March 6th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
I’m in Israel for work this week, so I won’t be able to keep my usual schedule of posting here at SolidOffice. However, bandwidth is good and most of the internet’s activity is unconstrained by physical-world geography.
The OpenOffice.org project publishes an interview with BharateeyaOO.o, the team responsible for OOo development in India, and translation into numerous Indian languages.
RKVS Raman, head of BharateeyaOO.o, describes the project’s history, milestones, community development, and future goals in this interview. His team has already translated OpenOffice into 15 of India’s 22 official languages, and is scheduled to complete the remainder by December 2007.
Raman’s organization is pragmatic and effective in its work, and also strives toward a very idealistic purpose: “Long term goals involve studying the cultural aspects of Indic computing; create sturdy speech recognition engines for Indian languages; continuously create/explore avenues for wide adoption of FOSS in various sectors by active promotion and support, and to become an instrument in the proliferation of ICT in rural and underprivileged areas.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Interview with BharateeyaOO.o: OpenOffice.org for India
March 2nd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Linux Today announces that Zaragoza, Spain will migrate to FOSS:
“The City Council of Zaragoza has decided to abandon the Windows operating system and move to open source systems that should save the Aragon capital city nearly €1M per year.”
The migration will be carried out in two phases, scheduled to be finished by the end of 2008. Phase 1 involves a move to OpenOffice.org, and Phase 2 is the adoption of Novell SUSE Linux.
According to the article, “The Press Office and the Office of Citizen Relations already are using OpenOffice.org, and will be followed by the Municipal Registry office,” which means the migration’s in full implementation mode! (Eliminating the specious argument they’re just aiming for price concessions from Microsoft. We never believed those allegations regarding other announced FOSS migrations anyway.)
National and EU recommendations promote the use of Free Software and open standards across the European continent, so Zaragoza is almost certainly going to be surrounded and supported by many others riding the same wave. Good luck to them and their neighbors! (Now please help us out in New York City!)
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Zaragoza, Spain Adopting OpenOffice and Linux
March 1st, 2007 Benjamin Horst
ThisWeek Community Newspapers announces that Bexley City Schools, a district in Ohio, will migrate all its computers from Windows to Linux:
“We began looking around and said, ‘Well, if we go to the most current Microsoft product, how much would that cost?'” Hyland said.
Upgrading ME to Windows XP, a newer version of the popular operating system, would cost the district about $412,000, she said. That price would include purchasing new machines and upgrading software.
The technology budget for the district last year was $159,000…
Last spring, the district decided to avoid those costs and switch to Linux, which is much cheaper to maintain. Because the district is dropping Windows and picking up Linux, it can phase out older computers and the ME operating system in a more efficient way, Hyland said.”
Meanwhile, on the West Coast, SearchOpenSource.com writes Microsoft Windows ousted at California school district:
“By this summer, all 5,000 students and 250 teachers will be working off of a Linux-based thin client running OpenOffice.org, and the majority of the district’s servers will be running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.”
Linux’s advantages, including remote administration and no licensing fees, resulted in huge cost savings for the 7-school district:
“Carver said it cost the district about $2,500 per school to migrate to Linux, compared with the estimated $100,000 it would have cost to upgrade their Windows infrastructure. In addition, buying more Microsoft Office licenses would have cost the district $100 per license, she said, whereas OpenOffice was free.
Ultimately, moving to Linux has enabled the Windsor School District to build out technology capabilities that wouldn’t have been possible with Windows.
“[The students] are able to do more because Linux cost less,” Carver said. “Our new computer lab [at Brooks] was set to cost $35,000 and ended up costing us $16,000 with Linux [on thin clients].”
And the kids love it too. “The kids think Linux is cool because it’s new, but what they’re really doing is stepping into the 21st century,” Carver said.”
Adding to the familiar story of cost savings is a slightly newer story, of additional capabilities Linux and FOSS provide to schools, above what they could have done with Windows and Microsoft.
Soon these migration stories will be so common I won’t be able to keep up with them (I don’t post many of them already, but do try to read most). Putting this in terms of Gladwell’s Tipping Point, we must be somewhere between the early adopter and early majority phases of the global shift to FOSS platforms.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »