio, will migrate all its computers from Windows to Linux:
“We began looking around and said, ‘Well, if we go to the most current Microsoft product, how much would that cost?'” Hyland said.
Upgrading ME to Windows XP, a newer version of the popular operating system, would cost the district about $412,000, she said. That price would include purchasing new machines and upgrading software.
The technology budget for the district last year was $159,000…
Last spring, the district decided to avoid those costs and switch to Linux, which is much cheaper to maintain. Because the district is dropping Windows and picking up Linux, it can phase out older computers and the ME operating system in a more efficient way, Hyland said.”
Meanwhile, on the West Coast, SearchOpenSource.com writes Microsoft Windows ousted at California school district:
“By this summer, all 5,000 students and 250 teachers will be working off of a Linux-based thin client running OpenOffice.org, and the majority of the district’s servers will be running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.”
Linux’s advantages, including remote administration and no licensing fees, resulted in huge cost savings for the 7-school district:
“Carver said it cost the district about $2,500 per school to migrate to Linux, compared with the estimated $100,000 it would have cost to upgrade their Windows infrastructure. In addition, buying more Microsoft Office licenses would have cost the district $100 per license, she said, whereas OpenOffice was free.
Ultimately, moving to Linux has enabled the Windsor School District to build out technology capabilities that wouldn’t have been possible with Windows.
“[The students] are able to do more because Linux cost less,” Carver said. “Our new computer lab [at Brooks] was set to cost $35,000 and ended up costing us $16,000 with Linux [on thin clients].”
And the kids love it too. “The kids think Linux is cool because it’s new, but what they’re really doing is stepping into the 21st century,” Carver said.”
Adding to the familiar story of cost savings is a slightly newer story, of additional capabilities Linux and FOSS provide to schools, above what they could have done with Windows and Microsoft.
Soon these migration stories will be so common I won’t be able to keep up with them (I don’t post many of them already, but do try to read most). Putting this in terms of Gladwell’s Tipping Point, we must be somewhere between the early adopter and early majority phases of the global shift to FOSS platforms.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
February 28th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Computerworld writes California may join rush of states toward ODF.
“A California legislator last Friday introduced a bill that would mandate the use of open, XML-based document file formats by the state government starting next January. It is the third such state-level legislation to be introduced this month.”
This follows Massachusetts’ move to ODF (not by a state law, but by a decision of its IT agency), and bills introduced in Minnesota and Texas to adopt an open format for state agencies as well.
“Like the other two measures, the bill in the California Assembly doesn’t list any specific document formats that could be used. But as in Minnesota and Texas, the introduction of such a bill appears to be another potential win for backers of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) for Office Applications.”
If you put these four states on a map, you’ve got the compass points covered: Massachusetts in the East, Minnesota in the North, Texas in the South, and California in the West. We just need to fill the in-betweens!
Also, California is the most populous state (37 million people, more than 12% of the entire USA), and Texas is second (24 million people, about 8% of the US population), meaning that a large number of Americans will be affected by these bills.
Further, California, Massachusetts and Texas contain important high technology nodes; where they pioneer tech issues, other states are likely to follow along.
Any way you slice it, this is good news for open formats, ODF, and data liberation! It is bringing the entire country very close to the digital tipping point.
Also see a post on Andy Updegrove’s Standards Blog for more information and analysis:
“It was 18 months ago that Massachusetts began this trend, when its Information Technical Division revised the Enterprise Technical Resource Model (ETRM) upon which its IT procurement is based. That revision not only required open standards and welcomed open source in its procurement, but also blessed an open document format standard called OpenDocument Format, or ODF. Since then, government procurement based on open standards in general, and the role of ODF in particular, have been very much in the spotlight.”
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
February 28th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
AbiWord will be available on the OLPC platform, and it was just improved with support for ODF.
The linked article was just a quick note, so if you want to skip the link, here’s the full text:
“I’ve just added support for the OpenDocument file format to the “OLPC version” of AbiWord (it already supported .doc, .rtf, (x)html, .txt, and of course .abw). Given that AbiWord hacker and supreme bughunter sum1 just fixed an annoying OpenDocument RTL bug, OpenDocument import and export should be useful for our Bi-Directional-Multilanguage-ODT-loving friends as well :)”
Posted in ODF, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on OLPC to Support OpenDocument
February 27th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
An open document standard, though not explicitly ODF, will become mandatory in Denmark beginning January 1, 2008.
Sam Hiser says not to worry, as MSOOXML cannot stand up to ODF in a fair comparison:
“This gives me no anxiety whatsoever. MSOOXML has already been thoroughly de-bunked vis a vis its repudiation of other existing standards; it is in perhaps a perpetual deep-freeze at ISO (from which Microsoft will not seek or wish to remove it, since “ISO status pending” is all they need to sell it; the alternative is to re-wire their entire new catalog of software); under further use testing and scrutiny in Denmark, its repudiation of the basic intentions of XML will be highlighted; and under scrutiny in Denmark the thorough dependency of MSOOXML documents upon the Microsoft stack (Vista, Exchange, Sharepoint, Outlook, MS SQL Server, IE7, Office 2007, Groove, etc.) and their lack of interoperability & compatibility outside the new Microsoft stack will be underscored and well understood. The Danes will find that MSOOXML is no solution.”
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on Denmark: Open Standards Mandatory
February 26th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Zimbra is coming up from behind to challenge the Exchange behemoth, and it has a lot of advantages Exchange cannot match. Very interesting to me is that it plays nicely across platforms: Zimbra can be run from Linux and Mac OS X servers, and it gives equal support to lots of client apps on all three major platforms (including Evolution, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook, and its own excellent web client).
A recent review of the development process shows how the team has gone out of its way to help its users.
Zimbra comes in open source and for-pay versions that include a support contract.
How about that? Instead of submitting to MS Exchange and slowly being forced to migrate all your desktops to Windows, you can run Zimbra and use as many Mac and Linux machines as you like without sacrificing email, contact, calendar sharing, VOIP, and document management! That’s more features than Exchange offers, at a much better price (free, if you choose the OSS option).
Zimbra even includes “over the air” synching with mobile devices, but in true Zimbra fashion, you are not limited to just one mobile platform. Zimbra Mobile works with Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm devices with no extra server needed. (Blackberry requires a little bit of extra work.)
Posted in Open Source, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
February 22nd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
After a high-profile accusation of piracy threatened a schoolteacher with a Siberian prison sentence, many Russian schools will move entirely to open source software, from Linux to OpenOffice.org and the rest of the FOSS stack.
“Schools in the Perm region will soon quit buying software from commercial companies, said the region’s Education Minister Nikolay Karpushin. The announcement was made in line with the report on ensuring ‘license purity’ in the region’s schools.
According to Karpushin, schools would start using freely distributed software like the Linux OS, Russky office and OpenOffice desktop apps.”
Russia is one of the largest countries where I had not heard a lot of news about FOSS adoption, so this story caught my eye. Russia is, fairly or not, famous for digital piracy. Maybe instead they can become famous as a powerhouse of open source!
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Russian Schools Moving to Linux
February 21st, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Computer assembler Dell has launched a new site for collecting customer feedback, called Idea Storm. (The name’s a bit hokey, but the intention is good.)
Users can submit their suggestions or ideas, and other site visitors vote on the ones they’d most like to see implemented. It’s a good way to get a company’s most passionate users really communicating with each other and with the company itself.
Unsurprisingly, this site has shown as untrue earlier claims by Dell (and other hardware makers) that there is no demand for pre-installation of Linux and open source software on the machines they sell: a user suggestion that Dell “offer the 3 top free Linux versions for free pre-installation on all Dell PCs,” has received over 62,000 votes in the past five days.
That’s cool, but something even easier to implement has come in at #2 in total votes cast: pre-installation of OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, and a bevy of other FOSS desktop applications on top of Windows. In three days, this idea has garnered over 37,000 votes.
Many other open source-related ideas have filtered to the top of the list. (While it appears an MS astroturfing campaign has begun in the comments section of these ideas, they cannot reduce the votes that have been cast in favor.)
If you’re a Dell customer, or potential customer, let them know what you want!
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Dell Customers Want OpenOffice