“equally critical of proprietary and open source myths, advocating software choice beyond marketing and romanticism”
The Italian chamber of deputies on the 22th of September 2010 approved unanimously a motion to move on with the adoption of open standards in order to make office suite migrations a reality.
The original motion, made by Carlo Emanuele Trappolino who actually pointed out that a migration process was started back in 2007, was calling for a fast adoption, but the final text doesn’t specify any timing constraint.
Sun reported results for its second quarter of fiscal 2009, and Dana Blankenhorn, Matt Asay and the Var Guy all agree that when it comes to open source Sun is on the rise. Simon Phipps states that open source is driving the new Sun, and Jonathan Schwartz keeps saying that open source is key.
The value of the Sun brand maybe the reason behind the growth in MySQL billings, but we don’t know actually what ’MySQL/infrastracture’ means, and drawing conclusions is a guessing game.
Continue reading ‘Sun Open Source Business: Is Sun Finding its Way?’
Measuring the true Success of OpenOffice.org - Michael Meeks wrote a long post about OpenOffice.org success, mostly from a development point of view. Being Michael a Novell’s employee his perspective might be considered biased, but I totally agree with his recipe:
Continue reading ‘OpenOffice.org Success: Homesteading the OpenOffice.org Noosphere’
The market opportunity for OpenOffice.org Migrations topic took over after turning OpenOffice.org migrations into a business post, with a variety of views and perspectives.
Savio Rodrigues points out that top 2000 companies will likely end up closing a deal with Microsoft, but out of that niche he sees a business opportunity for ISVs, System Integrators and also Microsoft’s partners. Leif Lodahal, project coordinator in the Danish OpenOffice.org project, sees Sun’s absence from the Danish market as an opportunity.
The most important barriers to OpenOffice.org adoption by medium to large enterprises are the lack of system management tools, the scarce availability of enterprise applications’ integration, and the burden associated with the migration of custom applications.
Continue reading ‘OpenOffice.org Migrations: Easing Medium-Large Companies’ Migrations’
DE: Böblingen considering migration to Open Source desktop - The city of Böblingen will be moving to a desktop based on the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, as anticipated during a workshop for Open Source communities, organised by the recently launched European Open Source Software Observatory and Repositor
Katowice Municipality: saving public money with OpenOffice.org - The administration of the Polish city of Katowice introduced OpenOffice.org on its desktop computers, replacing proprietary office suites. Read the case study.
FI: Open Source resource centre joins Linux foundation working group - COSS, the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions, became an associate partner of Fossbazaar.
Io Leggo Copyleft! - a two days conference dedicated to the copyleft world.Linux e il software libero per la Pubblica Amministrazione e il Terzo Settore (eng: Linux, Free Software for Public Administrations and the Third Sector) - case studies, experiences and analysis of free software migrations.
RomeCamp is back. This edition has been organized by Elastic (Nicola Mattina) and DigitalPR (Vincenzo Cosenza), Current is one of the sponsors and the website enlists many media fans.
In occasion of the Linux Day 2008, that will take place on Saturday in 119 Italian cities, the Italian Linux Society and the Italian OpenOffice.org Association are launching a campaign for a special endangered specie. The campaign is aimed at helping the Microsoft Office users specie, a specie at risk by OpenOffice.org diffusion.
Microsoft Office Dinosaurs by JamesB
ILS and PLIO members are engaged to save a Microsoft Office’s user helping her to progressively migrate to OpenOffice.org 3.0. In a early stage users would be allowed to use both suites, with a wider and wider use of OOo 3.0, to end by using just OOo.
“Microsoft itself admitted Microsoft Office’s users were destined for extinction, comparing them to dinosaurs”, says Michele From della Silvestra, ILS’s president. “That ads actually didn’t bring all of them to stop using Microsoft Office, so we decided along with PLIO to launch an initiative to foster the creation of “MS Office Angels”. MSOffice Angels are groups of volunteers aimed at helping Microsoft Office users to stop using it, and move to OpenOffice.org”.
Read the whole press release (Italian), and have fun with OpenOffice.org!
The Italian and the English announcements of the third major release of OpenOffice.org yesterday went out, and today the whole OpenOffice.org website is struggling to cope with the demand for the new release 3.0 of OpenOffice.org.
Here some excerpts of the English press release.
Edinburgh, UK (PRWEB) October 13, 2008 — Celebrated at a launch party in Paris today, and just in time for the eighth birthday of the project, the OpenOffice.org Community today announced the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0. The third major update of the leading productivity suite delivers significant enhancements and advanced, extensible, productivity tools for all users, including Mac users, as OpenOffice.org now runs natively on the Mac OS X platform.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 is more than a simple productivity application. With this release the basic components, which include word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, graphics, formula and database capabilities, can easily be supplemented by extensions downloaded from the OpenOffice.org extensions repository. Instead of feature bloat, OpenOffice.org 3.0 gives users in enterprises, offices, schools, as well as home users the freedom to configure their suite their way.
I like the Italian press release more, and it is not just because I am the Institutional Relationship Manager for the Italian OpenOffice.org association and a member of the Italian OOo marketing team. We stressed the importance to be a serious challenger for Microsoft in the Italian market, providing also some numbers (3.580.000 downloads so far this year, one every 7 seconds). We highlighted also that the OpenOffice.org architecture allows third parties contributions, knowing that many are not familiar with the notion of extensions yet.
McCreesh, Marketing Project Lead for OpenOffice.org, actually said similar things, as reported by ZDNet co.uk, mentioning OpenOffice 3.0 increased focus on the integration of extensions:
What we are doing is improving the way people can build extensions so, rather than keep on increasing the size of OpenOffice, people can download additional functionality if they particularly need it.
As seen with Funambol, Sun basically retains almost full control of decision making and IP ownership. Despite within the openoffice.org community there are some tension between control and openness, now the OpenOffice.org modular architecture allows subproject creation. And third parties’ extrinsic motivations may vary.
OpenOffice.org migrations are not easy yet, but the state of enterprise applications integrations can change now.
The pilot project to migrate schools of three Russian regions to Free Software has recently expanded its geography. Now it is possible for the schools outside of Tatarstan, Perm krai and Tomsk region to voluntarily apply for participation by completing a special form (Russian) published on the project website.
The project, if successful, may be the first step towards large-scale migration of Russian secondary education instutitions and, consequently, of the other state agencies to Free Software as President Medvedev stated last year (Russian) while being the First Deputy Prime Minister.
Children in the Putino village of Perm Krai running Linux
It is a hot summer for the project contractors since the schools must be migrated before September 1, when the new academic year starts. By now, according to the official website of Armada, the consortium that unites the firms involved in the project, the project is slightly ahead of schedule. Moreover, Armada’s CEO Igor Gorbatov expects (Russian) the total number of schools migrated to Free Software to surpass the target number of 1000 (the goal is to migrate 50% schools in the central cities and 20% in the rest of the three regions) so that there may be 2000 or even 5000 schools.
According to project statistics (Russian, but the numbers are quite self-explanatory) published by Armada on June 4, only 182 schools of 1084 had been migrated. However, the project members are actively promoting Free Software, the most notable activity being the on-site install seminars that are organized almost every week in various towns and villages of Perm Krai.
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