Erwin's StarOffice Tango

Erwin's StarOffice Tango
Erwin Tenhumberg's Insights into Open Source and Dancing
... or why Open Competition matters

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Freitag September 28, 2007

New ODF organization being founded in the Netherlands
A new ODF organization, the OpenDoc Society, is being founded in the Netherlands. According to this Dutch article, the new organization has already support from 25 organizations. The Dutch homepage of the OpenDoc Society can be found here.
( Sep 28 2007, 06:32:42 PM CEST ) Permalink

Vietnam meets Extremadura to learn about open source
I just came across this Spanish article. Apparently the Vietnamese government met with people from Extremadura (Spain) in order to exchange ideas and experiences around the adoption of open source. It's great to see governments start their own kind of "community building"! BTW, more information about Extremadura's open source efforts can be found in this video.

In this context, it's amazing to see how many people from different French ministries and other government agencies are actively participating in the French OpenOffice.org mailing lists and helping each other. You see domain names like equipement.gouv.fr, interieur.gouv.fr, culture.gouv.fr, douane.finances.gouv.fr, finances.gouv.fr, cotes-darmor.pref.gouv.fr, dgi.finances.gouv.fr, justice.gouv.fr, and hautes-pyrenees.pref.gouv.fr. It's no surprise that according to the OpenOffice.org user survey, France has the second largest OpenOffice.org user community. (Disclaimer: The survey is currently only available in English, French and German.)
( Sep 28 2007, 01:23:33 PM CEST ) Permalink

20,000 OpenOffice.org seats in Vietnam
Here is another OpenOffice.org success story:
"More than 20,000 computers used at Party agencies nationwide will replace Microsoft Office software with OpenOffice open source office software.
... Cost savings is only one of the reasons for this change. The major target of the replacement is to improve the ability of the Vietnamese IT circle because the use of open source products like OpenOffice will create a new market for Vietnamese IT companies, according to Mr. Loi."
The full article can be found here. Seeing all the OpenOffice.org and ODF success stories coming in and having read this Forrester report yesterday, I guess the current market leader is getting under more and more pressure. When we talk about 90% market share today, we only talk about 1 Billion PC's, ignoring the majority of the world's population that does not have a computer, yet. I'm sure interesting times are coming up!
( Sep 28 2007, 12:54:18 PM CEST ) Permalink

City of Amsterdam ready to switch to OpenOffice.org
According to this Dutch article, the City of Amsterdam is ready to switch to OpenOffice.org and Linux based on a pilot. The decision about the migration is expected for December. According to the Article the test users had no problems using OpenOffice.org because of its familiar user interface. Since my Dutch is a bit "rusty", please let me know if my summary is correct! Anyway, great news!
( Sep 28 2007, 12:13:09 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]