Indian Opposition, *and* Indian Government

I wrote recently about the main opposition party in India getting behind open source; it seems that the Indian government has also seen the light:

E-mail system of the Prime Minister's Office was under the grip of a computer virus for three months last year forcing officials to replace the software.

The technical glitch plagued the e-mail communication system of the PMO, which was based on the Microsoft Outlook Express, from February to April in 2008.

Although the extent of damage was uncertain, the PMO said that most of the e-mails addressed to it were not received.

The problem was detected only in late April after which the Microsoft Outlook Express email software was discontinued and replaced by another software - Squirrel mail.

"Squirrel mail" is presumably the open source Squirrelmail: "Webmail for nuts". (Via The Reg.)

90% Open Source Lightning

Well, not exactly: Lightning, which comes from Mozilla, is a 100% open source calendar extension for Mozilla Thunderbird....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Has Thunderbird Finally Taken Off?

There's an interesting set of data on TechCrunch derived from the consolidated activity of users of the RescueTime service. This shows you exactly how long you are spending on each app; the aggregrate results therefore provide fascinating insights into what people in general - or at least RescueTime users - are doing

One caveat is that the service seems to be aimed mostly at Windows and Mac users (although a GNU/Linux version is available), and so results are necessarily skewed. Despite this, there's an amazing result amongst the data: the ninth most-used app is Thunderbird.

Now, its usage (2.26%) may only be around a sixth of Outlook's (12.44%) but that still seems to me to be astonishing. It also suggests that Thunderbird is doing rather better than many - myself included - assumed. The received wisdom is that Firefox is storming away (unfortunately, there's no breakdown by browser in the RescueTime set: things are shown by site, rather), Thunderbird is miles behind. That seems not to be the case if these figures are at all representative of the wider world. And even if they're not, it suggests early adopters are, well, adopting Thunderbird in significant numbers.

The Inventor of Email Uses...Thunderbird

Of course:

He uses Thunderbird, an e-mail application developed by Mozilla, the company which distributes the Firefox web browser, but he also has a Gmail account.

He said he once had to use Outlook – “I didn’t find it particularly attractive”, and that for a time he blocked all incoming messages from Hotmail, “because they used to carry a lot of viruses – though they’ve clamped down on that.”

(Via David Ascher.)

Interoperability: The New Battlefield

One word is starting to crop up again and again when it comes to Microsoft: interoperability - or rather the lack of it. It was all over the recent agreement with the EU, and it also lies at the heart of the OpenDocument Foundation's moves discussed below.

And now here we have some details of the next interoperability battles:

the EU Competition Commissioner’s office, with the first case decided by the EU Court of First Instance, now has started working intensively on the second case.

The new case involves three main aspects. First, Microsoft allegedly barred providers of other text document formats access to information that would them allow to make their products fully compatible with computers running on Microsoft’s operating systems. “You may have experienced that sometimes open office documents can be received by Microsoft users, sometimes not.”

Second, for email and collaboration software Microsoft also may have privileged their own products like Outlook with regard to interfacing with Microsoft’s Exchange servers. The third, and according to Vinje, most relevant to the Internet and work done at the IGF, was the problem of growing .NET-dependency for web applications. .NET is Microsoft’s platform for web applications software development. “It is a sort of an effort to ‘proprietise’ the Internet,” said Vinje.

That's a good summary of the problems, and suggests that the Commission is learning fast; let's hope that it doesn't get duped when it comes to remedies as it did the last time, apparently fooled by Microsoft's sleights of hand over patents and licences.

Will Lightning Strike OpenOffice.org?

I've written elsewhere about what I call the FOOGL concept - Firefox, OpenOffice.org and GNU/Linux. Basically, the idea is that once everyone is using Firefox and OpenOffice.org on Windows, it's much easier to slip them across to GNU/Linux, because nobody really cares about platforms if the apps are the same.

The only fly in the ointment in this argument is that you need a good email client. Thunderbird, I here you say: to which I reply, OK, but what about the calendaring? If you're going to replace Outlook, you need to match its basic functionality, and for businesses that means calendaring.

Enter Lightning, an add-in to Thunderbird that brings it up (down?) to Outlook's level. Here's an interesting interview with the Engineering Director at Sun Microsystems, Michael Bemmer, on this very subject. What's particularly significant is that it hints at a day when Lightning will be more closely integrated with OpenOffice.org too.

Now that would be seriously fooglicious.

Aunt Eudora Goes Open

For old-timers such as myself, the Eudora email client has connotations of pure Web 1.0-ness. During the 1990s it was more or less the definitive piece of Windows software for sending email if you didn't want to besmirch your name by using Outlook, once that existed. Times have changed, of course, and Thunderbird has now taken over that role.

So the announcement that future versions of Eudora will not only be open source but based on Thunderbird, seems to close the circle nicely. (Via LWN.net.)

Open Source's Big Blunder

It is easy to be fooled by the success of open source software. High-profile applications like Apache and Firefox are routinely cited for their absolute market dominance or relative technological superiority. GNU/Linux is going head-to-head with Microsoft Windows Server, while many are predicting that 2006 will be the year GNU/Linux on the desktop makes its breakthrough (just like 2005 and 2004). The bitter fight over the OpenDocument Format in Massachusetts is an indication that for the first time there is real rival to Microsoft's Office formats, and the Eclipse development platform continues to gain support among coders, corporate IT departments and software companies.

So what's missing from this rosy picture of free software's inexorable rise?

The one area that everyone seems to forget about is education. While it is true that GNU/Linux and open source applications are popular among the more tech-savvy users at university, younger students are exposed almost exclusively to Microsoft's products (except in a few enlightened regions of the world).

The failure of open source to devote significant energies and resources here is a serious problem. As Microsoft learned from Apple, whose initial rise was largely thanks to the widespread use of the Apple ][ in education, if you get them young, you get to keep them (most of them, at least). It is all very well trying to put open source solutions on the desktop, but if the people coming through the educational system have been conditioned to use only Microsoft's products, they will resist any moves to force them to touch anything else. The users become Microsoft's fiercest advocates.

The corollary is that broadening the use of free software in schools will automatically lead to increased use in the home and business markets. Indeed, there is a double benefit if schools routinely deploy programs like Firefox, OpenOffice and GNU/Linux. It ensures that tomorrow's consumers, workers and leaders will be completely comfortable using them, and encourages today's parents to find out more about the software that their children are using at school. One of the huge advantages that open source software enjoys over proprietary applications is that parents can make free copies of a school's software, rather than "borrowing" office copies, say, of Microsoft's products.

Against this background, it is heartening that the UK government body BECTA is carrying out a review of the licensing programme it signed with Microsoft in 2003. Significantly, the report will examine the risks of "lock-in" to Microsoft's products, and "focus on ways to improve access to alternatives to Microsoft products to ensure that there is a freedom of choice". This review therefore takes place in a very different context from the one in which BECTA negotiated its previous deal. In 2003 there was no question about changing supplier - it was taken for granted that Microsoft was the solution: the question was the price reductions that could be won from the company.

As I've noted elsewhere, Microsoft is very adept at bowing to "pressure"” and making "sacrifices" during negotiations. In this case, BECTA could proudly announce that its 2003 deal would save the UK taxpayer £46 million. But for this sum, Microsoft not only retained it grip on the British educational system, but had that stranglehold more or less enshrined in official policy.

It remains to be seen what BECTA comes up with, but its two previous reports in this area, on the use of open source software in schools, and on the possible cost savings of doing so, were notable for their intelligence and even-handedness. This gives some hope that open source may at last be given the opportunity to prove its worth in the British schools.

Helpfully, BECTA has said of its work that "“recognising the increasing relevance of this issue to educators in the EU and indeed globally, an international exchange of views will be facilitated."” This "exchange of views" might provide those living in other areas where there is no significant use of free software in schools with a good opportunity to push for similar reviews in their own countries.

One thing seems certain: if something is not done soon, an entire generation will grow up around the globe that equates the Web with Internet Explorer, email with Outlook, productivity software with Office and computers with Windows. In such a world, open source will at best be marginal, and at worst, irrelevant.