March 30th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Recently, I noted the analysis concluding that OpenOffice may have 11 million users in the US.
Eike Rathke points out why this may be an undercount. He listed many aspects of the survey’s methodology that likely exclude more OOo users than MSO users. Rathke notes the survey…
– did not measure usage by pupils under age of 18 at school and home
– did not measure anything on other operating systems like Linux, OpenSolaris, MacOSX, …
– did not measure that 100% of all users of Linux and OpenSolaris do not use Microsoft Office
– did not measure the fair amount of MacOSX users using OpenOffice.org
– probably wouldn’t have been able to recruit Linux users anyway, because users of Free Software usually care more about privacy
Based on these factors, it does seem fair to say the survey did not fully count the US OpenOffice userbase. Maybe in the future we can gather more accurate numbers, but for now, at least we know its bottom boundary.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Measuring OpenOffice.org’s US Userbase
March 25th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Director of Instructional Technology for a large Texas school district, Miguel Guhlin shares his experience creating online learning environments with Moodle in his post Moodle Habitudes – Constructing Online Learning Environments:
Online learning is critical to our future, both for adults and children in K-12. I’d like to see a series of courses that go beyond how to design online learning–although that is certainly essential–to how to best manage resources to facilitate and enable online learning. As an administrator growing his own program, what planning do I need to put in place to ensure success for learners in K-12 environment?
Guhlin has the rare combination of technical and strategic planning skills to step back from the immediate technology and develop best practices that he can share with other school districts. This article contains much valuable advice for anyone interested in building online learning environments.
Posted in Education, Open Source | Comments Off on Miguel Guhlin on Moodle Habitudes
March 24th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
For ZDNet, Joe Brockmeier writes Firefox Inches Toward 50%, Safari Holds Steady.
Brockmeier reviewed the statistics from W3Schools, which draws a developer crowd and thus tends to skew more toward Firefox than many sites.
Firefox climbed to 46.4% in February, while the various versions of IE dropped by 1.2% to 43.6%.
Looking at other sites that track browser usage, the numbers for Firefox were lower, but the trend was identical. Firefox and Safari are growing in use share, while MS IE is shrinking every month.
This means the task of developing websites will get easier over time, as the standards become stronger and IE, which ignores many of the web standards, will fade to the point it can be safely ignored.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Firefox Inches Toward 50% Share
March 23rd, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Matt Hartley, writing for Internet.com, suggests to the country Let’s Use Stimulus to Boost Open Source in Schools.
His argument, in summary, is that the stimulus funds to be delivered to schools gives those schools the perfect opportunity to address the upfront costs of switching to Linux and an open source software stack. Then, for years and years after, the schools will benefit from the lower cost and longer lifespan of hardware and software running the open source stack.
This stimulus bill may be the only shot of fresh federal funds education is going to get for a very long time. This means whatever approach US education opts for regarding technology, it had better be something that can be sustained when the stimulus funds run out. This is where I see open source software and Linux stepping up to the challenge in a way that’s not practical for Windows.
Hartley also points out that at least two states have already made significant investments in open source, paving the way for others to follow: Indiana and Ohio.
Indiana installed 22,000 computers with Linux and open source in 2006 in a program to cut costs per machine so it can work toward a one-to-one student to computer ratio. In 2007, an Ohio school district began migrating all of its computer systems to Linux and open source as well.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Use Stimulus to Boost FOSS in Schools
March 20th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
The Guardian publishes Open Source Apps are No Small Free Beer, analyzing how their free cost is leading to a major boost in interest during this great downturn.
There cannot be a corner of the industrialised world that doesn’t rely on some form of free software. But free software, and the open source movement it inspired, has so far affected mostly the back-end world of servers and databases, or taken over from software, like the web browser, that was already available at zero cost.
Until now, suggests the Guardian, looking specifically at OpenOffice.org:
Take OpenOffice, the leading alternative to a paid-for “proprietary” software application. As the downturn started, its download figures began to rocket. According to Oregon State University, since it launched its third version in mid-October, OpenOffice has been downloaded more than 42m times. That’s roughly four times (3.75) every second.
Recent efforts have been made to analyze usage share of OpenOffice to see whether it is displacing users from Microsoft Office.
In November, the US analyst Clickstream reported (http://bit.ly/open2) that 5% of internet users used OpenOffice in the last six months. By comparison, 51% used Microsoft Office, suggesting that Microsoft had 10 times as many users as OpenOffice. But this also suggests that Microsoft’s dominance could be declining, as three years ago it enjoyed 95% of the market.
Not only is OpenOffice showing strongly in competition with MSO, but this information also shows MSO has a much lower usage than many IT analysts assume, if only half of internet users are opening it in a six-month period.
In the public sector, for governments around the world, OpenOffice is proving to be even more popular.
