December 21st, 2006 Benjamin Horst
In addition to rethinking the cost of hardware and distribution of computing resources around the globe, the One Laptop Per Child project has made some major changes in GUI assumptions as well.
Mike Hearn writes a review of the OLPC graphical user interface:
“This UI is quite simply one of the deepest and most interesting redesigns of the desktop user interface ever produced.”
Mike has a list of at least 20 innovative ideas included in the OLPC, but to me one of the most interesting is, as he writes, “Network and presence is fully integrated into the core of the design.” This is a major departure from existing OS GUIs, which mostly derive their design from pre-network blueprints.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on OLPC GUI Review
December 20th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Five thousand dollars in prizes were awarded last week at the conclusion of the OpenOffice.org Template and Clipart Contest, reports the Ubuntu Blog.
LXer announces “The contest resulted in some superior and innovative work. “Some of the templates show just how advanced and flexible Openoffice.org’s OpenDocument format is as both a Word and Spreadsheet ODF processor. The winning templates and many others breaks a myth that Openoffice.org cannot do advanced editing functions like Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel. It is obvious that Openoffice.org has come of age and is more than just a free alternative to MS Office but is an extremely worthy competitor” said Russell Ossendryver.”
Project sponsor WorldLabel.com has already committed to a second annual contest in 2007 because of this year’s success.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OOo Template and Clipart Contest Finishes
December 11th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
The Inquirer reports on a survey that shows Europe-wide use of Firefox has hit 23.2%, with one country (Slovenia) at 40.5%.
Finland is at 39.3%, Poland at 33.6%, Germany at 33%, and France at 20.7%.
What’s the global situation? Pretty good, for our band of freedom-fighters:
“Worldwide, Europe – at 23.2 per cent – is just behind Australasia (23.4%) in its use of the foxy browser. According to Xiti, 14.5 per cent of North American surfers use Firefox. Its smallest market share is in South America, where it accounts for just 11.1 per cent of active browsers.”
Posted in Open Source, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Firefox Keeps Booming in Europe
December 6th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Yusseri writes a great piece on the Open Malaysia blog on his research into Microsoft’s efforts, directly and through proxies, to undermine ODF around the world.
“I looked around in the web and the available documentation that we had to provide data for my presso. I found lots of other OSS initiatives all over the place. What I also found was a fair amount of resistance against the initiatives. This resistance was led by one large multinational corporation and a few “alliances” — namely the BSA and the Initiative for Software Choice. There were no other single corporation that protested, campaigned, lobbied or made donations against the disparate initiatives.
There was only one: Microsoft.
All the others — IBM, Sun, Oracle, SAP, CA, Symantec, Adobe, Autodesk, etc. — either made supporting noises or kept quiet altogether.
I checked all over the world — America, Australia, South Africa, India, Korea, Japan, Germany, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, Spain, and more — and it was all the same.”
Read Yusseri’s article to see the details of “free” Microsoft software and “discounts” and “donations” (and the occasional veiled threat), all intended to block or stall the open source efforts.
It is dangerous how far this one rich company’s arms stretch around the world, and it is a terrible shame to see so much progress being held back by one stubborn and corrupt organization. Let’s hope the dam breaks soon, hundreds of places all leap to freedom at once, Microsoft cannot keep up with it all, and a free market based on open standards emerges to replace the repressed environment of today.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Open Malaysia Blog on Microsoft’s Attempts to Undermine ODF
December 4th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
It appears my recent post on Birmingham’s Linux pilot did not tell the full story.
Techworld (UK) writes Birmingham City Council claims open-source success.
“With Birmingham’s trial period over and with lessons learnt and understanding gained, the Council now expects to make cost savings over time, and contrary to press reports which claimed Birmingham had scrapped the Linux initiative, it will in fact “significantly increase” its use of open-source software, Evans said. The trial also had other positive results, he claimed, such as demonstrating the ease with which Firefox and OpenOffice.org can be substituted for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office.”
Excellent news! And, later in the article, OpenOffice and Firefox’ potential are explored further:
“OpenOffice, for one, met little or no resistance with most users, many of whom said they didn’t notice they’d been using a different application. (Power users did face some problems.) The public had no trouble using Firefox on public terminals and some said they preferred the open-source desktop to Windows. “It appears that OpenOffice provides a satisfactory equivalent to Microsoft products for those using basic or intermediate functionality,” iMpower found.”
This seems to justify the strategy of porting open source programs to Windows, to acclimate users to FOSS before they migrate fully to Linux. Smaller steps make the path easier to travel.
