December 16th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Australian IT publishes “OpenOffice Skakes Microsoft,” reviewing and promoting OpenOffice to a mainstream tech audience.
With OOo 3.0, most normal users will find OpenOffice a complete replacement for MS Office: “Here at Doubleclick we’ve been using OpenOffice 3.0 for some weeks and we must say it’s getting harder and harder to see why average users would want to shell out several hundred dollars for MS Office.”
That’s great for software users, but why does it “skake” Microsoft? (And what does “skake” mean, anyway?) Here’s author David Frith’s answer:
Steve Ballmer recently told a US business users’ conference OpenOffice is the only one that Microsoft regards as serious competition.
A “thermometer” on the OpenOffice.org website shows why.
In the first four weeks after release, OpenOffice 3.0 was downloaded more than 12 million times.
That’s probably at least $2.5 billion lost to Microsoft, and mounting at $600 million a week.
So now you know why OpenOffice’s existence gives Steve Ballmer the shivers.
Don’t look at these numbers as money Microsoft has lost (that would be cruel and unnecessary). Look at these numbers as money everyone has collectively saved, and that is a great thing in an economy like today’s!
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on “OpenOffice Skakes Microsoft”
December 15th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
It feels like InformationWeek is writing more and more about open source lately, perhaps because the open source tide is rising ever higher. Last week, IW’s Serdar Yegulalp published Open-Source Office Suites Compared, which reviews OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, IBM Lotus Symphony, KOffice and AbiWord:
“In this review I’ve taken a look at OpenOffice.org’s most recent release, along with the commercially-supported StarOffice from Sun, IBM’s reworking of OO.o as Lotus Symphony, the KOffice suite for Linux, and the minimal but still useful AbiWord. Talking about how these would entirely replace Microsoft Office would be misleading, since not everyone might be doing that — so I’ve looked at each product as far on its own merits as possible.”
Each suite has its unique strengths, and Yegulalp does a thorough job comparing their primary advantages and the factors that differentiate them.
Overall, the presence of these five major office suites as competitors, and cooperators that all support the open ODF file format, helps to encourage robust experimentation and innovation which the market has sorely lacked for well over a decade.
“Compatible competition” will bring better value and technology to all of us using these types of software tools.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
December 12th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The ODF Alliance catalogs some big achievements for the OpenDocument Format in its latest newsletter. (They provide the newsletter as a PDF, so to just read the text you can check out Boycott Novell’s mirror, “ODF Alliance Newsletter – 10 December 2008.”)
What’s big about it? Germany: “Germany has decided to implement use of ODF. According to the announcement made by the federal government’s IT Council, German federal agencies will be able to receive, read, send and edit ODF documents beginning no later than 2010.”
This brings significant additional mass to the movement: “To date, 16 national and 8 provincial governments have now formally recommended or required the use of ODF by government agencies and with the public.”
Among those other adopters are the Dutch, where the government has recently “published instructions in the country’s National Gazette regarding making open standards-based procurement the default – a policy which has been in force since 1 April 2008 – now that the European Commission has given its seal of approval. According to the announcement made on November 24, 2008 by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, this means in principle that for public purchases of IT worth more than 50,000 euro, the use of open standards such as ODF is now mandatory for government bodies in the public and semi-public sectors (“comply or explain” why not).”
Further, the newsletter points out the new ODF Toolkit, jointly developed by Sun and IBM, to build and share libraries that can read and write ODF files for use in developing new software applications.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on Germany to Support ODF
December 11th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Sun recently released the 1.0 version of JavaFX, an open source Flash competitor, providing a “unified development and deployment model for building rich client applications that integrate immersive media including audio and video, graphics, rich text and web services.”
I would like to see an open source Flash competitor gain traction, even as Adobe has open sourced parts of Flash, although it feels less urgent now that the overuse and abuse of Flash–such as when it’s used to implement entire websites–has subsided. (I’ve also installed Flashblock in Firefox, to make pages load faster and eliminate the most annoying ad banners.)
We’ll see if JavaFX can make an impact on the market, and if it offers something interesting and unique beyond what Flash can already do.
Posted in Open Source, Uncategorized | Comments Off on JavaFX 1.0 Launches
December 9th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Suggestions have appeared that the United States Federal Government could save enormous amounts of money by abandoning the purchase of licenses for several major desktop software applications.
As the single largest customer of Microsoft’s Windows, MS Office, and other programs, the feds are clearly spending a lot on software licenses. In this time of unprecedented budget difficulties, no stone should be left unturned in the quest for saving costs and cutting back. Thus, the suggestion that US federal offices migrate from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org.
PC World calls this “your second economic stimulus check.”
Phil Shapiro writes:
One of Obama’s first executive acts may be to standardize all Federal offices to OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice is free, robust, stable and more than sufficient for 99 percent of government work. If any particular government office requires Microsoft Office, they’ll be able to purchase it — after explaining in a few sentences why OpenOffice is insufficient for their needs.
What do you get when all Federal offices standardize on OpenOffice? The effect of this is a second economic stimulus check. You get increased productivity at lower cost. Scratch that. You get increased productivity at no-cost.
Does Shapiro have any evidence this might happen? Not that I am aware of, but it makes for a good thought experiment, nonetheless. And maybe saving tens or hundreds of millions of dollars doesn’t look like much in this age of $700 billion bailouts, but on the other hand, every small act counts.
Other countries have taken this step already, increasing the necessity of adapting to remain competitive: “100 million students in Brazil will have several years more experience using free software than students in the United States.”
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org for the US Federal Government?
December 8th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Eric Bachard has been capably leading the rebirth of the OpenOffice.org Education Project, signing up universities in North America and Europe to teach programming and project collaboration by participating directly in OpenOffice itself. His most recent success has been to bring Ecole Centrale Nantes onboard.
Becoming an integral part of university curricula is a sure way to guarantee OOo development over the longest timeframe. In addition to contributing directly to development, universities are a good place for further adoption of the software. As they participate more, the code will evolve to better serve their needs, while the profile of OpenOffice will increase within the universities, and they’ll naturally begin to use it in departments across campus. Students will become comfortable with it, and bring it into the workplace after they graduate.
Strategically, this effort is of the utmost importance, and we wish Eric and the Education Project team great success!
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Focus on OpenOffice.org’s Education Project
December 4th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
So far, OpenOffice.org 3.0 for Mac has been limited to Intel machines only. However, plenty of Mac users are still running PPC machines and would like to use the latest OOo on their computers as well.
Fortunately, Nakata Maho has been working on builds for PPC Macs, and with a little help from other developers, has overcome several issues in delivering a PPC version of OpenOffice 3.0.
Current versions available for download are developer builds, so you may encounter lots of bugs. And new versions may be released superseding those linked here. Try this page and look for the latest directory to see if newer builds are available. (As of this writing, the most recent is “Dev_DEV300_m36“).
Posted in Mac, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »
December 3rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Songbird is the audio player sibling to Firefox and Miro, providing innovative new features that connect music with other media and web community content. It’s a highly user-friendly open source program that lets its users discover, share and listen to music in new and unique ways.
Yesterday, Songbird 1.0 was released to the world.
What is Songbird exactly? In the project’s own words, “Songbird is an open-source customizable music player that’s under active development. We’re working on creating a non-proprietary, cross platform, extensible tool that will help enable new ways to playback, manage, and discover music.”
Many new features have been implemented in this latest release, and there are many more planned for the next phases of development. Now is a great time to check it out, provide feedback, and even get involved to participate in its ongoing growth.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Songbird 1.0 Released
December 2nd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Recently, I’ve been in contact with an Ohio school district through an educational technology mailing list. The district has migrated to NeoOffice on all its computers (Macs, of course), but did not implement training or documentation for the new users. Thus, they have had some frustrations with the migration.
I sent the following in an email to give them the resources they need to get comfortable with their new software, and I’m posting it here in case it is useful for others in a similar situation:
I’m happy to help you find the NeoOffice (and related OpenOffice) online communities. Without participating in these, or without any training to accompany the switch, I can see why you and your colleagues would be frustrated! I hope I can help you all cross over the transition period to smooth sailing beyond.
For manuals, I suggest Solveig Haugland’s and the OOoAuthors Project’s manuals.
Solveig’s blog offers useful tips every day: http://www.openoffice.blogs.com/
Her book is called “OpenOffice.org 2 Guidebook” and is the definitive reference on the software: http://openoffice.blogs.com/bookresources/
OOoAuthors is a group of volunteers who have written a plethora of great books on the OpenOffice component applications. You can download any of them free as PDFs, or you can purchase the printed books from Lulu.com for a reasonable price. Links to all of these can be found on the site’s homepage: http://oooauthors.org/en
For online resources, NeoOffice maintains a user forum and a wiki where you can ask specific questions of the many users and volunteers who participate there.
NeoOffice Forums: http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums
NeoOffice Wiki: http://neowiki.neooffice.org/index.php/Main_Page
OpenOffice has its own official forum as well. Since the two programs are very similar in most functionality, you can also ask questions of the site users there:
http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/
In reviewing it just now, I came across the following thread that should be particularly useful for you: http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=11660
The books above should provide the step-by-step instructions for specific tasks. If you need more, then any book about OpenOffice should suffice, and you can also look into The INGOTS online training and certification program, at www.theingots.org, for online training materials (accredited in the UK, but quite useful here in the USA too).
Good luck, and let me know if you have further questions!
Posted in Free Culture, Mac, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »
December 1st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
OpenOffice’s Extensions are getting a lot of attention lately. Several articles in the latest Linux Identity special issue describe extensions, including my own (The Top OOo Extensions, second from last in the list).
In addition to these, MakeUseOf.com’s Damien Oh writes 9 Must-Have OpenOffice Extensions, which offers another take on some of the best. Among his favorites are the Sun PDF Import Extension, Professional Template Pack II, OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs, Writer’s Tools, LanguageTool, and several more.
Posted in Extensions, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on “9 Must-Have OpenOffice Extensions”