From Birmingham to Brussels, local and regional governments are switching to OpenOffice in a bid to confront the hegemony of Microsoft. “The idea of using open source software not originated by an American multinational corporation seems to go down particularly well in the French public service,” says John McCreesh, marketing project lead of OpenOffice.org.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 3 Comments »
March 19th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Several years ago, the French Gendarmerie police force began its migration to open source for the 90,000 desktop computers used by its 105,000 police officers. In a recent followup (Gendarmerie Saves Millions With Open Desktop and Web Applications), OSOR.eu finds the Gendarmerie continues to succeed with its open source strategy:
The French Gendarmerie’s gradual migration to a complete open source desktop and web applications has saved millions of euro, says Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard. “This year the IT budget will be reduced by 70 percent. This will not affect our IT systems.”
The migration still continues now, as new systems are bought to replace older machines. In this way, change is managed as a gradual process, while the general rule against buying new software licenses (using legacy licenses until they are replaced with open source) means that money is being saved immediately.
“If one of us wants a new PC, it comes with Ubuntu. This encourages our users to migrate.” Guimard estimates Gendarmerie since 2004 has saved 50 million euro on licences for standard office applications, hardware and maintenance.
The decision in 2004 to move to open source, was raised by one of the Gendarmerie’s accountants. “Microsoft was forcing us to buy new software licences. This annoyed our accountant, who tried OpenOffice.” According to Guimard the proprietary software maker then started lobbying the Gendarmerie, which is how the general manager found out about the experiments. “When he saw OpenOffice worked just as well and was available for free, it was he that decided it should be installed on all 90,000 desktops.”
After sampling open source with OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird, the Gendarmerie took another step and migrated to Linux as well.
In 2007 the Gendarmerie decided to replace even the desktop operating system. Guimard: “Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users. Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »
March 17th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
An open source lifestream software, Sweetcron, has been created by Tokyo-based web producer Yong Fook. Sweetcron can be seen in use on his site YongFook.com.
Similar to FriendFeed, Facebook’s activity stream, Twitter, Mugshot, and other services, it’s great to see a fully open source, distributed version of the concept arise. I am looking forward to experimenting with it further.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Social Software | Comments Off on Sweetcron
March 16th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
In the fast-growing world of open source netbooks, Laptop Magazine reports One Third of Dell Inspiron Mini 9s Sold Run Linux, which counters some recent reports that Linux was losing ground to XP.
Dell attributes part of the Linux growth to competitive pricing on the Ubuntu SKUs. “When you look at the sweet spot for this category it is price sensitivity, and Linux enabled us to offer a lower price entry point,” added Dell senior product manager John New.
According to Dell, the return rate of Ubuntu running Mini 9s are comparable to the XP rate, which we are told is “very low.” “Our focus has been making sure that before the order is taken, the customer knows what he is getting,” New added.
On a similar note, Macworld publishes Why Netbooks are Killing Microsoft, which focuses on the changes to the competitive landscape that ultra-low cost netbooks and open source operating systems and software are creating. Specifically, they seem to be affecting Microsoft’s revenues in a very real way:
Microsoft said that its revenue had increased an anemic 1.6 percent in the quarter that ended Dec. 31 compared to the same quarter a year earlier. But that number doesn’t tell the whole story. Windows took the biggest hit, while systems for servers and related tools had hefty increases in sales. Windows sales were down an eye-popping 8 percent; server and related revenue grew 15 percent.
Microsoft clearly blames netbooks for the drop in Windows sales. Here’s what it said in its statement: “Client revenue declined 8% as a result of PC market weakness and a continued shift to lower priced netbooks.”
With about 30% of netbooks shipping with Linux, and users of even the Windows netbooks unlikely to purchase Microsoft Office (it would cost more than half again the cost of the entire machine), the company is in a difficult situation that is only going to get tougher.
But on the other hand, consumers are benefitting from low cost machines that fill their needs quite well, and that is cause to celebrate.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | 1 Comment »
March 13th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Miro and Songbird have both received updates in the past week. Both are projects inspired by Firefox (and both are or were built on Firefox’s coding platform XULRunner), and each one takes the open web concept into new territory–Miro to open video, and Songbird to music.
Miro announced it has reached approximately one million users, and Songbird has recorded nearly one million downloads of its latest version.
Miro has also announced its co-sponsorship of the Open Video Conference, to be held in New York City on June 19 and 20 this year. (When I will probably be out of town for a family wedding, alas.)
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Miro and Songbird Updates
March 12th, 2009 Benjamin Horst
Wired’s blog reports that Freescale is developing ARM-based netbooks with planned retail prices of about $200:
Freescale is racing to get netbooks out this summer, featuring the company’s chips, that would offer up to eight hours of battery life, be significantly thinner than existing designs and priced under $200.
“We are taking dead aim at the netbook space,” says Glen Burchers, marketing director at Freescale.”The value proposition that Freescale brings is dramatically lower power consumption and even lower prices.”
The price and features should attract great interest from consumers. Even more interesting in terms of computing paradigms is the fact that Windows cannot run on ARM chips, while Linux and Google Android will be perfectly suited for the platform.
Linux is already growing quickly due to pre-installation on netbooks, but Freescale machines will further accelerate its rise, since the temptation to install Windows won’t exist at all due to these technical limitations.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on $200 Netbooks on the Horizon?