In a new departure, the Open Source Initiative will hold a small open source license clinic oriented towards US Federal agencies. The event will be at the Library of Congress on May 9, 2013 starting at 9am. Places are limited and you’re encouraged to register now.
Filed under: Events, OSI | 1 Comment »
Lots of open source projects raise money from their user communities by soliciting donations. Most open source projects will have the 'Support' or 'Make a Donation' button on their home page or download page. At Eclipse we have had the Friend of Eclipse program for a number of years to solicit financial support for our community.
Earlier this year, we started looking for ways to increase the number of users making donations.
Filed under: Open Source | Tagged: Eclipse, Fundraising | Comments Off
Have you ever thought of migrating your company to an open source desktop productivity suite? You don’t switch just to save on license fees; think that way and the differences in the replacement package – which can never be a drop-in replacement – will kill your migration like they did Freiburg’s.
While the saving on Microsoft license costs seems like the biggest motivation, actually the most important outcome is changing everyone’s behaviour. Among the goals of this change are reducing the rate of change in the tools and file formats and thus making documents accessible for the longest time and ensuring that the features in use across your company’s ecosystem are as interoperable as possible. One simple but big win is to get people to stop distributing editable document versions of any format. open or not. Hybrid PDFs are the first step to freedom.
With that reduced rate of change and a cross-platform interoperability that allows use of Linux, Mac and Windows, flexibility is enhanced and you’re given much more control over your IT environment as a result. It’s important to invest rather than skimp on the migration; the cost savings come later as the flexibility takes effect
Achieving these outcomes can only happen with planning and purposefulness. Continuing their practice of creating resources and “letting the work do the talking” The Document Foundation issued a white paper explaining how to conduct a successful migration. I’ve read through it and summarised it for you in my InfoWorld column this week, along with a few tips of my own.
TDF naturally use LibreOffice as the open source suite to install, but other open source alternatives work just as well with the same ideas. Hopefully the paper will evolve as the community adds its experience – it’s a hybrid PDF after all, anyone can edit it and this would make a great focus for the cross-community collaboration some folk are calling for.
Filed under: LibreOffice | 1 Comment »
LibreOffice can connect natively to a WebDav server, apparently. Here’s another video in the same series as the ones I posted about CMIS connections, showing LibreOffice connecting to a WebDAV server (in this case running on a Raspberry Pi!). More of a swiss-army-knife of document access every day.
Filed under: LibreOffice | 4 Comments »
I’ve not tried a document management system before, but these videos of LibreOffice checking documents in & out of document management systems via the new CMIS interfaces added in LibreOffice 4.0 make it look really easy. I’d like to try a group collaboration using one of these systems.
This video shows how to do it with Alfresco:
This video of using the same featiure with Nuxeo shows it’s just as easy with any CMIS-enabled document management system:
I wonder if there’s any hope of public services like Google Drive or Dropbox or GitHub offering support for the CMIS standard?
Filed under: LibreOffice, Standards | Tagged: Alfresco | 3 Comments »
LibreOffice is built from a large legacy codebase that dates back over 20 years. It includes millions of lines of code, can be compiled for a wide range of platforms and incorporates the ideas from long-superseded approaches to programming. Meanwhile, the LibreOffice development community is diverse, international and distributed. Bringing together the immovable object with the irresistible force has resulted in all sorts of interesting innovation. Read about it in my InfoWorld column this week.
Filed under: InfoWorld, LibreOffice | 1 Comment »
The release of LibreOffice 4.0 continues the regular drumbeat of feature releases (coupled with maintaining a known-stable earlier version) that’s a signature strategy for The Document Foundation. While a lot of the long-term investment they’ve made has been in cleaning the code, speeding it up and making it more stable, there are also important features in the new release that improve LibreOffice’s enterprise value, such as CMS integration, MS Visio 2013 support and support for large spreadsheets and XML data import. Overall, the pressure on Microsoft to innovate remains high. Read more on InfoWorld.
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The free office suite the community has been dreaming of for twelve years
Berlin, February 7, 2013 - The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0, the free office suite the community has been dreaming of since 2001. LibreOffice 4.0 is the first release that reflects the objectives set by the community at the time of the announcement, in September 2010: a cleaner and leaner code base, an improved set of features, better interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem.
Filed under: LibreOffice | Comments Off
This video message from EU vice president Neelie Kroes includes a fantastic explanation of the benefits of open source for public administrations.
Filed under: Open Source | Comments Off
I was pleased yesterday to see the MariaDB community starting the process of creating a Foundation to host open collective governance for their community. I’ll be interviewing Monty on Monday in a live webcast at 5pm; watch my Google+ stream for the hangout. Meanwhile, I’ve written a short news item on InfoWorld about the Foundation.
Filed under: Governance, InfoWorld | Comments Off
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All views expressed on this blog are those of Simon Phipps and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other entity, including clients and former employers. See my full disclosure of interests.
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