There are many ‘sharing’ plugins for WordPress to help readers submit posts to Twitter, Delicious and other similar sites. I was looking for a plugin that I could change the icons on and add larger ones for the LottyBox blog so the submit links would be nice and clear. The links below show what I found specifically the Socialable plugin and the large Social me icons.  I was also helped by some handy CSS for adding larger icons.

• Top 20 Social Bookmaking Plugins for WordPress – Share your Posts : Speckyboy Design Magazine
  Top 20 Social Bookmaking Plugins for WordPress – Share your Posts.
  (tags: wordpress plugins social plugin bookmark socialbookmarking design webdesign)
• Social.me by ~jwloh on deviantART
  Excellent Social Media Site icons. Perfect for social bookmarkinging links like Sociable for WordPress
  (tags: icons webdesign free icon social socialmedia web2.0 images)
• Jazzing Up Yoast’s Sociable WordPress Plugin to Spur More Sharing — Webstractions Web Development
  Css Code that will allow you to use larger icons for the Sociable WordPress plugin
  (tags: webdesign wordpress plugin css socialmedia socialnetworking)
• BlogPlay.com | The New Home of Sociable
  Sociable is a wordpress plugin that allows you to add a sharing link to different Social Media Sites (Twitter, Facebook etc) to the bottom of your blog posts.
  (tags: wordpress plugin social plugins web webdesign blog socialbookmarking socialmedia web2.0)
• 30 Amazingly Creative Social Bookmarks Icon Sets : Speckyboy Design Magazine
  This article is a list of the best and most creative Social Bookmark Icon Sets for your web sites or blogs.
  (tags: icons webdesign social icon design web2.0 socialmedia socialnetworking)

I am always interested in reading information and advise on business blogging and I came across this book on scribd which I thought was quite good (below).

For people wanting more in depth and technical information (and want to use WordPress) I can really recommend WordPress for Business Bloggers by Paul Thewlis.

Blogging for Business

I am currently building and ecommerce site for my wife’s business using the open source ecommerce software Magento. Magento has got  a lot of good press since its launch and has won many awards and is very well thought of. There is no doubt that Magento is very funtional and flexible, Google and Paypal integration is particulary good. Essentially Magento is a Content Magento System but as user friendly as WordPress it is not. Like most great open source projects there is normally an answer to most issues on the web (via google) and below are a few links that have helped me a long the way. As I have still not completed my site no doubt there will be more links to come.

• Magento – How to add Products to your home page
  (tags: magento ecommerce tutorial products)
• Magento Connect – Blank Theme – Overview – eCommerce Software for Growth
  this is a sample skeleton theme for Magento designers.
  (tags: magento theme blank templates opensource)
• Magento Connect – Linen Stretch Theme – Overview – eCommerce Software for Growth
  Simple and clean (and free) Magento theme.
  (tags: magento themes opesource ecommerce)
• How to Import Products into Magento | ChaseSagum.com
  There’s a little confusion among some on how to import products into a Magento ecommerce store. I spent some time today researching and trying to find the best method on doing this. The reason for my research is because there was no simple documentation anywhere that I could find on how to import products. Magento actually has built a pretty robust import/export mechanism into the ecommerce cms that has a ton of flexibility to do many things. I’m not going to cover all of those. This is just for those of you who simply just want to import products into their Magento cart.
  (tags: magento import ecommerce howto cms products opensource)
• Magento – Home – eCommerce Software for Growth
  Open Source e-commerse software. Magento has excellent functionality and lots of potential especially with its Magento Connect extension system allowing additional functionality to be added through plugins.
  (tags: ecommerce opensource php cms e-commerce shopping business software)
• Magento Connect – Royal Mail Domestic and International Shipping – Reviews
  Plugin to add a Royal Mail shipping options to Magento the opensource ecommerce solution.
  (tags: magento royalmail extension opensource)
• Magento – Screencasts – Working with Paypal -
  Video of setting up Magento with PayPal
  (tags: magento paypal ecommerce opensource)
• Magento – Wiki – Moving Magento To Another Server
  The following article will outline the steps and commands involved to successfully transfer Magento from one server to another. This article assumes you have a basic understanding of SSH, and that you have SSH access on both servers.
  (tags: magento migration server tutorial howto backup moving)

