April 10th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Andy Updegrove writes Case Study II: A National Archive Moves to ODF, covering “the decision by the National Archives of Austalia (NAA) to move its digital archives program to software that supports ODF.”
He writes, “The significance of this example is that the NAA gathers in materials from many sources, in many different formats, which will need to be converted to ODF compliance for long term archival storage… But that will be a one-time only exercise, as compared to maintaining the capability of accessing all of those documents in all of those formats indefinitely. Instead, post conversion, the NAA will only need to deal with one software suite (in this case they have selected OpenOffice 2.0). But even if OOo is eventually discontinued, the ODF compliant documents will remain accessible, so long as any ODF supporting software remains available.”
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April 7th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Following on the heels of Massachusetts and some rumblings in California, a bill has been introduced in Minnesota that would require its executive department to “use open standards in situations where the other requirements of a project do not make it technically impossible to do this.”
See the Standards Blog for more:
Updegrove writes, “The fact that such a bill has been introduced is significant in a number of respects. First, the debate over open formats will now be ongoing in two U.S. states rather than one. Second, if the bill is successful, the Minnesota CIO will be required to enforce a law requiring the use of open formats, rather than be forced to justify his or her authority to do so. Third, the size of the market share that can be won (or lost) depending upon a vendor’s compliance with open standards will increase. And finally, if two states successfully adopt and implement open data format policies, other states will be more inclined to follow.”
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April 5th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
As mentioned in yesterday’s post, Bristol is moving 5,500 PCs from Microsoft Office, Lotus and Corel to StarOffice.
ZDNet UK reports the city will save £1,000,000 as a result.
“The Council estimates that the total cost of StarOffice — Sun’s commercial version of the open source OpenOffice.org suite — over a five year period will be £670,000, while Microsoft Office would cost £1.7m, according to the government-funded Open Source Academy.”
“Bristol Council, which is currently running a mixed environment of Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and Microsoft Office, believes it may even have overestimated the cost of migrating to StarOffice, as the training barrier appears to be lower than was originally thought.”
“Our biggest challenge was encouraging staff to be open-minded about anything that wasn’t MS Office. Microsoft has become so dominant and ubiquitous that the default assumption for many people is that everything else is inferior and that the only way to accomplish work is to do it in the exact way that an MS Office product does it. When you combine this with the idea of software that doesn’t cost money, you end up with comments like ‘if it’s cheap it must be nasty,'” said Beckett.”
Indeed, perception is the biggest problem for FOSS and OpenOffice. “Mindshare” can lag several years behind technical reality in the world of software. While the geeks have embraced FOSS, crossing the chasm to get typical people using it will take a bit longer. However, events like the Bristol migration are examples that this is already beginning to occur.
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April 4th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
The UK’s beautiful, Plone-based Open Source Academy website exists to help migrate government agencies to cost-effective, stable and powerful open source software tools. “Our aim is to encourage the use of Open Source Software by local authorities through knowledge sharing and practical advice. The content of our portal, as well as our one-to-one services, can help you economise on costs and increase Open Source’s implementation efficiency.”
Bristol‘s 5,500-PC StarOffice migration (saving 60% over using Microsoft Office) is the current big news over there. “The decision was taken following a full evaluation of the costs and benefits of both platforms that included staff retraining, migration and support costs of switching the 5,500 users from a mixture of predominantly Microsoft systems to StarOffice.”
“So far, the experience of migrating users has proved that the cost of migration is low and ease of use is high. We now have concrete evidence that less effort is required to deploy the software, support and train users than we estimated,” said Gavin Beckett.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
April 3rd, 2006 Benjamin Horst
The March 2006 OpenOffice Newsletter is now online, with plenty to report.
Several new books have been released, a number of conferences have been held and others are being planned, OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 was released, and more.
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March 31st, 2006 Benjamin Horst
I just learned about Penguin Day, which is a great idea for helping get non-profit organizations and FOSS groups to work together.
A number of cities have held Penguin Days, including Philadelphia, New York, Seattle, Toronto, London and others.
“Penguin Day brings together nonprofit staff, tech providers, geeks, consultants, and open source software developers for a day of learning and conversation. Together, we’ll demystify open source for nonprofits, frankly address the challenges of developing open source tools, and learn about specific promising open source applications for nonprofits.”
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March 30th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Want to keep track of all the cool new programs being written for Maemo, the platform that powers the Nokia 770?
Here’s the Maemo Wiki’s Maemo Applications Catalog.
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March 29th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Matthew Overington and Steven Deare write ‘Sandal and Ponytail Set’ Cramping Linux Adoption? for CNet News.com.
In the article, Peter Quinn discusses the effect of FOSS developers’ typically-casual dress code on their reputation among business users. However, he also says that FOSS and open standards like ODF are being investigated at almost every state IT shop in the US:
“I think there’s something going on in every agency in every (U.S) state,” he said. “Whether the CIO knows it or not, that’s a different thing. I think almost everybody, they say, ‘It’s not happening at my shop, I promise you,’ but when you (go) to their shop, it’s happening. So I think it’s happening everywhere, but there’s varying degrees.”
IT folks must keep quiet for fear of reprisal from the well-monied and entrenched corporate lobbyists. “When you think about the lobbying power and the cash that’s available for opponents of open source and opponents of OpenDocument, there is a significant amount of money and resource that people can and will bring to bear,” says Quinn.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Peter Quinn on FOSS Adoption
March 28th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Again, it’s a shame I cannot speak or read Portuguese! However, it looks like Brazil’s “Computers for All” initiative has resulted in the sale of over 1,000,000 Linux-based computers to members of the Brazilian public in 2005.
At the same time, MIT’s One Laptop per Child project will deliver another 1,000,000 Linux-based “$100 laptops” to school kids in Brazil.
The Computers for All initiative’s website reports both of these victories.
In yesterday’s post about Microsoft, I read that officially, there are 330 million computers in the world running Windows. If that number is correct, then these two Brazilian projects will shift more than 0.6% of total global marketshare to Linux.
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March 24th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
It wouldn’t be a surprise if it’s true: ConsortiumInfo.org reports that Microsoft may be trying to sabotage ODF to make it irrelevant by delaying its ISO recognition until MS’ format reaches the finish line.
Groklaw also analyzes the issue:
PJ writes, “I hope I’m not giving them ideas, but all they would have to do to slow ODF down, I’m thinking, is ensure lots of discussion, review, documentation, exploration, etc. to arrange that ISO can’t ratify ODF until ECMA is ready to submit their competing XML.
That can’t be the plan, I’m sure. That would be mean and anticompetitive.
It’s rare that there would be no comments needing resolution. And if there is a comment, it has to be sent around to everyone, and then there has to be a response, and then consensus has to be reached. You get the picture. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s XML is whizzing through ECMA’s special fast track process.”
Of course, Microsoft Office 2007 has just been delayed again…
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on MS Trying to Sabotage ODF?