January 31st, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Infoworld reports on an enormous corporate migration to desktop Linux in Peugeot Citroën revs up 20,000 Suse Linux desktops:
“As part of a multiyear contract with Novell, the French company will install Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop on up to 20,000 computers in addition to 2,500 servers, the U.S. software vendor said Tuesday.”
The announcement came yesterday, which happens to be the day that Microsoft’s Windows Vista was made available for sale to the general public–I guess Peugeot wasn’t impressed!
Meanwhile, Miguel de Icaza, major open source contributor, also chimes in with some additional information.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Massive Migration: Peugeot Moving 20,000 Desktops to Linux
January 29th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Dan Bricklin’s awesome wikiCalc has reached version 1.0!
He announces: “After over a year and a half of work (part-time), I’m finally releasing the wikiCalc web authoring system as a “1.0” product. This means it has a pretty complete set of features for producing the quality output for which it was designed, has been relatively stable for a period of time, and has a reasonable amount of documentation. People who have held off testing or using the product until this point should now start taking a look. This is the code that will be the starting point for the SocialCalc project.”
Posted in Open Source, Wiki | 1 Comment »
January 29th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
As a part of its effort to promote a knowledge-based economy and develop democracy, the Metamorphosis Foundation and USAID held OpenOffice.org training for 74 employees from 22 municipalities in the Republic of Macedonia this January.
The Macedonian government is moving away from pirated software by adopting open source. Furthermore, OpenOffice expertise is rapidly becoming necessary in the EU and for aspiring members, as the number of government computers running OOo in France, for example, has reached 400,000 in the past year.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
January 26th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Solveig writes More Brilliant People Saying that Office 2007 Is A Whole Different Program, So Why Not Just Use OpenOffice.org?
Indeed. She quotes a blog by Baslow, who writes, “Faced with the prospect of tackling Microsoft Office 2007, many users may opt to move to OpenOffice.org; it will feel quite familiar to users of Microsoft Office prior to the 2007 version, it is well documented and it’s free.”
Supporting Baslow, Solveig rhetorically asks, “So why upgrade to MS Office 2007? Pay nothing, and switch to OpenOffice.org, instead. You retrain for both, but the cost of OpenOffice.org is hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions of dollars less than Microsoft Office, depending on how big your organization is. Saving a lot of money is, well, really good. It lets you spend that money on something that’s actually important: education, cure for cancer, better pizza, or whatever your business or organization is about.”
They are both right. And to prove that many others are not just thinking about switching to OpenOffice.org, but actually doing it, Ismael’s blog (from France) posts a Report About OOo’s Adoption.
He summarizes a French report that uses demand for software training as a proxy to measure demand for the software (what a clever way to determine real interest in open source programs).
Ismael writes “Their study is based on the demand of training instead of the number of licenses sold, which is more interesting for this type of software and which allows to measure the interest of companies and administrations for them. This report points out that OpenOffice.org use has increased by 30% in one year (2005 to 2006), like Linux. The best progression is for MySQL (+50%). For the others: PHP +20% and Java +5%.”
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Solveig on MSO 2007 vs. OOo, and French OOo Study
January 25th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
A press release announces that South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research has adopted OpenOffice.org on over 2,500 computers, in order to take advantage of the ODF standard file format:
“CSIR President and CEO Dr Sibusiso Sibisi, a well-known proponent of OSS and the driving force behind the CSIR’s adoption, comments: “Open document standards are of prime importance for allowing open access to information, now and in the future. By using open document standards to store our data, the CSIR is not locked into a specific vendor that developed and implemented a proprietary standard, thus eliminating the risk of not being able to access current data in future when such a standard may cease to be supported,” he says. “The maturity of OpenOffice, a powerful open source office suite that implements ODF, has in turn enabled the CSIR to adopt ODF without major obstacles,” he adds…
“The CSIR’s move to open standards will ensure that scientific knowledge produced in the organisation is preserved for posterity and that it can be accessed without limitation to specific tools. In this regard, it will empower the science community, and indeed, ultimately the people of South Africa,” Sibisi concludes.
ODF allows anyone to use the tool of their choice to open, view, change, edit and store data. It also allows free exchange of information, irrespective of the software used and it is an ISO standard controlled by the non-profit Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. ODF supports most office documents – text, spreadsheets, presentations, charts and graphical documents – and the standard is implemented by a range of applications and companies, including Google, IBM and Novell.”
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Adopts OpenOffice.org
January 22nd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
TWiki, a structured wiki especially strong and widely-used for organizational intranets, has just been updated to “Edinburgh”, or version 4.1.
The press release declares, “TWiki is the leading open source enterprise wiki platform, and a pioneer in the field of situational applications. TWiki extends the free-form world of wikis by adding structure. With TWiki, wiki content can be browsed, searched, grouped, categorized, filtered and restricted for limited access. TWiki looks and feels like a Web 2.0 web site, and can be easily modified through standard web browsers.”
Posted in Open Source, Wiki | Comments Off on TWiki Updated
January 19th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
The famous study of open source software just published by the EU has made its rounds to all the major tech sites. Even Boing Boing picks it up.
I’ll quote their summary:
“
This study may be a watershed in the digital tipping point toward open source software that we all know is coming.
Edit: InformationWeek reports on the study, and pulls this valuable quote:
“Gorman insists the open source software makes economic sense. “It’s a very good business model for entering large, existing markets and taking significant share, and creating significant customer and investor value,” he said. “If you’re an incumbent competing with a new company that’s an open source company, it’s very difficult to adjust or change your business model to be competitive. Usually by the time they end up adjusting, it’s too late.”
Posted in Open Source | Comments Off on EU’s FOSS Study on Boing Boing
January 19th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Rounding up a few interesting news items today:
Recently, Tamil Nadu, a high technology state in India, announced its move to FOSS for 99% of government computing infrastructure.
Now its neighbor, Kerala, is also moving to FOSS. Combined, these states have a population of nearly 95 million people–more than Germany–and both are key states in India’s IT economy.
Item 2 is an update to Docvert, an LGPL web service for converting documents like MS Word “.doc” files to the ODF standard or other XML-based formats. Anyone can install it on their own web server to convert documents, or use it as a base on which to build further software projects.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Kerala, India to Adopt FOSS, and Docvert
January 17th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Engadget posts a photo gallery of the new Nokia N800, the successor to Nokia’s 770 Debian-based internet tablet.
Also, ThoughtFix continues his coverage of the N800 with an interview with Ari Jaaksi of Nokia and plenty more.
Many good points come from the interview. One of the most interesting is this (paraphrased) quote from Dr Jaaksi: “Linux, Gnome, gstreamer, and other open-source choices were a BIG contribution to the success of this device.”
Of course they were! The 770 reached out to open source developers and gave them a real voice in its development. A community naturally formed around it, Nokia treated the developers as they ought to be treated, and the product became a success. This is a really good example of the way companies and developer communities can work together well.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Maemo, Open Source | Comments Off on More on the new Maemo
January 13th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Erwin Tenhumberg posted two interesting articles recently:
- New EU report about the impact of open source
- French Ministry saved 1.2M Euros with OpenOffice.org
The first article links to a PDF of an EU study on the impact of open source. Erwin chose to highlight a few points of particular interest, which I’ll quote here:
- According to table 1 on page 31 more than 90% of the surveyed Brazilian government organization and more than 70% of the Indian government organizations are using OpenOffice.org.
- According to paragraph 6.2.3.8 on page 35 a market share of 8% in German businesses is estimated for OpenOffice.org.
- Quote from page 102: “Indeed, the group of users was also asked whether as a result of the experimentation they thought they could do with OpenOffice the same amount of work they could do with Microsoft Office. As shown in Figure 46, under 10% of respondents thought they could not, more than 20% thought they definitely could perform as well with OpenOffice, while almost 60% thought they could be as productive with OpenOffice (as confirmed by the time-use analysis) though with some problems. Given their previous lack of experience with OpenOffice the fact that problems were subjectively perceived is unsurprising, but the fact that objectively the productivity of users remained the same and did not reduce is important.”
- An interesting read is also table 45, “Conclusions from the comparison of the usage of OOo and MSO in the organizations”, on page 244.
Erwin’s second article covers the large migration of French government agencies to OpenOffice.org. The original is in French, but Erwin summarizes:
“According to this French article the French Ministry of Agriculture and Fishing saved 1.2M Euros with OpenOffice.org. The switch to OpenOffice.org cost them 1.5M Euros, but the renewal of Microsoft Office licenses would have cost them 2.7M Euros.”
In summary, the early reports from the EU and its member states show how strong the case is for moving to open source and OpenOffice.org. Further, every successful migration makes succeeding ones easier, in a snowball effect. This is the behavior expected by Tipping Point theory, and we should expect to see the pace of migrations continue to increase both in Europe and around the world.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Erwin Tenhumberg on Open Source in the EU