March 11th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Alolita Sharma publishes an overview titled Open Source in India Today on the FOSSBazaar blog.
The current position of FOSS in India is strong:
Over the past decade open source software has become popular with technology users in India. The benefits of open source – affordability, availability of source code and freedom of choice – have made open source a preferred platform for many innovative Indian organizations and individuals…
The government of India has been involved as well, setting up a National Resource Center for Free and Open Source Software (NRCFOSS) in 2005, and the Institute for Open Technologies and Applications (IOTA) in 2007.
IOTA’s mandate is to promote open source software in government and academia. IOTA provides information on open source software and open standards to organizations looking to understand how open source can fit into their IT infrastructure. IOTA also offers training on Linux and OpenOffice.
Federal and state goverments are leveraging open source to provide services to their citizens as well as run their offices at a lower cost. Numerous organizations promote open source in India for these gains in efficiency and in the reach of providing government services to a larger part of the population.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Open Source in India Today
March 4th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Today is the first full day of DrupalCon DC, by far the largest DrupalCon to date. Last year’s US conference in Boston had 800 attendees, and this year over 1,300 tickets sold out a month before the event.
This morning Dries gave his keynote on the state of Drupal, including plans for Drupal 7 and how Drupal and its community can contribute to the future of the internet (the “semantic web”, “web 3.0”, the “giant global graph” or whatever else it may be called).
He also reviewed the history of Drupal, which stood out because it illustrated just how quickly the community and the power of the software have grown.
Many many Drupal experts and development companies are in attendance, and all of them seem to be quite busy–converting most of the web to Drupal, it seems!
Posted in Drupal, Free Culture, Open Source, Social Software | Comments Off on DrupalCon DC 2009
March 3rd, 2009 Benjamin Horst
On Saturday February 28th the New York City Drupal users’ group held its sixth DrupalCamp NYC at NYU Poly in Brooklyn.
I’ve been to four or five so far and each one was great. Following the unconference format of a BarCamp, DrupalCamps always teach me something new and useful, as well as provide an opportunity to enhance the social and business ties of the community.
Unique to this latest camp, a New York Times reporter and photographer wrote a piece on DrupalCamp 6. (Yes, I am visible in the extreme top-left of the photo.) They did a good job understanding what goes on at DrupalCamp and some of the core motivations of the community, pulling some good quotes from interviewees:
Andy Thornton, 36, a programmer from Astoria, Queens, who works at the United Nations, said the egalitarian nature of Drupal was “almost the epitome of what the Web promised at the beginning. This is very much a democracy. It doesn’t have a top-down authority.”
Posted in Drupal, Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on DrupalCamp in the NY Times
March 2nd, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Claudio Filho started and leads BrOffice.org, the project to translate and distribute OpenOffice.org in the Brazilian market. (BrOffice.org is the official Brazilian community of OpenOffice.org, which had to choose a different name because the trademark for “OpenOffice” in Brazil was already held by another company.)
Last fall (August, 2008), North by South interviewed Filho about the BrOffice project. Already one of the largest native language communities, it has also seen great success with wide government and popular support across the country.
One of the motivations is, of course, cost efficiency in economic development:
It becomes absurd when we compare it with practical matters, like how much this means in soy or oranges, products that generates jobs, income and currency to the country. To have an idea., 1 copy of (M$) Office costs the equivalent to 2 tons of soy, or worse, to 7 tons of oranges, approximately. However, these products generates how many jobs?! And how many families are fed with these jobs?! At this first analyzes we see that solutions like BrOffice.org are fundamental to Brazil.
Beyond this, the BrOffice project works toward other important goals that will improve the development of Brazil. Filho predicts that further investment in BrOffice will quickly:
increase the product development, generate jobs inside the community, establishment and expansion of knowledge (know-how) in the country, not to mention things like fighting digital exclusion and evasion of foreign exchange in the country.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on North by South Interviews Claudio Filho of BrOffice
February 27th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
s5h.net assembles a collection of links to support its article OpenOffice.org More Popular Than Realised, Even in Education.
The roundup links to seven articles covering the widespread use of OOo in education, the number of downloads achieved by OOo 2.0 (old news now), comparisons between OOo and MSO for new users, the cost advantage of OOo and how its continued growth will impact Microsoft revenues, and also info on NeoOffice and RedOffice.
In response to the title, it is truly a difficult task to estimate OOo (or Linux) usage share. Recent estimates range as high as 200 million OOo users globally and rising fast, but there is no central record-keeping and there are numerous ways to share the code.
Eventually the mainstream media will catch on and report the large number of OOo users, which will cause even more people to switch, but until then all I can say is that when I send ODF files to colleagues, I almost never hear complaints. (Are they not reading my documents? Are they opening them in Google Docs? Or do they use OOo?)
