December 8th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Another big Linux and FOSS migration in Europe! GNOME Journal reports, “When the Republic of Macedonia decided to deploy Linux in 468 schools and 182 computer labs nationwide, they chose GNOME on an Ubuntu distribution.”
Darko Arsov, head of the project, explains, “The planning started in early 2004 and the actual implementation began in June during the summer holidays. In about four months we’ve managed to clone 5,000 PC’s and install high speed WiFi Internet in 460 schools.”
Macedonia has a relative paucity of computing and internet infrastructure, but with smart moves like this, it will quickly leapfrog into the top tier of tech.
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December 6th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Momentum builds every month for OpenOffice, the OpenDocument Format, and open source software!
This month’s OpenOffice.org Newsletter covers IBM’s adoption of ODF for its new Workplace software suite, follows the continued maneuverings in the Massachusetts ODF decision, reviews the move of Mannheim, Germany, to OpenOffice and Linux for its employees, and links to a number of OpenOffice “how-to” articles, and a range of opinion pieces covering all the recent activities.
Two links I particularly like:
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December 4th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Rocketboom posts a great video blog entry in which Amanda interviews random people in Washington Square Park, asking whether they prefer Firefox or Internet Explorer. Yes, it’s a Firefox rout, and those who claim they prefer the competition almost always admit that it’s just because that is what they have used.
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December 3rd, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Recently, the National Center for Open Source Policy and Research was launched!
Based at the University of Southern Mississippi, “NCOSPR is a non-profit organization established to promote the use of open source software solutions within government IT enterprise environments for the benefit of government agencies and public sector entities. NCOSPR accomplishes this by serving as a facilitator and administrator of development and implementation services among government, academic, open source community and information technology (IT) industry developers, distribution and user communities.”
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November 29th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Some cool developers have written a component that lets you open SVG files in OpenOffice.
It’s a very cool program, though not quite finished. The page above lists some caveats, including: “During import, the SVG graphic is translated into OpenDocument graphics primitives that can be displayed and edited with OpenOffice Draw. This transformation uses services from the Apache batik SVG engine. The filter produces nearly perfect results for simple SVGs. However, color and transparency gradients are still problematic (due to deficiencies in the current OpenOffice.org implementation of OpenDocument)…”
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November 28th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Open Source Mac provides a list of great FOSS applications for Mac OS X. Be sure to read through to Page 2 and all the way down to the bottom; there are a lot of good apps hidden there!
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November 26th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
Groklaw publishes Format Comparison Between ODF and MS XML by Alex Hudson, J. David Eisenberg, Bruce D’Arcus and Daniel Carrera of the OpenDocument Fellowship.
The introduction begins,
“There has been a lot of attention to the legal encumbrances in Microsoft’s new MS XML format. In this article we’ll look at the technical side, and try to show you how the design of these formats affect interoperability. After all, that is the purpose of open standards.
OpenDocument benefits from 5 years of development involving many experts from diverse backgrounds (Boeing, National Archives of Australia, Society for Biblical literature, etc.). It was written with the explicit purpose of being interoperable across different platforms. In contrast, MS XML has not gone through a peer-review process, and was written with only one product in mind. This difference shows in the design of the formats.”
Sam Hiser also adds some of his own commentary on his blog.
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November 22nd, 2005 Benjamin Horst
The cities of Vienna and Paris long ago announced they’d be moving their desktops to open source, adopting OpenOffice and, at a slower pace, Linux as well.
ZDNet UK reports that Vienna’s project is moving smoothly ahead of schedule:
“Vienna’s ‘soft’ migration to open source on the desktop is proving more popular with users than expected, according to Erwin Gillich, the head of IT at Vienna’s municipal authority…
Gillich told ZDNet UK that his team has already installed OpenOffice.org on 2,500 desktops since it started offering the product to users in September.”
Likewise, Techworld reports that Paris is also ahead of schedule:
“Earlier this year, volunteers among the city’s 46,000 staff were invited to download and install open-source software, including the Firefox browser and Open Office.org. Now, the city is planning to migrate all the users of one city department or all of those in one of the city’s 20 districts, not just the volunteers, to test a larger migration. The city has 17,000 workstations, up from 12,000 in 2001…
The city is also responsible for IT matters in its primary and middle schools. There, it has installed Open Office on 2,150 computers, and plans to bring the total to 3,500 by the end of March, it said.”
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November 20th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
ZDNet UK reports, in Indian OpenOffice Rollout Picks up Pace, that the government has distributed nearly half a million CDs of open source software throughout the country.
“Open source groups are helping the Indian government meet its target of creating open source CDs in all official Indian languages by February 2006.
The open source applications included on the CDs, such as the Firefox browser and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, have already been translated into five Indian languages — Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Punjabi and Urdu…”
“If one person gets the CD, the whole community or [company] department gets the CD,” said Raman. “There are so many channels that people can get it from — the Internet, their friends, from magazines — that we don’t know how many people have access to it.”
You’re thinking that the next step is to distribute open source via OEM deals, right? That’s what made the current market leader dominant, and that’s why it continues to run the show–people will use whatever comes preinstalled, regardless of quality! But soon, in India, they’ll be delighted to find something good preinstalled for once.
ZDNet UK reports again: Open Source PCs Take a Passage to India.
I’m going to quote the majority of this brief article:
“RKVS Raman, a researcher at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, an organisation involved in the production of the free CDs, said on Tuesday a number of vendors, including HCL Technologies, Acer, Zenith and Sahara, will start selling computers pre-installed with localised open source software from December.
The computers will be pre-loaded with either Microsoft Windows or Linux and a number of open source products, including the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, the Firefox browser and the Columba email client, according to Raman.
“Linux is preferred by some vendors because it brings down the cost drastically,” said Raman, although he pointed out that the vendors that “insist” on installing Windows will still save costs by avoiding Microsoft Office.
The PCs will be available in three Indian languages at present — Hindi, Tamil and Telugu — although more languages will be added later. The Indian government hopes that the availability of PCs containing software in native languages will increase the adoption of PCs across India, Raman said.”
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November 18th, 2005 Benjamin Horst
At a UN conference in Tunis, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte debuted a working prototype of the $100 laptop.
A lot of innovative ideas are packed into these small machines, from a complete open source software stack, to a wind-up crank to generate electrical power, the use of wireless mesh networking for communicating with other units, and flash memory instead of delicate hard disks, plus much more!
From the BBC article:
“Every single problem you can think of, poverty, peace, the environment, is solved with education or including education,” said Professor Negroponte.
“So when we make this available, it is an education project, not a laptop project. The digital divide is a learning divide – digital is the means through which children learn leaning. This is, we believe, the way to do it.”
(Solveig’s also got a photo and some interesting commentary on her blog, check it out!)
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