Open Source means that users have the freedom to see how software works, adapt it for the own needs, fix bugs and limitations and contribute back to the community.
Ethan Zuckerman blogs “It's cute. It's orange. It's got bunny ears. An update on the One Laptop Per Child project.” They are cute. The OLPC project intends to sell these in lots of millions to third-world countries and school systems. They intend for these to be owned by school children and distinctly colored to disuade commercial trade in them.
This will be quite the challenge. These aren't laptops as we use them, but internet appliances. I could envision lots of uses for them.
InfoWorld: Top News posts Microsoft to pull PDF, XPS support from Office 2007. “Microsoft Corp. has decided to delete from its next version of Office an automatic way to save documents in PDF (Portable Document Format) after Adobe Systems Inc. threatened to take legal action.”
How strange. There must be more to this. PDF output is included with Apple's OS X. OpenOffice.org has the option to save files as PDF on Linux, OS X, Windows and everywhere else it runs. PDF output is free for anyone willing to dig around for it, from the free Ghostscript to PDFCreator.
Either Microsoft was infringing on Adobe's extensions to the basic PDF, or something else was in play here. I'm looking forward to some followup article that might shed more light here.
Another day, another Microsoft announcement of a dropped feature. Boy, the company is building an impossibly difficult hurdle to shipping new products.
Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system.
— Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living.
cited, in turn, in the GNU tar manual
SummerOfCode – PythonInfo Wiki [link removed – ted] Google has announced the Summer of Code projects. This page highlights a bunch of cool Python projects. Keep an eye on ’em!
Over at InfoWorld Ephraim Schwartz reports IBM to adopt ODF for Lotus Notes.
(InfoWorld) – IBM chose the Deutsche Notes User Group conference in Germany this week to make a significant announcement about its adoption of the ODF (OpenDocument Format) in the next version of Lotus Notes.
Awesome! Document interchange needs to have better options than PDF and RTF! Compressed, XML, documented, hackable — what's not to like?
Subversion is a source code control system designed as a replacement for the Concurrent Version System (CVS). Subversion is platform-agnostic and has clients available on Windows, OS X and Linux and supports access locally via the file:// protocol or remotely via svn:// or svn+ssh:// protocols, WebDav via http:// or https://. Very cool. There's a free book also available in print from O'Reilly. In addition, there are a bunch of add-on tools or links to other tools, like:
There are even more links at the Wikipedia page. Er, check it out!
Subversion is a source code control system designed as a replacement for the Concurrent Version System (CVS). Subversion is platform-agnostic and has clients available on Windows, OS X and Linux and supports access locally via the file:// protocol or remotely via svn:// or svn+ssh:// protocols, WebDav via http:// or https://. Very cool. There’s a free book also available in print from O’Reilly. In addition, there are a bunch of add-on tools or links to other tools, like:
There are even more links at the Wikipedia page. Er, check it out!
On his home page, Chris Schmidt announces, “I’m going to be giving a lightning talk called ‘Geolocation with GSM Cells’ at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference, on June 14th, 2006.” Chris is a regular at GNHLUG’s Nashua and PySIG chapters.
Congratulations!
OSNews reports KDE to Become Better Supported on the Ubuntu Platform. “At LinuxTag on Saturday, a meeting of Kubuntu and KDE contributors was held in order to improve the collaboration of both projects. The aim was to to talk about the common future of both projects. Jonathan Riddell and Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical attended the meeting. Later in his keynote speech to the conference, Mark publicly committed to Kubuntu as an essential product for Canonical and showed his commitment by wearing a KDE t-shirt.”
Good deal. I’ve been using KDE with Ubuntu for the last couple of versions and I like its responsiveness, especially on some of the slower hardware (PII-266 and -366 laptops) I’m using.
Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley reports It Didn’t Take Long: Office Validation Program Goes Live. “Just days after announcing its plans to attempt to thwart Office piracy by using the same kind of validation mechanism it has instituted for Windows, Microsoft posted for download the first Office Genuine Advantage (OGA)validated component.”
I can’t think of a better way to get folks to look at the alternatives to Microsoft Office – Corel WordPerfect Office, IBM/Lotus SmartSuite, Sun StarOffice, OpenOffice.org, Apple’s iWork and AppleWorks, and other tools – than to treat them as criminal suspects and to prevent the “extended try-ware” rationalization we’ve all heard once or twice. People need to recognize that MS Office is no big deal and that there are a lot of other packages that can meet their needs with less hassle, less cost, less malware and perhaps even an open and standardized office data interchange format. There’s nothing to lose but the shackles!