Dienstag Januar 30, 2007

"Italy adopts OpenDocument as a National Standard"
Great news:
"Italy has adopted The OpenDocument Format (ISO/IEC 23600) as a national standard."
Found here.
( Jan 30 2007, 10:30:52 AM CET ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Montag Januar 29, 2007

Fascinating
This is quite fascinating! Here is a quote:

"Korea will only get beyond this problem by 1) applying Korean laws on open standards to the certificate authorities, 2) reassigning new certificates which work with open web standards to all Koreans, 3) reprogramming all Korean websites to support 128 bit SSL which will allow for a heterogeneous marketplace of operating systems and web browsers. This is a herculean task and thus Korea stays hostage to Redmond.

Fascinating history. Unintended consequences and de-facto monopolies create costs too high to calculate and must be borne without question."
( Jan 29 2007, 12:21:33 PM CET ) Permalink

Donnerstag Januar 25, 2007

ODF Adoption in Argentina
"Misiones, a province in the northeast of Argentina, became the first regional government in Latin America to adopt ODF."
More information about the ODF adoption in Argentina can be found in the latest ODF Alliance newsletter.
( Jan 25 2007, 05:56:39 PM CET ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

"Office 2007 a slow burner for businesses"
"Three-quarters of businesses plan to wait at least three years before upgrading to the newly launched Microsoft Office 2007, according to new research from Forrester."
Found here.
( Jan 25 2007, 05:20:52 PM CET ) Permalink

South African CSIR adopts ODF
"CSIR President and CEO Dr Sibusiso Sibisi, a well-known proponent of OSS and the driving force behind the CSIR's adoption, said "the open document standards are of prime importance for allowing open access to information, now and in the future. By using open document standards to store our data, the CSIR is not locked into a specific vendor that developed and implemented a proprietary standard, thus eliminating the risk of not being able to access current data in future when such a standard may cease to be supported."

"The maturity of OpenOffice, a powerful open source office suite that implements ODF, has in turn enabled the CSIR to adopt ODF without major obstacles," he said."

The full article can be found here. Thanks to Craig Adams for pointing me to the news!
( Jan 25 2007, 05:13:41 PM CET ) Permalink

Dienstag Januar 23, 2007

Bruce Byfield about the customization of settings
"Frankly, the logic with which options are arranged in tabs under these headings is a little elusive. For that reason, when looking to customize OOo, you should not just look at any tab whose name seems related to your purpose, but scan all of them for additional features. This necessity becomes obvious when you consider four common use-cases: setting automated features, reducing memory requirements, setting security options, and enabling assistive options -- although none of these by any means exhausts the array of options that OpenOffice.org makes available."
Found here.
( Jan 23 2007, 09:40:08 PM CET ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Fuzzy logic extension for OpenOffice.org
I just came across this fuzzy logic extension for OpenOffice.org. It sounds pretty cool!
( Jan 23 2007, 09:38:37 PM CET ) Permalink

Accessibility tool with ODF support
People interested in accessibility tools with ODF support might want to check out the EUAIN project (see this and this)!
( Jan 23 2007, 05:45:21 PM CET ) Permalink

ODF and the statistical package R
For those of you who like OpenOffice.org and have to do a lot of statistical analysis might find the odfWeave package interesting. This R newsletter includes a short tutorial. Users looking for business intelligence solutions might want to watch the progress of Palo. In general, many OpenOffice.org and ODF related solutions are listed on this wiki page.
( Jan 23 2007, 05:41:14 PM CET ) Permalink

New ODF Toolkit project announced
A new ODF Tookit project has just been announced (read this). The project website can be found here. ODF users and developers are invited to participate!

Congratulations to the new project! I'm sure the ODF toolkit project will help to accelerate the adoption of ODF!
( Jan 23 2007, 04:17:55 PM CET ) Permalink

Freitag Januar 12, 2007

German "federal center for political education" explains open source
For those of you who can understand German, the German "federal center for political education" ("Bundeszentrale für polititsche Bildung") explains open source on this site. It's presented as a social movement within today's knowledge society.
( Jan 12 2007, 04:13:31 PM CET ) Permalink Kommentare [3]

New EU report about the impact of open source
A new report about the impact of open source has been published by the EU. The PDF document can be found here. Here are a few hightlights:

• According to figure 12 on page 29 OpenOffice.org is more popular than Samba within European public bodies.

• According to table 1 on page 31 more than 90% of the surveyed Brazilian government organization and more than 70% of the Indian government organizations are using OpenOffice.org.

• According to paragraph 6.2.3.8 on page 35 a market share of 8% in German businesses is estimated for OpenOffice.org.

• Quote from page 102: "Indeed, the group of users was also asked whether as a result of the experimentation they thought they could do with OpenOffice the same amount of work they could do with Microsoft Office. As shown in Figure 46, under 10% of respondents thought they could not, more than 20% thought they definitely could perform as well with OpenOffice, while almost 60% thought they could be as productive with OpenOffice (as confirmed by the time-use analysis) though with some problems. Given their previous lack of experience with OpenOffice the fact that problems were subjectively perceived is unsurprising, but the fact that objectively the productivity of users remained the same and did not reduce is important."

• An interesting read is also table 45, "Conclusions from the comparison of the usage of OOo and MSO in the organizations", on page 244.

Open source adoption by Indian state
According to this Spanish article the government of the state of Tamil Nadu in India has made the decision to migrate 99% of his Windows systems to open source software in 2007. 30,000 government employees are expected to switch to OpenOffice.org.
( Jan 12 2007, 03:05:53 PM CET ) Permalink

French Ministry saved 1.2M Euros with OpenOffice.org
According to this French article the French Ministry of Agriculture and Fishing saved 1.2M Euros with OpenOffice.org. The switch to OpenOffice.org cost them 1.5M Euros, but the renewal of Microsoft Office licenses would have cost them 2.7M Euros.
( Jan 12 2007, 03:00:59 PM CET ) Permalink

"UK government agency tells schools to ignore Vista"
This article is an interesting read. Here is a quote:

"The UK government agency responsible for technology in education has warned schools and colleges against deploying Microsoft Corp's Windows Vista and Office 2007 products, noting that for Vista especially 'the risks are high, and the benefits are far from clear.'"
( Jan 12 2007, 02:58:09 PM CET ) Permalink