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One of my favorite software products under development is the Open Source Application Foundation’s Chandler. One of my favorite hardware products recently released is the Linux-powered Nokia 770 web tablet. Running Chandler on the Nokia 770 would be a really exciting combination of the two!
It looks like the first steps are being taken, since wxWidgets and wxPython are being ported to the Maemo platform now.
ITWire, in Australia, reports: Analyst Says MS Office to Fall to Open Source
“Noted IT industry analyst, Dr Kevin McIsaac, predicts that Microsoft Office will give way to open source products as governments and other large organisations move to open standards for storing documents.”
In my opinion, this eventual result is clear as day. Tying MS Office into server products will surely extend its life in corporate environments (that already invested heavily in MS), but home, education, non-profit, governments and small businesses will not stay with the slow and expensive MS Office for very much longer.
I expect to see major inroads being made globally throughout 2006. (As we have already seen in some countries in 2005.)
Our good friends at Mad Penguin (Christian Einfeldt in particular) landed an interview with several of the IT leads at the California Air Resources Board (ARB).
Einfeldt writes, “[The ARB] is using FOSS primarily in the back office, just like so many other governmental agencies and businesses. But if you dig just a little deeper, as shown in this Mad Penguin™ interview of the ARB staffers responsible for moving ARB toward a more FOSSy future, you can see that the seeds of more profound change gradually developing.”
Some more great quotes caught my attention. Here they are, slightly out of context and out of order:
In summary, Einfeldt has written a great article and found a very mature and balanced decision-making organization that continues to find value in FOSS and adopt ever more key pieces of it into their infrastructure.
Sadly, my Portuguese is not up to par. However, I think this article — BB troca Office por software livre até o final de 2006 — says that Banco do Brasil has moved from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org on 23,000 computers.
If you know where an English translation can be found, or can supply one yourself, please let me know!
Edit: Erwin Tenhumberg’s blog covers the story, and several commenters provided translations and more info: In addition to the 23,000 computers Banco do Brasil has already migrated to OpenOffice, they will migrate the remaining 80% of their desktops this year, and save $6 million in the process. (Two respondents indicate this will amount to nearly 200,000 computers all told.)
One poster also writes that in addition to Banco do Brasil, another governmental bank (Caixa Econômica Federal), is currently migrating 120,000 of its own computers from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.
I’d really like to see OpenOffice vs. MS Office marketshare figures for Brazil at the end of this process!
In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Joyce Kasman Valenza writes, The Top 10 Technology Trends Affecting Education in 2005, summing up some of last year’s biggest changes.
She begins: “Technology continues to enrich the educational landscape. To highlight the most important trends of 2005, I turned to ed tech consultant Dave Cormier of the University of Prince Edward Island, one of the hosts of the Ed Tech Talk Show webcasts (http://edtechtalk.com/).” (If this is connected to the Ed Tech email list I am on, then it is a great resource.)
My favorites from the list:
In an interesting report from LinuxForum in Copenhagen, an IBM presenter announces that his company will not ever adopt Microsoft Windows Vista.
“At the end of the presentation, Andreas Pleschek revealed that the laptop he used for the presentation was running a pre-release of their new platform, the Open Client. It is actually a Red Hat work station with IBM’s new Workplace Client, which is built in Java on top of Eclipse. Because of Eclipse, it runs on both Linux and Windows, and they have been able to reuse the C++ code in Lotus Notes for Windows to run it natively on Linux via Eclipse. Internally in IBM, for years, they have had a need to run Lotus Notes on Linux, and now they can. And they will offer it to their customers.
Workplace uses Lotus Notes for mail, calendar, etc. and Firefox as their browser. For an office suite, they use OpenOffice.org.
Andreas Pleschek also told that IBM has cancelled their contract with Microsoft as of October this year. That means that IBM will not use Windows Vista for their desktops. Beginning from July, IBM employees will begin using IBM Workplace on their new, Red Hat-based platform. Not all at once – some will keep using their present Windows versions for a while. But none will upgrade to Vista.”
Sounds great, but a later rebuttal from IBM claims that they are not dumping Windows.
“The number of Linux users within the Armonk, N.Y., company is about 5 percent of IBM’s 329,000 employees, spokeswoman Nancy Kaplan said. The workers include software developers and designers, people configuring software and hardware bundles for customers and others who need to use Linux as part of their jobs.
“The Linux plan is for people who have a need for Linux, as part of their jobs, will use it,” Kaplan said. “We have not made Linux available to the general employee population and there are no plans to do that.”
“As to whether IBM would upgrade to Vista, the company was in the process of evaluating the OS and had not made a decision, Kaplan said.”
The upside seems to be that desktop Linux is treated as a peer of Windows and gets equal opportunity and support from the company. Plus, it seems that IBM Workplace will be replacing Microsoft Office on both platforms the company runs. And that’s a pretty big win.
Most excellent, this study compares Moodle to Blackboard in a real world teaching environment, and students who used both systems show a strong preference for Moodle (almost two-to-one).
From the conclusion:
“Moodle advantages over Blackboard:
* Easier to maneuver (fewer “clicks”!)
* Less area monopolized for navigation
* Easier to incorporate multimedia elements
* More tools available (glossary, poll, lesson, journal)
* Track student activity to see which parts of the course are preferred
* Quiz tool scores correctly and provides details on the student’s use
* Can be customized to add desired features
* Features are robust
* Survey allows as few as two choices”
Microsoft’s decision to radically alter the user interface for its next revision of MS Office, 2007, is an opportunity for OpenOffice to capture more marketshare.
If it really is true that training users to deal with minor UI changes is such a big deal (as criticisms over the move from MS Office to OpenOffice generally claim), then we are soon approaching a point where the swich from MS Office pre-2007 to OpenOffice.org 2 will be smaller and less disruptive than a switch from MS Office pre-2007 to MS Office 2007. In addition, it will cost nothing to pilot OOo, whereas even getting a few copies of MS Office 2007 to test in a workplace will cost big bucks.
eWeek covers this issue in Office 2007: Users Wary of Changes.
A strategy becoming more common is to provide OOo to users who will be content with it, and only use MS Office in the few places where its cost can be justified: “An increasing number of enterprises are also looking at who on their staff actually needs suites like Office 2007 and who could be well-served by alternatives such as Sun Microsystems’ branded StarOffice and the OpenOffice.org Project’s free OpenOffice.org distribution, according to Kyle McNabb, an analyst with Forrester Research.”
Similarly, The Times (UK) reports on the growing trend for home users to run FOSS applications.
“Once the preserve of geeks, open source has gone public in the past year, to the extent that programs such as Firefox have become household names. When a minor update for this browser was released last December, it was immediately downloaded 10m times, helping to double its annual market share to 10%, the researcher Net Applications reports.
And Firefox is no one-off phenomenon: 40m people have downloaded OpenOffice, an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. “I use OpenOffice at home, and I’ve found that it reads almost all Microsoft Word documents,” says Wayne Lee. “I’ve had no problems at all, and neither have my kids.”
Groklaw reports on the creation of the ODF Alliance, “an international group of industry partners, associations, NGOs and academic/research institutions… to build global support for the use of ODF.”
The list of founding members is long, and others are welcome to join at any time. Corel, IBM, Sun, Novell, Red Hat, Oracle, Opera, and a number of technology councils, universities and others are already proud to have their names attached to this initiative.
PJ summarizes, “What does it mean? To me, it means that there will be no future Peter Quinns left to take the heat all by himself. So, if you are a CIO for a governmental agency, and you are very much not wanting to experience what he did, this announcement means that you will have the support you need to make a successful transition, if that is the direction chosen. And if there are hostile hearings scheduled, such as we blatantly witnessed happen in Massachusetts, there will be people ready and qualified to speak up, with white papers and studies and success stories at the ready to unFUD the FUD.”
The February edition of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter is now available.
Big news includes: