July 14th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
While I was in Istanbul last week, so too was the GUADEC conference, though I was not able to attend any of it. A few interesting interviews with Mark Shuttleworth came out of the GUADEC event, but I’ll have to report on them secondhand.
Matthew Helmke interviewed Shuttleworth yesterday on his blog. They speak of many things, including Shuttleworth’s start in technology and a little bit about his other interests.
On Ubuntu, Shuttleworth says, “The key values were that it should be released on a predictable schedule, should be part of the Debian family, should always deliver the very best of the free software stack in a nicely integrated stack, should be governed as a community independent of the company(s) that back it, and should be available free of charge, with all security updates, for a long enough period that it’s actually useful as a commercial, production platform. I would credit the whole Ubuntu community with helping to turn those ideals into a real, and quite remarkable, product.”
derStandard.at focuses much more on the technical side of running the Ubuntu project in
Shuttleworth: “Apple is Driving the Innovation”. Shuttleworth is very interested in collaboration between projects, between Linux distros, between KDE and GNOME, and between companies working in the space.
And the title? It comes from this Shuttleworth quotation: “The fact that OS X is growing, tells us that Windows is weakening. The fact that OS X is growing and Linux isn’t, tells you that OS X is offering things that Linux is not. One of those is the pace of change, the level of innovation. You really have to give credit to Apple for driving innovation. Another of those things is their focus on the web as an experience. They recognize very strongly that the web is the killer application of the PC today and not Microsoft today.”
Good insight, and it proves once again why Shuttleworth is an important leader in the open source world. He takes inspiration from everywhere and channels it effectively into Ubuntu and his other projects, creating high-quality software for everyone.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | No Comments »
June 23rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Erwin Tenhumberg is (sadly) leaving Sun and this may be his last blog post there. It looks like he’s following a good opportunity at another company, and he hopes to continue blogging about open source in some form.
Today, he points out a number of ODF and OpenOffice.org successes, such as a download average in 2008 of 1.2 million copies of OOo per week (with recent weeks averaging closer to 2 million). He also writes:
“In addition, Asus, Acer and HP are now shipping laptops with OpenOffice.org pre-installed, and more and more organizations deploy OpenOffice.org in a large scale. Finally, according to Google file type searches like this one and this one, ODF is still clearly the market leading editable XML document file format. Thus, I’m sure ODF and OpenOffice.org have a bright future!”
All this he reports in the context of an “ODF Workshop” Microsoft will hold at its headquarters in the near future. Skepticism is healthy with Microsoft, but if they implement ODF honestly and completely (with none of their “embrace, extend, extinguish” behavior), this really is the victory bell for the ODF format.
Posted in GNU/Linux, ODF, OLPC, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | No Comments »
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 | No Comments »
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 | No Comments »
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 | No Comments »
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 | No Comments »
June 3rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
ZaReason’s weekly newsletter alerted me to two interesting articles on Ubuntu last week.
- “It’s Time to Retire ‘Ready for the Desktop‘” writes Jeremy LaCroix for Linux.com. (”The fact is, there are just as many people out there who have difficulty using Windows as there are who have trouble using Linux.”)
- Joey Stanford writes about his new Eee PC 900, on which ZaReason installed Ubuntu 8.04 for him. (”On the order form it says Xandros but I mentioned in a comment that it would soon be running Ubuntu. Within two minutes of placing the order they replied saying they can put a basic Ubuntu install on it, so I said “heck yeah!”. So, today when I opened it up, it booted Ubuntu out of the box. :-)”
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | No Comments »
May 28th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
In what he calls the The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment, Content Consumer created a series of normal computer tasks and asked his girlfriend to perform them on Ubuntu with no guidance from him. Her ability (and occasional inability) to complete the tasks, plus her relative frustration or comfort with them, gives a rough guide of what users may experience when using Ubuntu for the first time. Matching my expectations, she was able to accomplish most of the tasks without overlarge difficulty.
The post, as of this writing, has accumulated 3,543 diggs and 577 comments. Clearly, it has resonated. And the discussion it’s generated is also informative. End user testing is an important tool to continue to improve the usability of Ubuntu, other FOSS programs, and indeed, any software, so we should always encourage more of it.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | No Comments »
May 19th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
This weekend I installed and tested an open source desktop virtualization software, VirtualBox. In fact, according to its own website, it is “the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software.”
VirtualBox is now owned by Sun, which probably has the largest arsenal of open source software anywhere.
In my testing, I installed the latest Ubuntu, 8.04 Hardy Heron, which runs beautifully in VirtualBox on my MacBook.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Mac, Open Source | 1 Comment »
May 16th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Benjamin Mako Hill writes a post called “Laptop Liberation” on the importance of Free Software as the platform for the OLPC project.
Mako writes, “I gave a talk at Penguicon called Laptop Liberation where I talked about why I thought that OLPC’s use of a free software operating system and embrace of free software principles was essential for the initiative’s success and its own goals of education reform and empowerment. I’ve been saying similar things for some time.”
He points out the similarities between the OLPC’s educational philosophy of Constructionism and the way the Free Software world itself functions–they’re largely identical:
“Constructionism and free software, implemented and taught in a classroom, offer a profound potential for exploration, creation, and learning. If you don’t like something, change it. If something doesn’t work right, fix it. Free software and constructionism put learners in charge of their educational environment in the most explicit and important way possible. They create a culture of empowerment. Creation, collaboration, and critical engagement becomes the norm.”
Keeping control over one’s technology means keeping control over one’s destiny. This is the promise of open source/free software, and of the OLPC project.
“We can help foster a world where technology is under the control of its users, and where learning is under the terms of its students — a world where every laptop owner has freedom through control over the technology they use to communicate, collaborate, create, and learn.”
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | No Comments »