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This past weekend saw the successful conclusion of the fundraising campaign, and the date for the OpenOffice.org Metro Ad is set for Monday, July 31.
Many thanks to John Kakoulides, who designed the ad (which looks great), as well as to all the donors and others who helped promote the effort.
Next step: to get other media interested in the process so that a ripple effect develops around the initial ad placement…
Today is a good day for software migration news.
Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Geekcorps, thoroughly reviews the prototype of the One Laptop Per Child notebook computer on his blog.
Computer Business Review’s Open Source Weblog reports on a recent US Department of Defense report [PDF link] which “recommends that the DoD move to a roadmap to adopt open source and open standards, maintaining that such a move is not only in the US national interest, but in the interests of US national security.”
Through a NewsForge article today, I just learned about the Community Free Software Group that operates here in New York City.
“CFSG is in the middle of its third PC Garage, a program that brings kids and computers together at community centers around New York City. Selso DaSilva, one of the founders of CFSG, says that PC Garage is “an idea that seems obvious when you think about it. [We] help kids put together computers at community technology centers and other community-based organizations using free software as the teaching medium, and in the process the kids learn about technology that respects their freedom while building a computer they can take home.”
CFSG teaches people about working with hardware, the values of Free Software, and also specific software applications: “CFSG is putting together a program that will help high school students learn programming concepts, and it currently offers a 3-D animation course using Blender3D. “We’re [also] putting together graphics workshops featuring the GIMP and Inkscape, as well as an audio editing course with Audacity.”
NECC, the National Educational Computing Conference, is being held right now in San Diego. K12OS.org has bloggers on site recording the level of interest in open source among the teachers attending the event. In short, there is a great deal of interest!
Sessions on Free Software and Moodle have been packed to capacity. Public computers running K12LTSP have been in constant use, and over 15,000 educators are in attendance. Ubuntu shipped 2,000 giveaway CDs to the conference! And Nicholas Negroponte is there to discuss the $100 laptop project.
Author of the post, “pnelson” summarizes: “I’m not sure if the Linux world realizes that schools are ready for a change to free software.”
Dan Bricklin continues to hack away at his fascinating WikiCalc project. SocialText offers an intriguing screencast of WikiCalc’s current development state here.
Remembering AOL’s strategy of sending AOL sign-up CDs (and before that, floppy disks) to everyone in the country, and how it helped lead them to the top, I think Google should adopt the same tactic.
Make the “Google Pack” starter kit CD, containing all the applications of Google Pack, attached to an easy way to create a Google account for the pack updates, gmail and the other g-services. Add another application to the Pack–OpenOffice.org, with a new Google plugin that allows it to very easily save and read files stored online with Writely. (Think if it like IMAP email–you can read your email from your heavy desktop client when at home, and from your web interface when on the road.)
Mail this starter kit CD to every high school and college student in the country first. Then to small business owners, then to everyone else. Put it next to the checkout at grocery stores and drugstores, in “Google vending machines” on campuses, and next to the gates at airports for business travelers waiting to board.
New and imaginative distribution channels like this are required, because the existing entrenched monopolist already has a hammerlock on today’s channels. New subscribers who have missed Google’s current (all-digital) distribution efforts will be turned into a huge pool of new customers.
And of course, when OpenOffice pushes Microsoft Office aside as the leading suite, Google won’t have to worry about all that revenue (35% of MS’ total) subsidizing MS attacks on Google’s core markets.
The first national OpenOffice.org community meeting (“BrOffice.org”) was held in Brazil.
OpenOffice.org is becoming a juggernaut in Brazil. Perhaps it will be the first country where OOo gains majority marketshare?
Of particular interest are the success cases mentioned at the meeting:
“Three success cases in the migration to BrOffice.org illustrated the second part of the meeting. Banco do Brasil, Brazilian Army, and FIEC presented their migration cases detailing strategies and techniques used in the deployment of the software.
From Brasília, the senior analyst Dinis dos Santos presented Banco do Brasil’s case. Altogether, OpenOffice.org 2.0 was installed in all 4,000 branch offices, in the central management, and departments, adding up to 31 thousand workstations. According to Banco’s information, the savings were in the order of 7 million Reais.
Soon after, in Fortaleza, it was the Brazilian Army’s turn to present their case in the person of Major Alexandre. In the Army, migration was based on the strategical planning for Free Software in the Federal Government, from October, 2003. According do Major Alexandre’s presentation, BrOffice.org is perfectly adequate for organizations of any size. However, one of the decisive aspects for their success was the training of human resources.
Ending the presentation of cases, César Cals Neto, from FIEC, presented the institution’s case of success, showing that over 80% of the 1000 workstation network already uses BrOffice.org. The project used São Paulo’s Subway’s Authority’s experience as reference for their Free Software Migration.”
A working model of OLPC’s “$100 laptop” is starting to make the rounds.
“At the MITX (Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange) What’s Next Forum and Technology Awards June 7 in Boston, Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, was inducted into the MITX Innovation Hall of Fame…
But Negroponte used his time at the podium to talk about his current job as chairman of the One Laptop per Child association and its goal of putting what is commonly referred to as the $100 laptop into the hands of children in developing countries.
Negroponte didn’t just talk about the association and its goals; he also brought the first working model of the $100 laptop.”
A lot of innovations designed to specifically tailor the laptop to its intended markets have been introduced, some of which (such as wireless mesh networking) aren’t available anywhere else.
“During his talk Negroponte discussed some of the core requirements of the $100 laptop, such as that it run at very low power (around 2 watts), be readable in bright light, and be rugged enough to work in inhospitable areas.
One of the most interesting points was regarding the wireless mesh capabilities of the laptop. Negroponte pointed out that the point of most distributions will be to make sure that the villages have some form of internet connectivity in a central location, such as a school.
Each laptop will then use wireless mesh technology to spread wireless networking across the entire village. When the laptop is shut down, it will continue to work as part of the wireless network.”