December 6th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Yusseri writes a great piece on the Open Malaysia blog on his research into Microsoft’s efforts, directly and through proxies, to undermine ODF around the world.
“I looked around in the web and the available documentation that we had to provide data for my presso. I found lots of other OSS initiatives all over the place. What I also found was a fair amount of resistance against the initiatives. This resistance was led by one large multinational corporation and a few “alliances” — namely the BSA and the Initiative for Software Choice. There were no other single corporation that protested, campaigned, lobbied or made donations against the disparate initiatives.
There was only one: Microsoft.
All the others — IBM, Sun, Oracle, SAP, CA, Symantec, Adobe, Autodesk, etc. — either made supporting noises or kept quiet altogether.
I checked all over the world — America, Australia, South Africa, India, Korea, Japan, Germany, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, Spain, and more — and it was all the same.”
Read Yusseri’s article to see the details of “free” Microsoft software and “discounts” and “donations” (and the occasional veiled threat), all intended to block or stall the open source efforts.
It is dangerous how far this one rich company’s arms stretch around the world, and it is a terrible shame to see so much progress being held back by one stubborn and corrupt organization. Let’s hope the dam breaks soon, hundreds of places all leap to freedom at once, Microsoft cannot keep up with it all, and a free market based on open standards emerges to replace the repressed environment of today.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Open Malaysia Blog on Microsoft’s Attempts to Undermine ODF
November 29th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
One Laptop Per Child News is a blog that bills itself as “Your independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child’s computer, the OLPC Children’s Machine XO, developed by MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte.”
It’s got plenty of great information on the state of the project, along with some fun stuff, too.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, Uncategorized | Comments Off on One Laptop Per Child News Site
November 2nd, 2006 Benjamin Horst
The OpenOffice.org October Newsletter came out a few days ago.
Of particular interest is the report that our competitor plans to start a new “antipiracy” effort called Microsoft Office Genuine Advantage. PC World writes “The company’s Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) program will require mandatory validation of Office software starting October 27, the software vendor quietly disclosed today. After that date, any Office Online templates downloaded from within the Office 2007 Microsoft Office System applications will require validation of legitimacy.
Similarly, starting in January, users of Office Update will have to validate the legitimacy of their Office software before they can use the service, Microsoft added.”
Treating your customers as criminals will surely alienate them! The user comments attached to PC World’s article seem unanimous in their conclusion: switching to OpenOffice and Linux is going to become much more popular after this.
Posted in OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org Newsletter for October
October 16th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Stan Beer of iTWire writes Why Office 2007 won’t sell.
“When users upgrade to a new computer, it will come pre-installed with Vista so they have no choice there. However, new computers don’t come pre-loaded with Office 2007 and users will happily stick with Office 2003…
After spending money on a new computer and almost as much again on Vista, users will have a choice of spending hundreds more on a fancy revamped version of the Office they already had, which has a substantial learning curve attached to it. Or they can opt to install a compatible free open source version such as OpenOffice.org 2.0”
Choice in the software marketplace–it’s a new paradigm!
Beer concludes: “The point is there are now real alternatives to paying for an expensive upgrade to Office 2007 and the open source desktop office offering Open Office.org is probably the most viable. Until now, the open source crowd have not been as vocal as they could be. The question is can they get the message out to businesses and the consumer that they no longer have to pay for office productivity software? If they can, Office 2007 is going to be a hard sell.”
Posted in OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on iTWire: “Why Office 2007 Won’t Sell”
September 28th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
“darcusblog” is an interesting resource for XML, metadata, citations, OOo and ODF. The author is co-project lead of the OpenOffice Bibliographic project (OOoBib), which will provide very advanced bibliographic and reference data management capabilities to OpenOffice starting in 2007.
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on darcusblog
September 20th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Hacktivismo announces the release of Torpark, a secure and anonymous web browser.
The press release reads, in part, “Hacktivismo, an international group of computer security experts and human rights workers, just released Torpark, an anonymous, fully portable Web browser based on Mozilla Firefox. Torpark comes pre-configured, requires no installation, can run off a USB memory stick, and leaves no tracks behind in the browser or computer. Torpark is a highly modified variant of Portable Firefox, that uses the TOR (The Onion Router) network to anonymize the connection between the user and the website that is being visited.”
Earlier this year, Hacktivismo also released a secure and anonymous instant messaging client based on GAIM, called ScatterChat.
These are intended as tools for democracy and free speech: “ScatterChat is a secure instant messaging client designed for non-technical users who require secure and anonymous communications. Our typical end-users include human rights and democracy advocates operating in hostile territory. ScatterChat is also a valuable tool for anyone requiring secure communications.”
I cannot think of a higher purpose for encryption and anonymity than this.
Posted in Open Source, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Encryption and Anonymity
August 7th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Mitch Kapor spoke on The Case for Wikifying Politics at this year’s Wikimania Conference (which I missed). Andy Carvin transcribed Kapor’s talk on his blog. It’s fascinating and wonderful to read something progressive and optimistic in the world of political thought today.
Hula is an open source email and calendar server based on code donated by Novell. The project’s been running for a year and a half now, and has reached alpha-level code. I noticed new screenshots of the web interface which include some great ideas. They’re summed up in the dashboard view of the application, showing an overview of the user’s email and calendar events for the day. See the screenshots at Hula’s tour page.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Uncategorized, Wiki | Comments Off on Mitch Kapor on Wiki Politics, and Hula Project Web and Calendar Server
August 3rd, 2006 Benjamin Horst
The Register reports the One Laptop Per Child Project has collected 80% of the orders necessary to begin production:
“The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme is just one million laptops away from beginning production, as the group confirmed that Brazil, Argentina and Thailand have each placed orders for a million machines, according to DesktopLinux.com.
OLPC says it will begin production when it has orders for between five million and 10m laptops. Last week, it announced that Nigeria had signed on to the scheme, taking the total pre-ordered to four million.”
Meanwhile, java programmer John O’Conner writes in his blog (okay, almost a year ago) that he’d like to see a blogging extension for OpenOffice.org. I agree it would be handy, in particular because some competitors are touting the feature now (and because it would be helpful for the legions of computer-using folks who still prefer the desktop software paradigm over working through a browser).
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, Uncategorized | Comments Off on One Laptop Per Child Update and Request for OOo Blog Extension
July 20th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Today is a good day for software migration news.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on OpenOffice in the Netherlands, FOSS in Croatia and Atlanta, GA
July 11th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
ChipIn, a team fundraising collection site similar to Fundable.org, has launched.
According to their homepage: “ChipIn automates the time-consuming task of organizing people to give together. Connect with friends and collect funds for a birthday gift, office pool, neighborhood fundraiser or any other group purchase.”
ChipIn has some cool and unique features, including “widgets,” which are snippets of code you can add to any website to show a live window into the progress of your group action. Check out a sample widget here.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on ChipIn Launches