May 13th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
While OLPC’s XO laptops have been appearing around the world, it wasn’t a part of the original plan for them to be used in developed countries. However, the XO’s child-centric design and constructivist learning paradigm are certainly well-suited to students here, as anywhere.
It’s exciting to see the OLPC XO being adopted in Birmingham, Alabama schools.
“The Birmingham City Council in March approved spending almost $3.5 million to buy 15,000 laptops for schoolchildren and to upgrade technology at city schools. The computer program is being piloted at Glen Iris [Elementary School], which has almost 800 students but received about 1,000 laptops, Principal Mike Wilson said.”
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | No Comments »
May 12th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
As the library of extensions continues to grow, OpenOffice’s ability to be enhanced with extensions will become an ever-stronger “selling point” (it’s free, so they don’t actually “sell” it) for the application.
One of the most popular is Dmitri Popov’s “Writer’s Tools,” a suite of about 20 tools to simplify professional writing tasks in OOo. (Development is handled on the Google Code site.)
“Writer’s Tools is a set of utilities designed to help OpenOffice.org users perform a wide range of tasks. Using Writer’s Tools, you can back up documents, look up and translate words and phrases, manage text snippets, and keep tabs on document statistics.”
Get it; it’s really good!
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | No Comments »
May 9th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
More so all the time, open source is a great avenue for career advancement, writes Amanda McPherson of the Linux Foundation:
“Open source projects are not immune to politics, don’t get me wrong, but there is one key difference: transparency. Because your work is in the open, it’s the best way to market your skills.”
Open source lets you work on interesting projects, develop new skills, and showcase your work to the world.
Further, McPherson discusses how the skills contributors develop in open source are valuable to each individual’s career. This is in contrast to developing skills on proprietary platforms, where the owner of the platform gains as much or more value than the developers themselves:
“Because it’s open source you have a multitude of companies tied to the product and its success. In the Linux world, the platform is used by companies in the desktop, server and embedded markets. A member of the Linux community is not tied into one company since his or her skills or transferable to all of the companies who use Linux. This is in contrast to jobs in the proprietary worlds. If you’re a Zune developer, you certainly have transferable software development skills to another similar project. (Languages are languages after all.) Yet the value of your specialized knowledge and experience is of much more use to Microsoft than anyone else. That means you, as a worker, have less leverage and are more at the mercy of internal project politics specific to that company.”
Posted in Open Source | No Comments »
May 7th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Linux Journal’s annual user survey has arrived in the form of Linux Journal’s Readers’ Choice Awards 2008.
More than 5,900 readers completed the survey this January and February to voice their opinions on open source tools, programs and services.
Some of my favorite programs had very strong showings: Ubuntu was the favorite primary Linux distribution for 37.4% of respondents, Firefox the preferred browser for 86%, and OpenOffice the favorite office program of 85.1%.
Many of my other favorites appeared, such as GIMP, Eclipse, WordPress, Drupal, Frozen Bubble, the Nokia N800, OLPC XO, and more.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | No Comments »
May 6th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Educatorslog.in points out in Kerala Blazing the Trail for FOSS in Schools that Kerala, India’s, support for open source has become extremely strong:
“Kerala is all set to become the first state in the country to completely banish Microsoft and allow only GNU/Linux free software to be used in the mandatory IT test at the state SSLC examinations that half a million students took in March. Till last year, they could take the exam using either free software or the Microsoft platform. Not anymore.”
Kerala is also rolling out broadband internet access to all of its high schools, after its successful introduction of open source over the past year:
“Since last September, some 15 lakh [1,500,000] students have been busy training on or migrating to free software on 40,000 computers put up in 2,832 high schools watched over by over 60,000 IT trained school teachers (some 86 private training institutions train the teachers) besides 161 master trainers and 5,600 school IT coordinators. “We checked. It’s the world’s biggest mobilisation of its kind,” says K Anwar Sadath, executive director of the state government’s IT@Schools mission.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | No Comments »
May 5th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
XiTi Monitor’s regular browser report has been released, and it shows Firefox at nearly 29% use share in Europe.
“After a slight dip monitored in October 2007, the free browser’s visit share recovered strongly at the end of the year, stabilized in January 2008 and began a new upward trend in February and March 2008. Thus, Mozilla Firefox’s use share, on average for a European country, is 28.8% in March 2008, 0.3 points higher than February and up 0.8 points from January 2008.”
The top countries are Finland at 45.9%, Poland at 44.0% and Slovenia at 43.7%. Two other countries, Slovakia and Hungary, also exceeded 40% use share for Firefox.
In most of the rest of the world, Firefox also keeps growing:
“Although the average visit share for Mozilla Firefox is higher in Oceania (31.2%) than in Europe (28.8%), growth has been flat over this past month, while the European figure has increased.
“The browser lost a small amount of share in North America (-1%), while its trends in South America and Asia are comparable to those in Europe. It was in Africa that Mozilla Firefox posted the strongest gain for March 2008: 17.9% in visit share compared to 17.4% the previous month (+3%).”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | No Comments »
May 2nd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Elgg is a fairly mature, distributed open source social networking application (you can install it on your own server, and your users can connect with those on other servers as well).
A roadmap for Elgg 1.0 has recently been posted:
“To date, Elgg has been a great tool for creating a web-based social network. It was the first social networking platform to include OpenID support, and through its support of standards like RSS, FOAF and XML-RPC, as well as its highly extensible architecture, provides functionality unique to the market. If you want MySpace in a box, you can do it with Elgg; if you want a customised network with functionality specific to your niche requirements, you can do that too.
“Elgg 1.0 takes this flexibility as a starting point and supercharges it… Elgg 1.0 acts as a social application engine; a way to power any socially-aware application, whether it’s on the web or not.”
Elgg has a few open source competitors I know about, including NoseRub and Appleseed. There’s also some other related tools and protocols like OpenID that offer the possibility of the entire web becoming socially-enabled in the future (which I think is inevitable, in fact).
However, Elgg has already been very strong in providing self-hosted social networking sites used by several large UK universities, and seems to be the most complete of the above competitors.
Here’s my profile on Elgg.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | No Comments »
May 1st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Developed in Hungary, EuroOffice is a suite derived from OpenOffice.org with the addition of several custom features.
The project is working hard to address specific market needs while playing nicely in the OOo development ecosystem:
“Since it is open-source we hope that these additions will be considered improvements by our users and adopted in the future by OpenOffice.org developers. We have signed the JCA, so nothing stands in the way of adoption.”
Some of its unique features include a dictionary toolbar, map chart, solver and adaptive interface. EuroOffice looks like a solid product.
“EuroOffice is developed by MultiRacio Ltd., a Hungarian firm with a past in economical statistics and of course office application localization and development.”
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | No Comments »
April 30th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Colin Charles notes the government of Malaysia has progressed in its path to OpenOffice and ODF adoption in his post “OpenOffice.org and ODF adoption in Malaysia - thumbs up!”
“MAMPU, the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, decided that they were going to go OpenOffice.org and go ODF, and dump Microsoft Office by year-end 2008.”
The story gets even better, as many of Malaysia’s federal and state government agencies have already migrated to OpenOffice over the past few years, and more are planning to do so this year.
Colin Charles writes, “Now, you can hold them to their word, as they update a Wiki page, informing you about how many agencies are moving to OpenOffice.org. Big wins, once all of the Malaysian government related agencies are on OpenOffice.org (open source software in general). Again, read OpenOffice.org and ODF Adoption!”
Note the links in the above paragraph all point to the same location, but it’s well worth a visit to see the list of agencies that have rolled out OOo to hundreds or even thousands of their employees across the country.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | No Comments »
April 29th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The OpenOffice.org Extensions ecosystem continues to grow. In fact, the OOo development team has adopted a strategy of providing some core functions as extensions, in order to keep the code base smaller but allow users to selectively adopt features useful to them.
While I have not tested it yet, I just discovered the Sun Wiki Publisher extension, which sounds like a great tool to get more people using company intranet wikis, among other uses.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Wiki | 1 Comment »