Ubuntu has launched a new public feedback website called Ubuntu Brainstorm. Based in part on Dell’s IdeaStorm website (which led to great public demand for Dell to ship Ubuntu-based computers), Ubuntu Brainstorm is an easy way for people to submit suggestions and ideas to the project, to comment on other submitted ideas, and to vote for those they would like to support.
My friend and former intern Matt Leung hosts a weekly radio show on Vassar’s WVKR radio station called “The Technology Beat.”
He interviewed me recently to discuss open source software for musicians and students, and we discussed applications including OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Miro, Jokosher and others. (See the site above to listen online, or download an MP3 of the interview here.)
Matt’s show has focused on open source software and Creative Commons licensing for creating and sharing music. I’m the first interviewee who is not a musician, so check out some of the other shows to hear a lot of great songs from smart bands, including my friends Dave Michalak and Jay Olin’s band “Toxic Waste.”
Today is day two of Drupalcon Boston, at the new Boston Convention and Expo Center in South Boston. Sessions are just getting started today, but yesterday had a really great keynote by Dries Buytaert about the Drupal “State of the Union.”
Drupal 7 will be developed over the course of 2008, and will focus on making Drupal fit into the semantic web in a very natural way. In fact, Drupal’s embrace of semantic web principles could really help to accelerate the emergence of the semantic web itself, especially as “taking Drupal mainstream” is another goal of the Drupal 7 release.
According to Dries’ interpretation of Tim Berners-Lee, the WWW is evolving into the “GGG,” the Giant Global Graph. The GGG is like the social graph Google, Facebook and others are working on, but instead of connecting people to each other, it connects people and everything else (data and so much more), using semantic web concepts and tools like RDF, FOAF and others.
Joe Panettieri, of Seeking Alpha, writes “Is Google Apps the Next Microsoft Office?”
He sees universities adopting Gmail as their hosted email platform, Google Talk for instant messaging, and now, Google Docs is beginning to gain traction among students and faculty as well.
“Over the past year, Google’s Gmail has become Hofstra’s mainstay email platform for students and alumni. On average, according to Juckiewicz, roughly 8,700 students out of 13,000 students regularly use the Google Apps system. While Google Docs is beginning to gain traction across Hofstra, students are also using Google Talk for live chat and instant messaging and Google Calendar to share class schedules.”
Panettieri sees Google Apps threatening the Microsoft Office juggernaut in a few years. It will chip away that application’s dominance from below, taking away the simpler jobs–but also defining and dominating a new market, for intensely collaborative needs that span small teams across the planet.
“Assuming the offline capabilities arrive this year and work as advertised, Google Apps will become at least a partial replacement to Microsoft Office over the next two to four years, predicts a Texas college CIO, who requested anonymity.”
Solveig Haugland, OpenOffice.org author and trainer, has written Switching Office Suites from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org for Fanatic Attack.
She covers the technical and social aspects of making the change, using techniques she has learned from helping many companies around the USA over the last several years.
In this article, she focuses on the essentials; her goal is to “give you what you need to make getting to know OpenOffice.org easier. I can give you settings to apply that will keep you from having problems in the first place. Not all of them, of course, but with a limited amount of information on how to set up the program, I can help you have a smoother, more enjoyable experience with the program. So that’s what this is: setting up OpenOffice.org to make it work for you.”
LinuxWorld calls SCaLE 6x the “Best Yet.”
SCaLE is a very community-oriented event that fosters a lot of nuts-and-bolts interaction. “The goal of SCaLE has always been to serve Southern California by bringing together as many regionally relevant community groups, Open Source project advocates and enthusiasts, plus curious outsiders, to Open Source together as possible. SCaLE is a local tradition, organized and managed year around by a core committee of dedicated local volunteers…”
I attended SCaLE 4x, two years ago, and had a great time. It’s great to see non-profit projects with booths just as big and given equal treatment among those of large companies like Google and IBM. And it’s good to see the big company booths happily coexisting and attracting lots of attention from the individual open source enthusiasts and project developers, just like the small project booths do.
Jessica Hupp writes “Top 5 Sub-$300 Laptops Compared” on the Virtual Hosting Blog. “Armed with efficiency, open source software, and durable design, these devices have a lot to offer. Children, road warriors, and curious gadget freaks would love any one of these laptops.”
The OLPC XO and the Asus Eee have been on my radar for a while now, but the Elonex ONE is completely new to me. The Intel Classmate PC and Zonbu round out the group of five.
As a category, very low cost subnotebooks running Linux and open source are a major development of the last few years. The XO created this market and still leads it, with the best hardware and an extremely innovative software platform. However, since almost all of these run Linux, it is clearly the start of a new market that will eat into sales of PCs for many home users, and gradually displace Windows from below.
Google understands the importance of open file formats, and
She summarizes the issue succinctly: “The subject of open document standards grows in importance not only for the technically- minded, but for anyone who uses a computer to work on editable documents. Across the board, standards are crucial. They ensure that the devices and technology you use today will continue to work tomorrow, that your DVDs will play in your player, that your calls will go through to any network, and that your documents will be accessible from whichever system you choose today and in the future.”
Support for ODF is especially important now, as Microsoft’s major effort to undermine it is approaching its climax. The ISO will vote again next month on whether MSOOXML can also be an international standard alongside the already-approved ODF. But MS has attempted many unethical tricks to rig the process, and these seem to be catching up to the company as their publication in the media has galvanized opposition to keep them away.
Ian Lynch, creator of the INGOTs, recently emailed one of the OpenOffice.org mailing lists to give a little update on the project.
INGOTs stands for “International Grades – Open Technologies” and describes itself as “qualifications designed to motivate students and reduce administration through innovative use of the internet. Ingots are accredited in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.”
By encouraging students to participate in web 2.0 communities, the INGOTs helps them learn new software skills, as well as the ability to be self-directed in their learning experiences, something extremely valuable in a field with the innovation and rapid change of internet software and open source tools. On top of this, the students receive accreditation that can be used toward their school requirements.
Lynch’s latest email alerted us to student blogs about learning and teaching younger students OpenOffice skills. This demonstrates the project functioning as a self-sustaining community, as well as reinforcing students’ learning process as they go on to share it with others.
And building a business on top of open source software helps expand the software’s community as well as make an ongoing living for the business. It’s a great project, and I am glad to see it thriving.
FOSDEM, in Brussels, EU, is a huge and important annual open source conference happening this weekend. According to its site, “FOSDEM ’08 is a free and non-commercial event organised by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet.”
OpenOffice.org is at FOSDEM with a developer room for hacking, and plenty of coders and others to represent it and work together on projects small and large. It’s a great opportunity to start or increase your involvement with the OOo project.