One of the major reasons Birmingham ran into trouble with its pilot is that the UK has some catching up to do with regard to open source:
“The UK has less than average usage of open source compared with other EU countries, according to a report by the University of Maastricht, with 32.1 percent of all UK local government users on open source compared to the 78.7 percent European average.”
But, it’s clear they are moving in the right direction, if slowly.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Birmingham Revisited
December 1st, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Google is hosting the second meeting for developers porting OpenOffice to Mac OS X at their Hamburg offices on December 2 and 3 (tomorrow and Sunday).
Eric B writes:
“The main developers of the Mac OS X port for OpenOffice.org project meet to work together over a weekend
– show, analyze, work on current development version,
– share our knowledge in workshops (e.g. for debug )
– define tasks and objectives
– meet, collaborate and have fun coding.
If you are interested in attending and developing OpenOffice.org for the Mac please contact : ericb@openoffice.org
The minutes of this meeting will be public, and available shortly after the event.”
From several of the mailing lists, it seems to me that OpenOffice is already very popular on Mac OS X. As it improves, through efforts like this, the userbase will grow even more quickly.
I expect OOo to displace Microsoft Office on Mac OS X before it does on Windows, but its future majority marketshare on Mac will certainly help fuel its growth on Windows as well. (Remember that the mavens are already mostly Mac and Linux users. They’ll be promoting OpenOffice to their friends on Windows directly and through increasing global usage of ODF files.)
Posted in Mac, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice Mac Porters’ Meeting
December 1st, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Yesterday, November 30, a new version of Chandler, 0.7alpha4, hit the streets. This version is starting to look like a real application.
The press release reads, in part:
“Alpha 4 is our first Dashboard release. The Dashboard[1] is in part, inspired by GTD methodology and many of David Allen’s insights into the problems with the ways in which people process information and get too easily sidetracked from important tasks in today’s interruption-prone information workplaces. The Dashboard is the runway view of all of your information. The closest thing users have to a Dashboard today is their email client Inbox.
In addition to incremental improvements to calendaring and sharing, our goal in this release is to deliver a rough sketch of what Chandler will be by our first Preview release, which is scheduled for Spring of 2007.”
Posted in Open Source | Comments Off on Chandler Updated
November 29th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
One Laptop Per Child News is a blog that bills itself as “Your independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child’s computer, the OLPC Children’s Machine XO, developed by MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte.”
It’s got plenty of great information on the state of the project, along with some fun stuff, too.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, Uncategorized | Comments Off on One Laptop Per Child News Site
November 22nd, 2006 Benjamin Horst
ZDNet UK writes Criticism mounts over Birmingham’s Linux project.
The top brass pulled out and the project seems to have failed. Onlookers can’t figure out how so much money was wasted, when similar Linux migrations in Europe and elsewhere have shown vastly better results.
“The council planned to roll out Linux software and applications on 1,500 desktops in libraries across the city, but in the end it got no further than a 200-desktop project. Several industry watchers have voiced their concerns about the project, particularly around the number of PCs rolled out. Birmingham’s expenditure averaged over £2,500 per PC.”
Wow! This sounds like a classic case of pork barrel spending. I wonder where the money really went?
“Mark Taylor, whose Open Source Consortium also exited the project in the early stages, said: “I have no idea how anyone could spend half a million pounds on 200 desktops, running free software”.
Asked by ZDNet UK whether he was surprised that an XP upgrade was calculated as cheaper than the Linux project, Taylor said, “If it’s done properly, that can’t happen. It’s amazing that anyone can spend that much on [Linux] project management.” Taylor added that there are plenty of open-source skills in the Birmingham area which could have been utilised.”
While Birmingham may have chickened out from the full Linux migration, the move to OpenOffice is continuing, according to some responses to the original article. This is a good way to distract those who are trying to derail the effort. They’ll think they have succeeded in blocking a Linux migration, but meanwhile, all the office suites will have been replaced with OpenOffice, and that is no small accomplishment!
And the next time a Linux move is attempted, it will be much easier to complete, with some of the groundwork already taken care of.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Birmingham’s Linux Project
November 21st, 2006 Benjamin Horst
As the One Laptop per Child project continues to progress, they’ve recently uploaded a photo gallery of the first unit to leave the factory.
And ODF, the OpenDocument Format, plays an important role in the OLPC computers:
“An OpenDocument Viewer is important – it will allow kids to read electronic documents (such as educational books) in the OpenDocument format (ODF). This format is usable in AbiWord which is being adapted to work on the OLPC.
Obviously, since the whole point of the project is education, giving kids the tools they need to read electronic books in various formats is critical. The OpenDocument format (ODF) has properties that are especially valuable for OLPC electronic books, compared to HTML, PDF, or other formats.”
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on One Laptop per Child Photos, ODF Support