August 21st, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Kolkata Newsline reports EC opens window to free software.
“EC” refers to the Election Commission of India, “the largest government organisation to have opted for free software and stepped into the open-source environment.”
While the article does not specify how many computers are involved in this migration, it does not seem like an enormous number:
“Chief Electoral Officer Debashis Sen said: “We decided to replace the Office suite of Microsoft with OpenOffice at a meeting on August 7 and 8, and cost was one of the reasons (for the change).”
According to officials, the cost of MS Office suite is approximately Rs 15,000 per licensed copy and Microsoft generally gives a 10 per cent discount to institutional sales.
For Microsoft, the switch would mean loss of substantial revenue. In West Bengal alone, the EC has 100 computers in 65 sub divisions.”
Unless they mean, 100 computers in each of these 65 subdivisions, which would be a substantial number… and how many states are there in India that might each have this many divisions? There is room for multiple interpretations of this article’s numbers.
Whatever the numbers in this specific case, it is clear that OpenOffice.org is really gaining momentum in India. Many goverment agencies have migrated, as have a number of large corporations, and Linux desktops are selling well by all accounts. I don’t know what the big picture is, but all these clues are hinting at something really important happening!
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Election Commission of India Moves to OpenOffice.org
August 18th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Bob Sutor posits that “OpenDocument is bringing a renaissance of document creation and publishing.”
His arguments are quite clearsighted. The office suite has been a fixed product for a long time, when, from the perspective of its users, it should have morphed and mutated to fit dozens or hundreds of different specialized niches. The monolith is a dinosaur, the new mantra should be “smaller, faster, and specialized.”
“I know many of you will be thinking open source here, but the existence of commonly implemented open standards that are beyond a single vendor’s control means that there will be multiple, competitive implementations. This means better, more usable features, better security (because people will compete on this element), better performance, and lower cost. It is important to remember that ODF is just one example here. We’re going to see this repeated over and over again for other standards and in many industries…”
“What will also happen will be the development of high quality SDKs created for ODF and some standard things you want to do with it. For more than thirty years, UNIX users have used a string of filters to process, analyze, reshape, and format information. The binary formats used by WYSIWYG office applications dulled our senses to what we used to know how to do.
All of this will lead to a collapse of the office suite market, but we’ll still see the creation of even more documents that are more widely used and, fundamentally, just more useful.”
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Wiki | Comments Off on “OpenDocument is Bringing a Renaissance”
August 12th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
This is old news by now, but there’s an extension for Firefox that allows it to read ODF files.
“Currently it handles OpenDocument text files, in the future it will handle the other types too. It is released under the LGPL/GPL.”
Very handy!
Posted in ODF, Open Source | Comments Off on ODF Reader Firefox Extension
August 11th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Steve Hargadon interviews educators using open source in South Africa and Indiana (USA) today:
“I started very early in order to be able to catch Hilton Theunissen in South Africa, who has led the tuXlab project to install Linux thin-client in 200 schools. Then late in the day Mike Huffman and Laura Taylor provided insight into the Indiana Affordable Classroom Computers for Every Secondary Student (ACCESS) program.
These are both fascinating interviews, and along with the interview with the folks from Atlanta Public Schools last week, they are confirming a pattern that deserves some real exploration: high-priced, high-maintenance computers have led to relatively little actual student time in front of them (35 minutes a week per student in the case of Indiana, at a cost of $100 million a year!); low-cost computer solutions provide significantly more actual time in front of computers for students, and the result is dramatic engagement by students and teachers, and significant academic success…”
You can download the audio in MP3 or ogg format from his post linked above.
Steve also runs a really great website called K12OpenSource, in which he argues the merits of open source software for educational environments. (Of which I am a strong supporter.)
(K12OpenSource uses a nice hosted wiki service called Wikispaces.)
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, Wiki | Comments Off on Steve Hargadon: Two Open Source Interviews, K12OpenSource, Wikispaces
August 9th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Apple announced a new hosting site for open source Mac-related projects at www.macosforge.org.
Of most interest to me at this moment are the Wiki Server project mentioned yesterday and the CalDAV-based Darwin Calendar Server. It’s touted as working with all standards-capable clients, like iCal, Mozilla Sunbird, Chandler, and more.
(Meanwhile, Apple has moved a number of its projects, including Darwin Calendar Server, to the Apache 2.0 license.)
