Ryan Eder, on behalf of the contest, explains: “Brilliant design for an even better cause. From the physical design to the sociological impact, every element of this laptop is exemplary of true innovation. This product is immensely practical and beneficial to all users across the globe. Design at its best!”

I imagine that as it receives more exposure and real-world use, OLPC will continue to collect accolades like today’s IDEA award.

It also works hard to maintain your privacy on an ongoing basis:

“Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party. What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.”

Developed by two University of Washington Ph.D. students, this is a great tool to keep in your kit.

The features it covers are probably well-known to readers of this blog, but it includes good screenshots and a great deal of enthusiasm (using far more exclamation points than even I do):

“If you thought 2.4 was major release, then you have seen nothing! Come September, OpenOffice.org will release it’s 3.0 version! That must be quite a big jump!”

The author likes multiple-pages view, the new notes feature, Mac OS X support, Calc’s user interface improvements, tables in Impress, PDF import, and the Presenter Screen extension.

As I, the author is quite pleased with this upgrade:

“OpenOffice 3.0 is a major milestone for the project, there are tons of other new features. I also noticed a great improvement in speed, which has always a bane in previous OpenOffice.org versions.

“If you can’t wait until September, why don’t you download the beta version and try it out, so far it has been very much stable for me. You can download OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta here.”

Author Matthew Aslett places the teams in qualifying groups, compares their success in moving to open source and open standards, and declares a winner for each matchup. The “teams” proceed through further matches until an overall champion is declared.

The final match occurs between two true heavyweights, and is ultimately determined by the strength and number of open source companies operating successfully in the country determined as champion (and which I won’t spoil here…)

Yoon Kit writes, “It’s apparent that Malaysian agencies like MAMPU are also doing the right thing in adopting true open standards like ODF as their document file format, despite the fact that Microsoft Malaysia is constantly lobbying and interfering with MAMPU’s decisions. The reaction from Microsoft’s lobbying is certainly interesting. I think people are getting tired of their underhanded tactics, and false cries of “competition” and “fairness”.”

The post led to an interesting discussion/debate in his comments that is worth reading as well. (I like that Yoon Kit stands by his positions and thoroughly defends each of his remarks when challenged!)

The website (built on TWiki) has a section I just noticed called User Stories, which shows how real people are benefiting from Chandler every day. It’s great to see the variety of tasks to which Chandler is suited and it’s also helpful in thinking about how it can fit into your daily work flow.

GullFOSS announces OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta 2 was released yesterday.

You can download it for testing here.

I’ve been using the earlier beta with great success on my Mac and some Windows boxes. It seems about ready for primetime use already.

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.

In the same way, the open standard ODF format now has an online ODF validator service.

Michael Brauer, its creator, announces the service on the GullFOSS blog:

“What is it? It is actually a web page where you can check whether an ODF file meets some basic conformance or validation requirements defined by the ODF specification. This service is in particular useful for developers that want to test their implementations, but it may also be used to check if a particular file is a valid ODF file.”

My take is that this will be a very handy tool once Microsoft Office starts producing ODF files, since it will offer an independent service verifying whether those files are valid ODF or have been corrupted in some way. Based on Microsoft’s track record in failing to properly support open standards, we should expect major difficulties with the ODFs they produce. And the ODF validator service will let us pinpoint the cause of the problem. Surely Microsoft will claim that ODF is a broken file format, but users will be able to run the files through this validator and prove that is is MS Office, in fact, that is broken. (All this is conjecture at this point, but past experience suggests we’ll see it come true yet again.)

I may get the chance to post here, or perhaps not, but I should be back in New York City on July 12. See you then!