April 17th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Leif Lodahl writes about Gribskov, Denmark‘s annual savings of 1 million Danish Kroner per year due to its adoption of OpenOffice.
Michel van der Linden is head of IT in Municipality of Gribskov in Denmark. In this article he explains how the municipality changed from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice some years ago. Initially they saved about two million Danish Kroner and later one million per year.
(According to Google, 1,000,000 Danish Kroner is about $180,000 US dollars.)
Machine translation of the original article in Danish is available here.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Gribskov, Denmark Saves Millions with OpenOffice
April 16th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
With OpenOffice 3.1 due any time now, I’ve begun using the OOo 3.1 RC1 on a daily basis already. I haven’t encountered any reason to make it feel like anything other than a final release, so hopefully others are in the same boat.
H-Online covers the OpenOffice release candidate in a recent post:
Baring any delays due to major bugs the final version is expected to be released on the 15th of April. A full list of features in the upcoming 3.1 final release can be found here.
Whoops, that day has passed, but it must surely be coming very soon!
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice 3.1 Release Candidate
April 15th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Widelands is an open source real-time strategy game, inspired by Settlers I and II.
The screenshots look good, and I’m downloading the game now and hope to try playing it over the next weekend.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Open Source Games: Widelands
April 13th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Our friend Christian Einfeldt reports on Slashdot that Hungary and Tatarstan (in Russia) have made strategic moves to adopt Free and Open Source Software.
On April 2, the Hungarian government announced that it will be modifying its procurement rules to mandate that open source procurement funding match expenditures for proprietary software, according to Ferenc Baja, deputy minister for information technology. In Tatarstan, a Republic of 3.8 million inhabitants, the Deputy Minister of Education announced that by the end of this school year, all 2,400 educational institutions in Tatarstan will have completed a transition to GNU/Linux, following a successful pilot program it rolled out in 2008.
With the 2010 annual OpenOffice.org conference to be held in Budapest, Hungary, this is especially timely news.
Posted in Education, Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Hungary and Tatarstan Choose FOSS
April 8th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Google’s Android platform, while starting slow, shows a great deal of potential and has piqued the interest of many phone vendors and carriers. In the NY Times’ piece T-Mobile to Use Google Software in Devices for Home, Ashley Vance discusses new T-Mobile devices planned for Android.
T-Mobile plans to sell a home phone early next year and soon after a tablet computer, both running Android, according to confidential documents obtained from one of the company’s partners. The phone will plug into a docking station and come with another device that handles data synchronization as it recharges the phone’s battery.
There have been many rumors of netbooks adopting Android, in part because it is expected the brand power of Google would be strong enough to convince buyers they don’t need Windows. In fact, T-Mobile’s home phone sounds very much like a phone-netbook hybrid to me:
T-Mobile’s use of Android to advance its ambitions also shows just how blurry the line has become between phones and computers. Its tablet-size phone device resembles a small laptop without a keyboard and has a seven-inch touch screen. It would handle basic computing jobs like checking the weather or managing data across a variety of devices in the home.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Androids in the Home!
April 7th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Frank Mau writes Pootle and OpenOffice.org, in which he discusses continued refinements to the translation tools available for OOo native language communities. Among those tools is Pootle, which helps to manage translation project teams.
Of interest to the whole community, is the vast breadth of translations that have already been completed for the development branch of OpenOffice 3.1. Mau announces:
OpenOffice.org 3.1 is knocking on the door and we are proud to deliver more languages than ever before. I’ve seen near by 100 full install-sets for m5 testing! Great to see this engagement by the community, big thanks to everyone.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
April 6th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
ComputerWorld publishes a lengthy piece titled 25 Highly-Anticipated Open Source Releases Coming This Year.
It’s a roundup of some major open source project releases scheduled for the rest of this year, although article commentors pointed out a number of important projects that weren’t mentioned… which shows how important and enormous the field of open source has become.
Firefox 3.5, Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, Android, Maemo, Eclipse, OpenOffice.org 3.1, Kaltura, Dimdim, Foswiki, WordPress, several open source hardware projects, and much more.
It’s going to be a huge year for open source!
Posted in GNU/Linux, Maemo, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Wiki | 1 Comment »
April 3rd, 2009 Benjamin Horst
John C. Dvorak, a PC Mag columnist long seen as a major Microsoft apologist supporter, has become enamored of Ubuntu for himself and his readers, and expresses it in a recent column, Dvorak Likes Linux:
The critical mass has been reached, and it’s time everyone tried Ubuntu.
A strong statement, and a major shift for the irascible writer. He expands it with:
I seriously like the Ubuntu 8.10 implementation and will now install it permanently on my latest machines. It’s a winner…
In many instances the complexity of Linux turns out to be smoothed over by the Ubuntu architecture. It’s so good that I’m a little annoyed with myself for not getting to it sooner.
It’s a pretty amazing change for this IT veteran, made even more so when he caps off the piece with this:
If I had a small or mid-size company, I’d probably use only Linux and open-source software, just to stay out of the way of the software police and their onerous “audits”—another abhorrent situation that, to me, is intolerable.
Congratulations, John, for coming around! Welcome to the new world.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Dvorak Prefers Ubuntu
April 2nd, 2009 Benjamin Horst
This June 19th and 20th, New York City will play host to the Open Video Conference.
Open Video is a broad based movement of video creators, technologists, academics, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, activists, remixers, and many others. When most folks think of “open,” they think of open source and open codecs. They’re right—but there’s more to Open Video than open codecs. Open Video is the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video. These qualities provide more fertile ground for independent producers, bottom-up innovation, and greater protection for free speech online.
As important as the openness of HTML and web protocols, is the importance of open video, for the future of the web. The web’s greatest strengths include decentralization and the free playing field provided by open standards and open formats. As video becomes ever more intrinsic and central to the web and internet, it’s of great importance that the founding values of these media are maintained and strengthened.
The Open Video Conference, organized in part by the Miro project, should be a milestone in ensuring we achieve this future.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Open Video Conference
March 31st, 2009 Benjamin Horst
It’s long been common sense that economic downturns aid some businesses, even while harming most others. Beneficiaries tend to include discount retailers, as shoppers shift downmarket, as well as similar cost-conscious products and services that can replace more expensive alternatives.
Because of its price benefits, open source is now benefiting in this way, writes Eweek, in Why Recession Is Causing Enterprises to Rethink Open-Source Strategy.
Author Chris Preimesberger writes:
Budget limitations and continued improvement in software and associated services are making open-source software alternatives such as MySQL, SUSE Linux, OpenOffice.org and plenty of others look mighty good to IT managers and CFOs.
Interviewing Matt Asay from Alfresco, the article asserts that open source is starting to be seen as the safe, default option that will save a manager’s job, whereas in the past it was often considered new, untested and risky.
Is this evidence of an arriving tipping point?
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »