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Some people get sniffy about OpenOffice.org, calling it mickey mouse in comparison to the “serious” and “grown-up” Microsoft Office. That may have been a vaguely plausible jibe for version 1, but I've found version 2 to be incredibly fast and powerful – it really does everything I need in an office suite, and it does it well. And yet OpenOffice.org rarely gets the respect it deserves.
Maybe that's going to change soon – at least on the continent: If we look at OpenOffice.org, the three markets where the open source office suite is competing most successfully with Microsoft Office are probably Germany, France and Italy, followed by other European markets like Spain and the Netherlands. In Italy, where I have the updated numbers, we are hitting today - maybe while I’m writing this post - one million downloads since January 1st, 2008 (over 350.000 since the announcement of OOo 2.4 in late March). Although we don’t have Microsoft figures for Office 2007, we estimate a maximum of 1.8 million licenses sold in 2008. I already know the reply: “You can’t compare licenses with downloads…”. Of course, gentlemen, but do you really think that one million downloads in slightly over one hundred days (at an average of over 9,200 downloads per day) still equals to a few thousands users? Do you really think that a small bunch of people, just the same small bunch of people, can get all these downloads? Come on, we’ve other stuff to do. Please, be realistic. We’re eating your pie, quickly. We’re hungry. These are serious numbers, even if you need to reduce them by a factor to allow for overcounting. Alas, I fear that the numbers are not so good here in the UK, which for historical reasons has always been in thrall to Microsoft, in terms of operating systems, browser and, I suspect, office apps. Maybe we'll learn to be as wise as our continental cousins one day. Meanwhile, if you haven't already done so, do try OpenOffice.org 2.4 – you won't regret it. Original link: http://www.computerworlduk.com/t... "A penguin once took a vacation
From the grind of commoditization: 'My effort's best spent With an enterprise bent; I'll see you down at the next station!'" -- "Tux, the Magic Penguin," by Anders Bylund, 10 minutes ago Two of the biggest names in the world of Linux and open-source software picked the same day to back off their designs on a new world order in consumer computing. According to the Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) website, the Linux veteran has "no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future." At the same time, Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) CEO Ron Hovsepian spoke to the press at the opening of a new engineering center in India, saying that "The market for the desktop for the next three to five years is mainly enterprise-related." Despite the relatively slow uptake of Windows Vista, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) remains the player to beat in consumer-level operating systems. Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) is trying to sell some Linux-based computers with a certain Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) flavor to them, but took that effort out of its physical stores rather quickly. The systems are still available online, but the average Joe and Jill won't exactly flock to that offering. Linux has been around for the better part of two decades now, and it's gaining steam in the corporate computing space. Luring consumers into the open arms of that friendly penguin is proving much harder. "The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today's Linux desktops simply don't provide a practical alternative," says Red Hat. "History is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled, or are run as charities." I can understand if the publicly traded Linux vendors don't want to emulate that particular model. Maybe it's best to let the open-source community do its thing awhile longer, getting the desktop closer to the ideal of being easy to understand and instantly usable to any technophobe. The Ubuntu gang is working on it, alongside the Gnome and KDE projects. It'll be easy enough to make a marketing push once the technology matures enough, devoting those resources to the enterprise sector in the meantime. Godspeed, Tux. See you down the road, and in the data center. Original link: http://www.fool.com/investing/va... Is it really the worst thing in the world if Red Hat doesn't want to make a consumer-grade desktop Linux distribution? I don't think so. With all the things Red Hat already does so well, it's not as if it's missing out -- and if other people already are hard at work on that project, Red Hat still won't be missing out. This is open source, remember?
The insinuation many people have read into its recent statements about making a desktop distribution was that it would have a hard time competing against Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s entrenched desktop presence, which is always an easy target. There's a kernel of truth to that, though: building a consumer-friendly distribution of Linux is just the beginning. You have to get it in front of people and make it a viable alternative -- something that's happening a bit more with Linux on the low end, and in fact Red Hat has been working on just such a project -- the Red Hat Global Desktop Program. Still, with all the existing desktop distributions out there that work remarkably well, Red Hat would probably just be duplicating work already done elsewhere if it tried to create something intended for mainstream users. Its talents are best served where it has honed them -- in the enterprise, both in the server space and on managed desktops. Finally, since just about all the work being done for user-grade Linux is open source anyway, it'll all benefit Red Hat in the long run as well. Red Hat isn't admitting defeat by doing this -- no more so than General Motors would admit defeat by not making skateboards. It's smart to stick with what it knows, and not try to become all things to all people. Original link: http://www.informationweek.com/b... I contemplated this month whether or not I should comment on Microsoft’s mega-ginormous 44.6 billion dollar rejected bid for Yahoo!, but by that time, it would be very old news and no longer relevant. Unfortunately, that’s the downside of writing for a monthly print publication with a three-month lead time. Frankly, by the time you read this column, everyone else would have commented on it, so whatever little I could add would only be a futile attempt at being ostentatious. Still, whether Yahoo is gobbled up by Microsoft or another company, or if Yahoo! continues to trundle along on its own, one thing is certain — it needs a major mojo injection. From a services perspective, Google has surpassed it in almost every respect. The core search engine capabilities aside, Google has made a tremendous effort to add indispensable hooks into our electronic lifestyle, whether it’s through GMail, Google Maps, Google Office, Google Calendar, Google Earth, Google Talk, Blogger, Google Feed Reader, Froogle, Picasa, and definitely not least of all, YouTube and Google Video. This is not to say that Yahoo! doesn’t have some pretty damn good core services either, some of which I would argue are superior to Google’s, such as their Flickr photo-sharing service which is absolutely second to none. (Note, however, that Yahoo! bought Flickr, rather than inventing it…) I have more than 6,000 photos on Flickr for my food blog, Off The Broiler: but I use Google’s Picasa to do my photo edits, and I prefer GMail and Google Calendar to Yahoo’s offerings — although I know many people who are staunch supporters of Yahoo’s versions. Yahoo’s news service is more sophisticated and personalized than Google’s, with its integrated video content feeds, which is why I have it set as my home page. Yahoo! Finance is also an extremely powerful tool if you do armchair investing. Google also has a Finance site, but it’s decidedly minimalist and its portfolio management tools aren’t as good. However, Yahoo! has failed where Google has succeeded, by extending services to literally everywhere. It’s no secret why nearly every Apple iPhone commercial features Google Maps, Google Search and Youtube to showcase its capabilities, because these are services that are fundamental to our Internet lifestyle. While not as well advertised, Google also recently rolled out a comprehensive suite of programs for the Blackberry. Where are the equivalent service extenders on mobile devices from Yahoo? Sure, they have a Yahoo Mobile client for Blackberry, but it only supports Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger. On iPhone, they have Search, Mail, Finance, and Weather. Compared to Google, it’s not even close. Google’s support of open source doesn’t hurt, either. The three-year-old Summer of Code program, has produced cool applications, and also created a great deal of goodwill from the FOSS community, and this has spurred a lot of interest in hooking in and extending their published APIs in places like Web applications and blogging. Case in point, Google Maps and its geolocation services are plugged into a lot of popular blog sites, like Slice, which uses Google’s API to create a “thumbtack map” of pizza parlors that it reviews over New York City, complete with integrated links to content on the SliceNY.com site. The Google Maps API is also used by BlogSoop, a meta-index restaurant site that collects restaurant reviews by food bloggers, and displays a corresponding map location with every restaurant database entry. These are just two examples of where Google’s technology has been used, largely due to their “Open Kimono” policy of publishing their API’s and creating services that people want to use. Is it too late for Yahoo! to beat back the Google giant? In a word, no. But they need to get on the Open Kimono cluetrain and do something pretty drastic to get their services extended all over the place. Perhaps they should consider heading Android off at the pass, and forming an alliance with Nokia and/or Motorola to produce a Y! Phone platform — an integrated Linux smartphone with camera, Wi-Fi and 3G data service that multimedia enabled and is hooked up to Flickr, Yahoo! Calendar, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, and with an integrated Yahoo!-flavored Opera browser on steroids, with built-in VPN capabilities and plugins for corporate Exchange and Notes systems in addition to IMAP/POP3 capabilities in a native Yahoo! Mail client. Make the whole platform open source instead of Android’s proprietary OS, and you’ll start to see the geeks jump on it like crazy and porting code to other platforms as well. That’s the smartphone that everyone really wants, and it’s easily within their reach. Jason Perlow is Senior Technology Editor of Linux Magazine. You can send Jason email at jperlow@linux-mag.com. Original link: http://www.linux-mag.com/id/5757... I am still cruising through the Standish Group report that claims "Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion" and I came across one very interesting gem that I think helps to explain some of my previous thoughts on why IBM isn't pushing any open source for SOA. I theorized that IBM is threatened by open source SOA tools as many of them meet the full requirements that enterprises look for. I still think that's true and I think a big part of that is because open source products have improved so dramatically they set a baseline for functionality and cost where users are not willing to pay the extortion fees that big vendors charge for upfront licensing. Using open source creates an instant baseline for any project. This baseline not only includes working programs, but also requirements, documentation, support procedures, and education material. In many cases, especially in infrastructure software, the baseline is a fully developed and working system. Many applications and service components are fully functional and can be used immediately. Other applications and components provide a firm baseline around which to develop a more elaborate system. Using DARTS and other data, Standish Group has concluded that 11% of all new commercial software requirements are being satisfied by open source solutions and components. This does not include the application service providers (ASPs) that are using open source software to service their clients, with products ranging from ERP to project management. This baseline notion is also interesting as products like JBoss used to be considered just for development with BEA for production, but over the last 2 years or that sentiment has changed with lots of JBoss is production. Original link: http://www.cnet.com/8301-13846_1... |
 The maintainer of Linux 2.6 has called for a full-time, architecture-independent "embedded maintainer." Speaking at a CELF's fourth annual Embedded Linux Conference, Morton also told embedded developers how to select a kernel, get support from the kernel community, and decide whether to submit code to mainline.(Click for uncropped view of Andrew Morton at ELC 2008)
Much of the talk was substantively the same as Morton's keynote at MontaVista's VisionSummit event in the Silicon Valley last fall. For example, Morton discussed how companies and project teams might wish to go about picking a kernel version, deciding whether to their merge code into mainline, and getting support from the kernel community. The gist of that material should be fairly apparent from Morton's detailed slides, linked at the bottom of the page.  Morton gives the "Pro" side of merging up (Click to enlarge) Yet, Morton seemed more eager than he had six months ago to use the forum to call for an "embedded maintainer." The call comes at a time when the number of kernel developers is increasing, along with the number of code lines changed in each release. Not shown on the graph below, yesterday's 2.6.25 release carried a change-log weighing in at 7.5M.  The number of changes per Linux kernel release has grown considerably [Source: The Linux Foundation] (Click to enlarge) Morton said that currently, Linux kernel developers do their best not to break things for embedded Linux users, because, "we think [embedded Linux is] cool." Still, things "can and do break," and a dedicated person might be able to limit the damage, he reckons. Morton sounded resigned to the economic realities of the embedded market, however. He suggested that software companies in the device market have traditionally not prospered as well as those in more mainstream computing segments, despite the gargantuan economic importance of the embedded and device markets overall. He said that currently, "by far" the bulk of kernel.org work is funded by server companies. Characterized by Bird as "the adult in the room," Morton has been vocal in the past about the need for Linux to maintain high quality standards. For example, he called for a "bug-fix only" release last year. Morton is among the top five contributors to the kernel by lines of code. Yet, he is also visible in the community, speaking at several Linux conferences every year. His ELC 2008 presentation is available as a downloadable PDF, here. Embedded developers typically understand that kernel.org Linux is not ready for production deployment in devices, because it has not been tested enough. "Linux is a go-fast technology project," MontaVista Founder Jim Ready likes to say, "Not a finished product." For that reason, device builders often purchase commercial versions of Linux, or else work hard to test and patch for stability. Most device customers have a high expectation of reliability. Original link: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news... The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has not received a formal appeal of its approval of Office Open XML as a standard, but it looks more unlikely with each day that passes. To date, there have been “no appeals and I have no way of predicting whether there will or will not be,” said ISO spokesman Roger Frost, who was kind enough to respond to several inquiries this week from ZDnet blogger about a possible appeal. On April 2, ISO announced that the controversial, Microsoft sponsored OOXML document format specification, known as 29500, had received the necessary number of votes to be approved as an ISO standard. The final results: 61 countries approved, 10 disapproved and 16 abstained. At that time, ISO said opponents would have 60 days to file a formal appeal of ISO’s decision. Following that announcement, many backers of the rival Open Document Format (ODF) ISO standard (used in OpenOffice) protested the vote and called for ISO to examine alleged “voting irregularities” in select nations including Norway. At an Oslo, Norway meeting on April 9 to discuss the maintenance of ISO 29500, more than 100 protesters (shown below, photographed, posted and described by one Microsoft blogger as “geeks) gathered outside the meeting hall with signs and shouts of protest to picket OOXML’s approval.
Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux and outspoken opponent of OOXML, said he holds ISO at least somewhat responsible for not addressing what he claimed were unscrupulous lobbying efforts by Microsoft to win votes. Still, in a recently issued memorandum, ISO defended its process and maintains that proper procedures were followed. “We reviewed the process before it started, all the while during its course and afterwards as well. While the voting on ISO/IEC 29500 has attracted exceptional publicity, it needs to be put in context,” the document reads. “ISO and IEC have collections of more than 17 000 and 7 000 successful standards respectively, these being revised and added to every month. This suggests that the standards development process is credible, works well and is delivering the standards needed, and widely implemented, by the market. Because continual improvement is an underlying aim of standardization, ISO and IEC will certainly be continuing to review and improve its standards development procedures. ” Andrew Updegrove, a Boston-based attorney at Gesmer Updegrove LLP who has been involved in the case, is none too pleased with ISO’s response. “To my mind, this is a bit like the FAA stating that there would be no investigation following reports that the wings of a 747 fell off just before it crashed, because the vast majority of flights land safely. But not to worry, because the FAA is always looking for ways to improve flight safety,” UpDegrove quipped. “Unfortunately, here as with so much else with the traditional standards infrastructure, the rules don’t really relate to the current challenge,” Updegrove said. “The appeal procedures don’t really seem to address a situation such as this, and ISO/IEC does not appear to be taking the situation seriously in any event.” Chris Maresca, founding partner of Olliance Group, an open source consulting firm, was doubtful about an appeal based on what he heard. “I’ve heard that ISO said an appeal was DOA [Dead On Arrival], but that’s about it,” he said. Outspoken OOXML opponents Sun and IBM have not commented on possible plans for an appeal. But at least one spokesman for the ODF Alliance said it’s too early to tell. “I wouldn’t be surprised, given the number of documented irregularities, if an [national standard body] formally appeals. ISO rules require that an appeal be fully documented so I would expect an NB considering such a appeal to use more of the time (two months) allotted,” said Marino Marcich, a spokesman for the ODF Allliance, in an e-mail to ZDNet. Paula Rooney is a Boston-based writer who has followed the tech industry for almost two decades. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations. Original link: http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-sour... At the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the traders betting on future commodity price fluctuations aren't the only ones who know what it means to take a risk. Five years ago, Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), now part of the CME Group, placed a hefty bet: that it could trust Linux with the heart of its business, executing billions of contracts a year and processing them faster than previously.
CME won its gamble. And in so doing, it proved that an open source platform, a relative newcomer to the data center scene in general and the financial world in particular, had the power and speed to handle high-volume, real-time, mission-critical applications. Outmoded servers, transaction times prompt migration The Exchange's 800 Solaris Sparc servers, which were simply outmoded, nudged CME in the direction of Linux. "We were starting to have issues with Sparc," said Vinod Kutty, CME's associate director and head of distributed R&D computing. Not only did they cost too much to support, but it wouldn't have been able to keep pace with the projected increase in trade volume, especially with electronic trades growing even faster than the business as a whole and pit trades on the floor becoming less predominant. "We wanted to save money and get much better performance," Kutty.said Another factor in the conversion was latency. The technological bar is continually rising on how fast a transaction must be completed to be considered "real time," but Kutty defines it, futuristically, as a single millisecond. At the time of CME's conversion, the Sun Sparc servers were averaging 200 milliseconds per transaction, about twice what was considered real time in 2003, he said. Today 15 to 20 milliseconds is the benchmark, he said. We have historically noticed that when we improve the performance of the trading engines, traders will trade more often. Vinod Kutty, associate director and head of distributed R&D computing,, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange People have often accused me of dreaming too much and not having my thoughts anchored in reality, particularly in this world of multi-billion dollar technology companies and big business, when huge amounts of money are at stake and every competitor is vying for the top spot.
