FOOGL (Firefox, OpenOffice.org, GNU/Linux) Usability

First, we had the hugely-important, but horribly-named "Economic impact of FLOSS on innovation and competitiveness of the EU ICT sector" report, and now we have the equally horribly-named tOSSad F/OSS Usability report.

Since this is actually about Firefox, OpenOffice.org and GNU/Linux, they should, of course, have called it the FOOGL Usability Report. Despite this monumental gaffe, it does include some very useful information about usability, traditionally viewed as free software's Achilles Heel:

The survey showed that the majority of respondents agree that all three products have sufficient number of features and are user-friendly in general. Among the positive features of Firefox and OpenOffice.org are their user-friendly graphical interfaces. These include menus with clear definitions and abbreviations, and logical navigation of the main and context menus. OpenOffice.org and Firefox was also considered to have a sufficient set of features and are easy to install.

Regarding GNU/Linux, the survey results show that in average there is a positive opinion among the survey respondents in terms of installation, information presentation, navigation and the overall impression from the operating system. Therefore it can be concluded that the more experience users have with GNU/Linux, the more positive is their opinion of it.

However, respondents also mentioned gaps in the usability area of these products. For some users, one of the GNU/Linux’s disadvantages is the difficulty of installation of hardware and the learning curve needed in the process of migration from the MS Windows interface. OpenOffice.org also has some issues with insufficient performance compared to MS Office, according to the respondents.

Apart from sole usability aspects, the survey discovered that there is a need for more information about which F/OSS programs represent alternatives to their commercial counterparts. The survey also showed that no charge and the GNU General Public License (GPL) remain the main reasons for switching to F/OSS products.

(Via Erwin Tenhumberg.)

A Climate of Desperation

Of course, the situation is serious, but at least we're not as desperate as this lot:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

What a good idea: Rent-a-Scientist. (Via Digg.)

A Million Penguins: Novel or Not?

Well, it had to happen:

So is the novel immune from being swept up into the fashion for collaborative activity? Well, this is what we are going to try and discover with A Million Penguins, a collaborative, wiki-based creative writing exercise. We should go into this with the best spirit of scientific endeavour - the experiment is going live, the lab is under construction, the subjects are out there. And the results? We’ll see in a couple of months.

At least they chose a good title.

Of Philip Rosedale, God and Darwinism

Here's an entertaining piece of a biotech writer grappling with and finally grokking Second Life via biological metaphors:

I’m trying to wrap my barely evolved first-life brain around the idea of a virtual organism where I (or, more accurately, my imagination) am a gene (a bundle of code) and where my “second me” was brought to life by Philip Rosedale, who then cast me off to fend for myself, although within a system of rules he launched when the world began. These rules themselves are evolving. For instance, what is to be done about evil? Should people be allowed to hurt and kill others? Rosedale seems to be a benign God, with a baby face and an easy smile in his first life as a human. But can we be sure about this?

Linux Guitar Project

Community effort to design and construct an extremely functional electric guitar powered by Linux.

Great; er, exactly how will it be powered by GNU/Linux?

Scooped on the Chief Lizard Wrangler

There's a great feature in Inc. about Firefox and its boss, the self-styled Chief Lizard Wrangler, Mitchell Baker, whom I interviewed for Rebel Code many moons ago.

Unfortunately, I can't say I really enjoyed it: I was an email away from writing something similar myself....

Radio Spectrum More Valuable Than Oil?

Hm, now here's a thought:

Martin Sims, of the UK organisation Policy Tracker, asked the regulators and ministers in attendance to ponder if radio spectrum is as important for economic growth in the 21st century, as oil was in the 20th century.

Does that mean soon we'll have wars fought over wavelengths? And what are the implications for the open spectrum movement? (Via openspectrum.info.)

Getting Snappy About Snap

Here's someone who hates the Snap pop-up preview feature, as used on this blog. If it weren't easy to turn off (just click on Options and choose Bubble Opt Out), I'd agree, but given that it's effectively optional, is it a problem?

Views, anyone?

Today's Bio-hacker Heroine, Tomorrow's Hope

There are so many threads here:

What could be a life-saving breakthrough in the fight against cystic fibrosis, cancer and AIDS has been achieved by a 17-year-old Indian-American student at the Mississippi Institute of Mathematics and Science.

...

the young scientist turned to Ayurvedic medicine. Madhavi, who was born in India, spent a great deal of time watching her grandparents, who were practitioners of the traditional Indian healing techniques. "I grew up learning a lot of that," she recalls. "They've used it so much that I know it has some effect. They wouldn't have used it for centuries if it didn't. So I decided to try that approach, and it worked."

...

While Madhavi could become a millionaire by patenting her work, she has something else in mind: making it openly available. She points out, "If I were going to patent this, the rights would have to be sold to a pharmaceutical company, and that would greatly increase the cost of the drug once it's developed. So to prevent that from happening, by publishing it, the information becomes readily available and any company that wants to manufacture it, would be able to. So the price would be much lower due to competition and the people who need it most will have access to it."

There is the young bio-hacker, blissfully unaware that what she is doing is hard; there is the ancient medical commons, used, not plundered; there is an understanding that patents, that should open knowledge, often lock it up; and above all, there is a compassion and altruism that gives us hope for the future.
(Via Technocrat.)

WTF is WTF?

Dave Sifry has always been one of the do-ers in the world of computing. And as someone who has been at the heart of open source for over a decade, he can be counted on to be plugged into hot trends.

His latest wheeze, Where's The Fire? or WTF? - a play on the acronym WTF? - ought, by rights, to be really sizzling, and not just because of it's name:

On January 31, 2007 Technorati released a new feature to help people to get explanations on things they see popping up in the blogosphere.

...

You can also write a WTF on any topic that someone would search for, and provide information and resources to them about that topic or subject. So, you might want to write a WTF about yourself or your friends names, or your company (or maybe even your competition!)

If you think that you've got a better explanation than the one that shows up on top of Technorati search results for a term, no worries, just go and write your own, and get your friends to vote for it. WTF uses a special time weighted voting system that means that the most popular recent WTFs will show up on top of the page.

As this indicates, WTF? hopes to tap into the power of both Digg and Wikipedia: user-generated, explanatory content that is voted up or down by peer review. At the moment there's not much there, and it seems to me that there's a crucial piece missing from the WTF idea.

The "blurb", as the basic unit of WTF is called, resides on Technorati's servers, not the blurber's: this means that blurb authors receive no compensation other than "glory". Unless there is some Technorati-juice being dispensed in the form of built-in links to the blurber's blog (and not just ones added gratuitously), I fear that most of the better bloggers will just say: "WTF?".

Second Life in a Box: OpenSim

The recent opening up of the Second Life Viewer code was big news, but the thing that everyone is waiting for is for the server-side stuff. Well, that may be a while off - see my interview with Cory Ondrejka for some more background on this. Meanwhile, though, the libsecondlife group has taken under its wing the OpenSim project, which as the home page puts it laconically:

OpenSim is a project to develop an Open Source Simulator.

This is great news, because it means that people can start developing other Second Life-like virtual worlds, completely independently of Linden Lab. It will also mean that people can start to explore some of the thorny issues of multiple, compatible virtual worlds now.

Conservation Commons

A little while back I was urging you to sign a petition calling for open access in the European Union (you did sign, didn't you?). Now here's another worthy cause, asking for open access to environmental information - the ultimate, double commons:

Principles of the Conservation Commons

Open Access: The Conservation Commons promotes free and open access to data, information and knowledge for all conservation purposes.

Mutual Benefit: The Conservation Commons welcomes and encourages participants to both use these resources and to contribute data, information and knowledge.

Rights and Responsibilities: Contributors to the Conservation Commons have full right to attribution for any uses of their data, information, or knowledge, and the right to ensure that the original integrity of their contribution to the Commons is preserved. Users of the Conservation Commons are expected to comply, in good faith, with terms of uses specified by contributors.

You can sign up online. See you there. (Via Open Access News.)

iHavenosenseofhumour

Catch it while you can.

All That Jazz

This looks an interesting project:

The Jazz research project seeks to extend the Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org) software development environment with collaborative capabilities to support coordination, communication, and awareness among a small close-knit team of developers. This involves creating connections to server infrastructure for messaging, awareness, and source control, building hooks into the Eclipse development environment to supply awareness of the developers' interactions with source code and source control, and integrating user interfaces for communication and awareness within the Eclipse environment to provide unobtrusive access to in-context team information.

Let's hope that this Jazz does better than the earlier one from Lotus (which was bought by IBM):

Lotus Jazz was an office productivity suite for the Apple Macintosh, released in 1985 for $595, after the substantial success of Lotus 1-2-3 for the PC. It was a commercial failure due to its low quality and aggressive competition.

Ah yes, I remember it well....

Steve Ballmer on Open Source

I am always amused - and slightly annoyed - that so much space is devoted to the wit and wisdom of Steve Ballmer, because basically he has none. That is, his words are pure marketing-speak, full of the right phrases, but signifying nothing. But at least in this FT interview, there's some interesting information about how Microsoft understands the open source challenge:

The biggest competitive challenges that any business faces is actually alternate business models. It is not a company. If you tell me somebody wants to come compete with us and do software in an area where we compete, or that we are going to get in a new area and it’s the same business model, it’s selling software, I know we can do it.

When somebody comes with a different business model, that’s where you get… or a phenomenon comes with a different business model.

What was the number one different business model that our company has confronted in the last six years? It’s Open Source. Open Source is not a technology phenomenon; it is a business model phenomenon. Frankly speaking, exactly what that business model is, is still unclear.

But that is a different business model and we had to ask ourselves: What do we do to compete? And we wound up saying it’s all about value and total cost of ownership, and high performance computing is a good example. It’s about 30 per cent of Linux share, and we are saying: Hey look, this is actually an area where we can take a lot of share with the right innovation, and the right total cost of ownership.

We shall see, Steve.

O Brave New World

It's not every day that a new continent is announced.

Anyone for Open Source TreeCAD?

Just when you think there can't be any areas left uncolonised by free software, you discover treeCAD. (Via MMORPG.)

Not so Corny for the Mexicans

By embracing the NAFTA treaty, Mexico surrendered its corn output to the vagaries of the North American corn market. Now, all of a sudden, Americans want corn, lots of it. As part of a dubious strategy to make “cleaner” gasoline while rewarding Big Agriculture and farm states, the U.S. Government is shoveling huge subsidies to corn-based ethanol production. This new demand has bid up prices in the U.S. and caused acute corn shortages in Mexico, which in turn has tripled and quadrupled the price of tortillas.

Which just goes to show that "free" trade is neither free as in freedom nor free as in beer.

British Library Closes Down Knowledge

As I feared, the close relationship between the British Library and Microsoft has led the former to start producing online exhibits locked into the latter's proprietary products:

Turning the Pages 2.0™ allows you to 'virtually' turn the pages of our most precious books. You can magnify details, read or listen to expert commentary on each page, and store or share your own notes.

Turning the Pages 2.0™ runs with Internet Explorer on Windows Vista or Windows XP SP2 with .NET Framework version 3, on a broadband connection. We have detected that you do not have the necessary software. You may also need to check that your hardware meets the 'Vista Premium Ready' specification.

So instead of opening up access to knowledge, the British Library is now foisting Microsoft's closed source on its visitors. A sad day for a once-great institution. (Via The Reg.)

Peugeot Drives Off with 20K SuSE Desktops

Well, strictly speaking, it's "up to" 20K:

PSA Peugeot Citroën, the second-largest automobile manufacturer in Europe, and Novell just signed a multiyear contract allowing the deployment of up to 20,000 Linux desktops plus 2,500 Linux servers from Novell.

Still, a good win for SuSE - and for open source.

Of course, that pre-supposes there's no massive oily patch on the road ahead for the Microsoft-Novell "mixed-source" juggernaut.... (Via Open Sources.)

Barely Born, Vista Gets a Second Life

Well, I suppose this was inevitable; call it the Clash of Hypes: Microsoft Vista is being launched at ten locations in Second Life. And nothing wrong with that - although intriguingly, as Kitten Lulu points out:

4 out of 9 are places where you can find sex escorts, and there is also the Isle of Lesbos that is somewhat sex-related.
I guess they want to convey the idea that Windows Vista is sexy… but not free.

Me, I just feel sorry for the bloke "coolz0r", whose MS implant seems to be overheating with all the excitement:

What they have done is beyond all imagination.

Yikes! (Via 3pointD.com.)

MySQL's IPO: Hot News - or Maybe Not

Amazing news - MySQL is planning to go public:

after years of rumo(u)r the company is finally preparing to go public, joining a select group of open source vendors that have made it to the publicly traded markets.

Or maybe not quite so amazing, since Marten Mickos had already told me this last July during an interview for Linux Journal (page 74, January Issue, if you're interested, published in December 2006):

We're aiming for an IPO. We're actually aiming for an independent existence and to do that you need to do an IPO, but the IPO is not the aim, the IPO is just a step. People say: What is your exit plan? and we say that we're not going to exit.

Go to Jail; Do Not Pass Go

At a time when this is happening:

The jail system is in "serious crisis" with overcrowding affecting rehabilitation of offenders, the chief inspector of prisons has warned.

Anne Owers said some jails have become "riskier places to manage" because of the overcrowding problem.

Do we really need this?

The European Parliament's committee for legal affairs meets today to vote on proposals for criminal penalties to be imposed on those who infringe intellectual property (IP) rights.

The vote today will determine whether or not a person who downloads a single unlicensed track of music could be sent to jail.

Think about it - because you can bet that most of the politicians won't....

Behind and Beyond Halloween

The publication of the first Halloween memo in 1998 was a pivotal moment in the history of free software. For the first time, it was clear that internally Microsoft was worried by this new threat, despite its outward-facing bravado and rhetoric.

Of course, there was no confirmation from the company that the memo was genuine, so there was always a theoretical possibility that they were faked in some way, although the internal evidence seemed overwhelming. But now, Groklaw reports, we have official proof of their genuine nature. The posting also offers an interesting meditation on how all this feeds into Microsoft's current attempts to "go legit" with the ECMA standardisation of its Office XML formats.

Not Drowning but Waving

Here's a clever idea, a Web site called goodbye-microsoft.com that doesn't just encourage you to install Debian alongside Windows on a dual-boot system, but actually does it for you, directly from the site, using your browser running on Windows as its starting point.

Wave good-bye as you go. (Via Linux and Open Source Blog.)