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on “OpenOffice More Popular Than Realized”
February 26th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
In the past few months the parent company sponsoring OpenProj was bought by Serena Software (for their hosted project planning application), while OpenProj continues to be developed as a standalone open source application.
Recently, Serena announced OpenProj reached the milestone of one million downloads, writing:
OpenProj has quickly become the most popular open source application for project management.
“OpenProj fills an important gap in the desktop market, as a key component in the Office family of products now has a replacement available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows. We are excited to celebrate the 1 Million download milestone.” noted Marc O’Brien, vice president of SaaS Projects and PPM Solutions at Serena Software.
Posted in Open Source | Comments Off on OpenProj Tops One Million Downloads
February 25th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
As I have been watching the rumors to see how explicitly the Obama Administration supports, promotes and uses open source software (I’ve posted on this thrice so far: 1, 2, 3.), naturally their choice to deploy Drupal for the Recovery.gov site is quite exciting!
Indeed, Recovery.gov is designed for transparency in multiple ways. First and foremost, its entire purpose is to make the details of federal government spending on the stimulus package visible to anyone and everyone, which should set a strong precedent of fiscal accountability that has been lacking for too long.
Second, to those geeks interested in infrastructure, the choice of running on an open source software stack is another vote on behalf of transparency. The software has a community of users and developers and has earned trust and respect through its open design and development process. This is subtle, but important, because it shows the depth of commitment to the ideal of transparency, when an organization chooses transparent, openly-designed tools because they are honestly committed to the concept.
More thoughts on the issue can be found at TechPresident in Why the White House’s Embrace of Drupal Matters. Author Nancy Scola also points out the well-known fact that open source software means no licensing fees were spent in implementing the software, further saving scarce dollars for other investments.
Posted in Drupal, Free Culture, Open Source | 1 Comment »
February 24th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
As part of its ongoing work to improve the way people experience the web, Mozilla Labs promotes its Concept Series, in which anyone can develop and submit user experience concepts for future versions of Firefox.
Mozilla Labs defines its mission as:
Laboratories are where science and creativity meet to develop, research, and explore new ideas. Mozilla Labs embraces this great tradition – a virtual lab where people come together to create, experiment, and play with new Web innovations and technologies.
Meanwhile:
The Concept Series aims to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.
Though still a new project, I expect the Concept Series to generate many ideas over time, keeping Firefox and other Mozilla projects at the forefront of the open web and software user experience and user interface design.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Mozilla Labs Concept Series
February 23rd, 2009 Benjamin Horst
As part of its marketing, outreach, and community support efforts, OpenOffice.org community members are forming groups on various social networking sites to create more communication between existing users and to promote OOo to potential new users.
The latest, as promoted this week by Alexandro Colorado, has been on Identi.ca, an open source competitor to Twitter. I believe you must be logged in before you can see the Identi.ca OpenOffice.org group, but it should grow into a useful real-time place to follow OOo news, so it’s worth signing in (it allows OpenID, so you have no excuse not to do it).
I know there are Facebook, LinkedIn, and many other social network OpenOffice groups out there, so I’ll post them here when I get a chance to catch up (or add a comment yourself, please).
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Social Software | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org on Identi.ca
February 20th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Canadian company Userful and Brazilian company ThinNetworks have partnered to deliver 356,800 Linux-based desktop systems to Brazilian schools, according to a their recent press release, Userful and ThinNetworks Announce the World’s Largest Desktop Virtualization Deployment – 356,800 Green Workstations.
Userful’s key innovation is to harness the excess power of current PC hardware and the multi-user nature of Linux operating systems. Multiple monitors, keyboards and mice are connected to one computer, giving each user separate but complete simultaneous access to his or her computing environment.
In the exuberant style of press releases, the two companies announce:
It is a historical achievement, being: the world’s largest ever virtual desktop deployment; the world’s largest ever desktop Linux deployment, and a new record low-cost for PCs with the PC sharing hardware and software costing less than $50 per seat. The decision to deploy Userful and ThinNetworks’ low-cost and environmentally friendly desktop virtualization solution establishes the Brazilian Ministry of Education as a global leader in computer education and provides other governments and institutions worldwide with a proven model for improving student to computer ratios while rolling out large numbers of desktops with minimal cost and environmental impact.
To my knowledge, all of their statements are factually correct, and the news is quite exciting, which makes it easy for me to overlook the typical annoyance of marketing speak.
Skeptics might assume this is vaporware, but in fact the first phase has already been implemented with 18,750 workstations installed and functioning well in rural schools.
The scale of this project and the prior successes of Userful and ThinNetworks are extremely satisfying to see. This is a huge success story for Linux and open source, and with luck it will quickly inspire similar projects in the US, where I might be able to see it with my own eyes (and save my own tax dollars from being wasted on proprietary alternatives).
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | 1 Comment »