In the world of high-end enterprise systems, that top spot - the world of large symmetrical processing UNIX systems - is divided between the tier 1 systems vendors - IBM, Sun and HP. All of these have their own proprietary architectures - IBM has POWER with AIX, Sun has SPARC and Niagara with Solaris, and HP has the PA-RISC and Itanium platforms with HP-UX. Only two of these vendors, IBM and HP, are able to run enterprise-supported versions of Linux in addition to their proprietary Unixes on their native platforms, although Sun has experimented in the recent past with Ubuntu on their Niagra chip, a relationship which seems to be waning. Back in the olden days of yore, when the earth was still new, there was one version of UNIX - AT&T’s. Much like the current days of Open Source, this code was shared freely among vendors, and the systems were largely source compatible with each other, until the vendors decided to all go their separate ways and rule over their own feudal computing ecosystems. Fast forward 40 years later, and you have the situation where we are today, where many incompatible versions of UNIX now exist and an independent, rogue cousin — which shares no lineage with UNIX despite having shared ideology and ported applications — is now nipping at their heels for the same market share. It has always been a dream of mine to see UNIX re-united within my professional lifetime into a single, standardized “mother” distribution. It could be argued that Linux displaces the need for UNIX, but as I have said before, commodity and utility computing will never fully displace enterprise-class systems. But it makes sense that they should be source compatible and migrating applications and code should be as easy as flipping a compiler switch or spitting out build packages with something like OpenSUSE Build Service. In an ideal world, there should be no such thing as a “Solaris-ism” or “AIX-ism” or “Linux-ism” or any kind of “ism” that inhibits code migration and application portability. Like the Linux Standard Base, which aspires to standardize the base distribution by which all Linux distributions are to conform to, the same should hold true of UNIX. POSIX -tried- to accomplish this, but proprietary OS extensions and varying platform differences effectively neutralized its effectiveness as a UNIX standard. I'm always using a mix of machines and OSes for my work, but until this week, my main "home" machine -- The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) -- has been mostly used at home for a bit of Web browsing, testing Linux distributions, and my daughter's favorite educational games (gCompris, Childsplay, TuxPaint, Potato Guy).
But this week I've needed to use the laptop a lot more, while I'm in the office. We're testing a new blog server, so I'm using my main computer (the Dell Pentium 4 box with Windows XP) to work on the new server, with the $0 Laptop and Debian Lenny for the old server). It's just easier to keep two computers running, given the situation. I often use my test box at the office, but despite remarkably similar specs (VIA 1 GHz C3 processor in the test box vs. Celeron 1.3 GHz in the laptop), the Gateway computes circles around the VIA box, a converted thin client hobbled by less-than-optimal graphics and sound chips. Anyway, I'm using the Gateway with Lenny -- and while still the Testing distribution of Debian, Lenny has been running very well on my various computers. I've been using the Epiphany browser very heavily. I can just as easily use Iceweasel (aka Firefox), but I've grown used to Epiphany. The one thing I miss is the built-in spell-checker of Firefox. I'm divided on the way Epiphany handles bookmarks. The browser encourages the user to categorize every bookmark, even in multiple ways. So I have categories for BSD, Linux, Debian, etc. The bookmarks themselves are arranged alphabetically, not in the order that they were created. That's both good and bad. On the one hand, it's easy to find things when they're alphabetical, assuming you've given them an appropriate name (or accepted the one provided by the Web site in question). I'd like a feature by which the most used bookmarks float to the top, but with categorization, it's easy to slice up a bunch of bookmarks into manageable chunks. |
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OpenOffice.org Storms Away – on the Continent
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