Most Linux distros (and the NeoOffice project) use a slightly modified OpenOffice.org with enhancements built by Novell on top of the standard Sun-compiled version (as well as customizations provided by their distro distributor).
Can Windows users access this slightly-different build of OOo? Indeed, you can get it from Go-OO.org.
The official announcement from Canonical states that Ubuntu 7.10, “Gutsy Gibbon,” is now available.
I’ve been using the beta for a few weeks now, and it is a beautiful, polished, full-featured operating system, that I think handily outdoes Windows. I’ve been very pleased with it and expect Ubuntu’s marketshare to continue its rapid rise with this update.
The next iteration of Mac OS X, codenamed Leopard, will be released on October 26. Out of many new features, one mentioned on Apple’s website is native support for ODF files in TextEdit.
More broadly, this may mean that Apple has developed libraries for ODF support, which will make it easy for developers to leverage in apps they build for the Mac platform.
Once the installed base of 25 million Mac users completes the upgrade to Leopard, we’ll see another expansion of the installed base of ODF capable users come along with it!
The Chandler Project has been a long term interest of mine, and it seems the same is true for Robert Scoble. He publishes a long interview “Collaborative Chandler Revealed,” covering the recent preview release of the application and the development process that has brought it to this point.
It’s a 51-minute video, so I haven’t watched it yet… but the text gives a decent overview and also links to Ted Leung’s detailed post on Scoble’s OSAF visit.
I particularly like the section where they discuss “turning email into a wiki,” since this is an idea I also had a few years ago. Basically, I use saved email messages as a database of information, so using the wiki interface to manage and modify that would work very well for me. Chandler developers and Scoble see it in about the same way.
Leung writes,
“In the interview, Robert latched onto the edit/update features of Chandler. These are still in a primitive state, but you can see the value of them already. He had a great summary of how it works – “you turn e-mail into a wiki.” Exactly. You can create and share a collection with any number of people, and they can all edit/update items in that collection and see each other’s changes, without groveling through endless e-mail reply chains. At one point in the interview, Mimi said something about e-mail being the hub of people’s usage. Truth of the matter is that e-mail is more like the glue that holds batches of information together. Collections of items with edit/update is a different kind of glue.”
I’ve been using Chandler on the desktop and via the hub service, and it is useful and very polished for a “preview”-level release. Reading about the capabilities and ideas that will emerge in its future has further reinforced my perception from regular use: this program is a new paradigm that will vastly improve my workflow and reshape the landscape around it.
Some time ago, the National Archives of Australia made the decision to use open standard, XML file formats for longterm preservation of digital data. Naturally, they chose ODF.
They developed a custom tool to help manage the archival process, named it Xena, and released it as open source using Sourceforge.
It’s a great example of the ecosystem growing around the ODF format, as well as how an open source tool developed for one organization’s needs can be shared online to help many others, without additional cost or effort.
Bruce Byfield cuts through some of the recent confusion about whether Novell is going to fork OpenOffice.org in “Novell is not forking OpenOffice“.
I am glad to see vigorous debate within the OOo community, as it means there are a lot of passionate concerned members who want the best for the project overall.
In general, in fact, it seems the OOo community has gotten a lot stronger recently, with new members IBM and Beijing RedFlag 2000, and Sun implementing new processes to better communicate with community members:
“According to Meeks, Novell is not stopping cooperation with Sun. “We contribute more than half our code to what we see as the core of OpenOffice,” Meek says, referring to bug-fixes and revisions of existing applications and subsystems. He also acknowledges that, recently, “Sun has really been improving how they deal with the community,” citing such improvements as an engineering steering committee that he says has resulted in “much faster patch turnarounds. So, on one level, that’s really encouraging.”
There is room for improvement in the way the community operates, but there is reason for strong optimism too, as the future looks ever brighter for the OpenOffice.org project.
It’s considered common knowledge that Microsoft Office controls 95% of the global office suite market, but this number comes from an obsolete market analysis framework and can no longer be considered accurate.
Building on this assumption without questioning it, the W.P. Carey School of Arizona State University writes “To Pay or Not To Pay: The World of Office Suites Opens Up.” The first paragraph begins,
“The ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite claims an impressive 95 percent market share. The software giant’s business division, which includes Office, brings in annual revenues of $16.4 billion. Yet since 2000, a free suite of software that includes spreadsheet and word processing programs similar to Excel and Word has evolved, with potential to chip away at Microsoft’s market dominance. Created by an army of volunteers, the open source OpenOffice.org has attracted a lot of attention but still claims a small percentage of the market.”
A few weeks ago, their sibling site at the Wharton School provided a few key words that clarify the whole situation.
Wharton’s analysis reveals the fallacy that 95% of users (PC users or office software users, pick one market) use Microsoft Office. Instead, the oft-quoted number simply measures that 95% of the revenue collected for the sale of office suites goes to MS (according to International Data Corp.). Thus, free products including OpenOffice.org and Google Docs are not measured by this statistic at all!
If you measure marketshare as the number of computers with the software installed, as a percentage of all computers, then Microsoft has far less than 95% and OOo has a good slice: Microsoft claims to have about 400 million MSO users, and some estimates place OOo users at 100 million. With these simple numbers, MS has 80% marketshare and OpenOffice has 20% (obviously excluding other players and overlap; these numbers could be refined).
When potential users see that MS has 80% marketshare and OOo has 20%, it will be clear to people that MS is vulnerable and competitors are growing strongly and quickly. This will accelerate adoption of OpenOffice.org, as those who are afraid to use it because they fear it’s not widely used, will see it is in fact very popular.
More accurate measurement tells a different story than what has been propagated so far, and the entire evolution of the marketplace could change because of it.
Solveig writes a detailed introduction to the new features and functionality introduced in OpenOffice.org 2.3.
She begins with a list of major new features:
Filled with screenshots and clear descriptions, this article is really valuable for users adopting or upgrading to OOo 2.3. It also covers the new chart tool and extensions capability very thoroughly to help us all get familiar with these two large feature upgrades.
Projity’s press release announces that OpenProj has already been downloaded 100,000 times, and InfoWorld also covers this milestone in “Preview: OpenProj brings free, robust project management to the desktop.”
I like InfoWorld’s summary of their review:
“OpenProj performs all the essential tasks you’d do with a desktop project management application. That, and cross-platform availability, would justify Projity charging even a portion of Microsoft Project’s $999 price tag. But with OpenProj’s free access, it’s just one more compelling case for going open source on the desktop.”
And InfoWorld’s final verdict,
“OpenProj, an excellent open source desktop alternative to Microsoft Project, reads native Project files while providing an especially precise scheduling engine. The OpenProj solution has essential project management tools, including Gantt Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, Earned Value costing – all surrounded by a customized user interface.”
You can download OpenProj for all platforms from Sourceforge.
The prolific tablet blogger Thoughtfix has written a thorough side-by-side comparison of Nokia’s N800 and Apple’s iPod Touch.
In my opinion, both are great devices (I only have an N800 though), and Thoughtfix agrees on that point. However, he tests and compares which is preferable for varied use cases, and finds that each has its stronger niches.
“The iPod touch paired with iTunes will be my media player of choice… The Nokia N800 is far more powerful as an Internet device.”
Hopefully both will thrive, and help establish this emerging category of tablet devices that may one day be as important as PCs or cellphones are today!