June 18th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Lotus Symphony is getting great reviews, including CRN’s “Symphony Sings as Office Clone.”
They found it preferable, in their review, to OpenOffice.org:
“The Test Center found Symphony a snap to use, and switching to Symphony after years of using Microsoft Office was painless. While OpenOffice was a nice alternative, Symphony looks and works much more elegantly while keeping the free price tag.”
A Mac version is not yet available, but is promised later this summer, and Symphony 2.0 (unclear when it is planned for release) will “update the base code engine and also include more OpenOffice.org features, such as an equation editor, database software, and a drawing program.”
Symphony’s arrival on the scene makes a good complement (and friendly competitor) to OpenOffice. It helps legitimize the idea of using ODF as a format for interoperability, and it helps sell ODF to enterprises. It’s also been imaginative in testing new user interface ideas, which will help move the industry forward much more than MS Office 2007’s dubious new choices.
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Lotus Symphony: A Rave Review
June 17th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
In response to Steve Ballmer’s prognostication that newspapers will be dead in less than 10 years, Bill Virgin of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer counters with a prediction that Microsoft will be dead in 10 years.
Ballmer’s original statement was: “There will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network,” Steve Ballmer told The Washington Post. “There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.”
Bill Virgin finds such sweeping statements tiresome, and strikes back, writing “A far more compelling and convincing business case can be built to support the view that Microsoft will be kaput in 10 years than to expect the extinction of the American newspaper in a decade.”
He elaborates: “Even the core business could wind up being a bit shaky. Windows still dominates in personal-computer operating systems, but even Microsoft isn’t thrilled with Vista; Apple is slowly moving from a few niches to greater acceptance in the corporate world and Linux or something similar could grab more market share.” And their forays into other businesses have been mostly unsuccessful, requiring significant subsidies to continue operating.
In short, it seems more and more likely that Microsoft’s influence will wane and perhaps even disappear, so Bill Virgin’s prediction isn’t all that crazy at all. And he doesn’t even mention OpenOffice or OpenDocument Format, and their emancipating effects on the industry!
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Seattle P-I vs Microsoft
June 16th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The OLPC project has an active community right here in New York City. This past weekend they held a “Grassroots Jam” event including a code sprint to develop a new server for the platform:
“According to LXNY secretary Jay Sulzberger, the server will provide “automatic backups, end-to-end encryption and authentication of email, extra processing power for individual and group tasks, convenient Bitfrosting (working with the default OLPC security platform), and [working] with programs which today do not yet run on the XO-1 [laptop].”
See more information on the Grassroots Jam at the OLPC wiki site.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on OLPC in NYC
June 13th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Neelie Kroes is an EU bureaucrat well-known to the open source and tech communities, because she is the relentless force bringing Microsoft’s monopolistic abuses to justice:
“Ms. Kroes has fought bitterly with Microsoft over the last four years, accusing the company of defying her orders and fining it nearly 1.7 billion euros, or $2.7 billion, on the grounds of violating European competition rules.”
The New York Times reports on Kroes’ recent suggestion that businesses and governments use open standards and avoid being tied to a single software supplier:
“Her comments were the strongest recommendation yet by Ms. Kroes to jettison Microsoft products, which are based on proprietary standards, and to use rival operating systems to run computers.
“I know a smart business decision when I see one — choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed,” Ms. Kroes told a conference in Brussels. “No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one.”
She also encouraged the Netherlands (her home country) to continue moving toward open standards, and praised government agencies in Germany and France that have already done so (by migrating to Linux and/or OpenOffice.org).
The EU is fast escaping Microsoft’s orbit, and they may leapfrog the USA in this round of global techno-competition. Their large-scale adoption of open source will strengthen many software projects, and that will benefit software users around the world.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Neelie Kroes on Open Standards
June 12th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The famous OpenOffice PDF Importer Extension is now available in beta form for OpenOffice.org 3.0, announces Erwin Tenhumberg (among others).
From its home on the extensions website: “The PDF Import Extension allows modifying existing PDF files for which the original source files do not exist anymore. PDF documents are imported in Draw and Impress to preserve the layout and to allow basic editing. It is the perfect solution for changing dates, numbers or small portions of text.”
Not all features are complete yet, but this is a major step forward in providing very useful capabilities to OOo users.
Erwin also highlights the cool Hybrid PDF capability it provides, and which I’ve written about recently:
“Once the extension is installed, the PDF export feature shows a new option at the bottom as well. With the Sun PDF Import Extension, OpenOffice.org allows creating so-called “hybrid files”. These are PDF files that also include the ODF content, i.e. the original source document. As a consequence, everybody can view these hybrid files with a simple PDF viewer. However, OpenOffice.org users can also edit these PDF files without any information loss, since OpenOffice.org will simple recognize and open the ODF content instead of trying to import the PDF information.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
June 11th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
From a post on EdTech, I was introduced to a collection of Success Stories of Free Software in Schools.
They have collected a number of links to articles about Linux adoption in schools, and also note adoptions of Moodle and other FOSS apps.
This reminds me, I have not been keeping my open source adoptions page updated lately, but it’s tough to keep track as so many places are now making the switch! (And there are many listings on the OpenOffice.org major deployments wiki page to keep track of too.)
Posted in Drupal, Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Success Stories of Free Software in Schools
June 10th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Firefox continues its growth into a true powerhouse. TG Daily writes, “Browser war gets uglier as Firefox is set to grab 20% share.” (By uglier, I interpret the article to mean, “more intense.”)
While Firefox is growing, so too is Safari. Yet Internet Explorer continues to fade:
“The most recent browser market share numbers released by Net Applications confirm further Firefox and Safari gains at the expense of Internet Explorer. According to the research firm, Mozilla is likely to hit a milestone this month by capturing one fifth of the browser market. A closer look, however, reveals that browser makers are using sophisticated strategies to aggressively push their browsers onto computers. It seems that the browser wars are heating up once again.”
In other good news, the browser market shift is also tied to a platform shift. Mac OS X is gaining marketshare against Windows, which brings more users to Safari and Firefox too:
“Another factor contributing to the rise of Safari and Firefox at the expense of IE comes from Mac market share growth. As more people switch to Macs, they use Safari or Firefox. Mac market share gains appear to directly translate to Safari browser gains and, to a smaller part, to Firefox for Mac.”
Posted in Free Culture, Mac, Open Source | Comments Off on Firefox Poised to Take 20% Marketshare
June 9th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
IBM Lotus Symphony is IBM’s office suite derived from OpenOffice.org and the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. The same tools are also available as a part of Lotus Notes 8.0+, but Symphony is the standalone version of the word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications that use ODF as their native file format.
The first betas of Symphony were released in September 2007, and have been downloaded over one million times. With the release of version 1.0, IBM’s business strategy has also been revealed: the software is free, but support options are available for companies who’d like to pay.
LinuxWorld interprets this move as a direct challenge to Microsoft’s ‘heartland’ in its article “IBM Releases ODF-Based Office Killer.”
Ebizq sees it as an indicator that ODF has reached maturity, with its already widespread implementation in OpenOffice now augmented by an enterprise product from one of the world’s largest IT companies: “Open Document Format (ODF) comes of age today as IBM announces the commercial-grade, general availability of Lotus Symphony, a suite of free, ODF-based software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.”
IBM is also using Symphony as a core part of a new stack of Lotus software aimed at small businesses called IBM Lotus Foundations, which looks very interesting itself.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on IBM Lotus Symphony 1.0 Released
June 6th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The highly irregular and foolishly mistaken decision of the ISO to approve Microsoft OOXML as a standard does not appear to be over yet. Groklaw is following the aftermath, in which already four countries are appealing OOXML’s ISO approval.
Groklaw quotes ZDNet: “After the two-month appeal period, we now have four appeals — Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela,” Jonathan Buck, the director of communications for IEC, told ZDNet.co.uk on Monday. “The appeals are now with our CEOs, IEC General Secretary Ronnie Amit, and ISO Secretary General Alan Bryden, who have a 30-day period to make sure appeals conform to directives.”
Other countries, such as Denmark, have found problems but their standards bodies did not make formal appeals.
Quite possibly, we’re in the midst of a market shift as ODF continues to gain traction globally while MSOOXML stalls and sputters.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on ISO Battle Isn’t Over
June 5th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Asustek, creator of the innovative and highly-popular ultra mobile Linux-based “Eee PC,” expects to double its sales next year (2009) to 10 million units. (Some models now use Windows XP instead of Linux, unfortunately.)
The Linux versions all include OpenOffice, which means millions of copies being distributed to new users around the world.
The new market it has defined, “ultra mobile PCs” is also set to explode: “The company, which had previously estimated that it would sell 5 million Eee PCs this year, forecasts low-cost PC sales are set to hit 20-30 million units globally in 2009, Asustek’s Chief Executive Jerry Shen told reporters.”
Many other companies have introduced Eee competitors, collecting marketshare on the margins, but the good news is that most of them also offer Linux as the default (or at least an optional) OS.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Eee Could Sell 10 Million Units Next Year