Posted in Mac, Open Source, Wiki | Comments Off on Mac OS Forge and Darwin Calendar Server
August 7th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Mitch Kapor spoke on The Case for Wikifying Politics at this year’s Wikimania Conference (which I missed). Andy Carvin transcribed Kapor’s talk on his blog. It’s fascinating and wonderful to read something progressive and optimistic in the world of political thought today.
Hula is an open source email and calendar server based on code donated by Novell. The project’s been running for a year and a half now, and has reached alpha-level code. I noticed new screenshots of the web interface which include some great ideas. They’re summed up in the dashboard view of the application, showing an overview of the user’s email and calendar events for the day. See the screenshots at Hula’s tour page.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Uncategorized, Wiki | Comments Off on Mitch Kapor on Wiki Politics, and Hula Project Web and Calendar Server
August 3rd, 2006 Benjamin Horst
The Register reports the One Laptop Per Child Project has collected 80% of the orders necessary to begin production:
“The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme is just one million laptops away from beginning production, as the group confirmed that Brazil, Argentina and Thailand have each placed orders for a million machines, according to DesktopLinux.com.
OLPC says it will begin production when it has orders for between five million and 10m laptops. Last week, it announced that Nigeria had signed on to the scheme, taking the total pre-ordered to four million.”
Meanwhile, java programmer John O’Conner writes in his blog (okay, almost a year ago) that he’d like to see a blogging extension for OpenOffice.org. I agree it would be handy, in particular because some competitors are touting the feature now (and because it would be helpful for the legions of computer-using folks who still prefer the desktop software paradigm over working through a browser).
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, Uncategorized | Comments Off on One Laptop Per Child Update and Request for OOo Blog Extension
August 2nd, 2006 Benjamin Horst
According to Heise Online, Extremadura completely switches to Linux and OpenDocument.
Extremadura, a region in Spain, switched all of the computers in its educational systems to a customized version of Debian–and OpenOffice–in early 2003 (including 80,000 machines in all), and has been working to expand the use of FOSS ever since.
“A Linux distribution called gnuLinEx, which was developed in-house as a derivative of Debian, will be used as the operating system. In addition, freely available office applications running on Open Source licenses will be used. All of the staff in the administration are obligated to use the ISO standards ODF and PDF/A to share and archive documents. ODF was originally developed from within the Open Source community OpenOffice.org as a vendor-independent document format based on XML…
Vázquez de Miguel says that the region will “no longer be so exposed to the problems caused by forced migrations” after this switchover. Furthermore, he says the administration will have more input in the selection of software and be able to reduce support costs… In addition, the region expects free software to increase security and autonomy in addition to making public expenditures easier to calculate and track.”
Posted in GNU/Linux, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Heise: “Extremadura completely switches to Linux and OpenDocument”
July 28th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
The Register reports: “Ubuntu heads for the mainstream”
“Mark Shuttleworth, millionaire cosmonaut and self-funded Linux guru, has managed to make his Ubuntu project the Linux distribution of choice in just two years. But now the friendly brown OS with the cute drumming noises faces an awkward journey towards the commercial mainstream.
Ubuntu has had quite a ride in those two years. By many benchmarks, it’s the most popular Linux flavour there is. It’s top of the Distrowatch download chart, and it’s the distro most frequently installed on Dell PCs – according to Michael Dell himself…
Ubuntu has also started to appear pre-installed on PCs – from the Singapore-based company, Esys – which will be a crucial step in taking Ubuntu to people who don’t have the skills to install it themselves.”
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on The Register: “Ubuntu heads for the mainstream”
July 27th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
According to a 2004 article (“Laptops pre-loaded with Linux getting popular“) in India’s “The Hindu,” HP India’s country manager for consumer portables, Rajiv Grover, said “between 20 and 22 per cent of our laptop business came from notebooks loaded with Linux.”
That was just over two years ago; what is the status today? More large corporate migrations, particularly in India, continue to make the news, but little effort has been made (of which I am aware) to calculate the current sales, usage, and marketshare figures for Windows vs. Linux in India.
As a rising giant, India is an exceptionally important market battlefield. If Linux was so popular two years ago, I can only imagine it has grown a great deal since then–I really must find more data on the Linux-in-India situation!
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | 2 Comments »