• Draw
  DRAW – from a quick sketch to a complex plan, DRAW gives you the tools to communicate with graphics and diagrams. With a maximum page size of 300cm by 300cm, DRAW is powerful tool for technical or general posters, etc. Cross platform support Linux, Windows and Mac
  (tags: software opensource openoffice draw visio diagrams)
• The KOffice Project – Kivio
  Kivio is an easy to use diagramming and flowcharting application with tight integration to the other KOffice applications. It enables you to create network diagrams, organisation charts, flowcharts and more. Kivio is designed for Linux and the KDE desktop.
  (tags: linux software opensource tools visio)

With the release of Service Pack 2 for Microsft Office yesterday providing support for OpenDocument formats (see details here) a few links about ODF

• OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC
  Fomats and specifications for the OpenDocument format (ODF)
  (tags: opensource openoffice odf opendocument specification standards)
• Download details: The 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 2 (SP2)
  Download of Microsoft Office 2007 that includes support for OpenDocument format (ODF)
  (tags: odf microsoft office opendocument office2007 sp2)
• OpenDocument Format support in Microsoft Office is here | The Outserve Limited Blog
  Blog post on Microsoft Office 2007 OpenDocument support in Service Pack 2.
  (tags: odf microsoft office opendocument)
• OpenDocument software – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  List of office software that supports Open Document Format
  (tags: software odf opendocument)

I have been meaning to write a post for the new StaffsLug (Staffordshire Linux User Group) website for sometime. I had intended. for my first post. to write a bit on the UK Governments ‘Open Source, Open Standards and re-use Action plan‘ but this will have to come later. As this week saw the release of the latest version of the ever popular Ubuntu 9.04 I thought it important that the Staffslug website had a post, so I wrote the post below which can be found on the site itself here.

This week saw 100′s of release parties for arrival of the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. Code named Jaunty Jackalope Ubuntu 9.04 (9 for 2009 and 04 for April) has arrived on time based on Canonical’s 6 monthly release cycle. Ubuntu 9.04 is not an LTS (Long Term Support) edition so will get 18 months of free updates (LTS receive 2 years free updates and are generally thought to be more stable). As ever, work has already started on the next version 9.10 code named Karmic Koala with the next LTS version being 10.04 to be released in April 2010.

9.04 Ubuntu does not contain any radical changes, as is often the way with a 6 monthly cycle, but does finally include OpenOffice.org 3.0 and also promises faster boot time. Other improvements come from updates to Gnome (the default Ubuntu desktop) and application updates like Evolution (Ubuntu’s  Outlook equivalent) which now comes with exchange server compatibility.

As well as the Gnome Desktop default 9.04 there is also Kubuntu 9.04 with KDE desktop,  Xubuntu 9.04 with XFCE desktop, Ubuntu Server Edition 9.04 with no graphical user interface and the new Ubuntu Netbook remix 9.04 designed for netbooks like the Asus eee’s and the Acer Aspires.

Some time back I wrote a short blog post on the (publicly available) open source position of the main political parties in the UK. At the time the Conservative party came out as having a very positive approach towards open source.

As covered on the Mercian Labels blog George Osbourne the Shadow Chancellor has taken this one step further by asking Dr Mark Thompson to develop independent recommendations to provide a better deal for taxpayers. The summarised results were as follows:

• The Government could save at least £600 million per year if it adopted a more effective open IT procurement process. The open source savings would come not just from reduced licensing costs, but importantly by freeing government bodies from long-term, monopoly supply situations.
• New government data standards should be introduced across government, creating a level playing-field for open source software.
• These new standards would enable large-scale IT projects to be split into small modular components, meaning that the UK government should never again need to sign an IT software contract worth over £100 million – so no more
  IT ‘white elephants’.

link to the original article

A possible reference there to projects like the NHS records Project with a predicted £12 billion spend, and being 4 years late, still looks like showing very little tangible benefit.

Meanwhile across in the United States, in his first couple of weeks of Government, Barack Obama has just asked Scott McNealy the CEO of Sun Microsystems for a paper on how open source can improve security and be cost-effective for USA government.

At the same time there is a petition on the Number10 government website to ask “That bodies in receipt of public money be mandated to evaluate open source alternatives before the purchase of commercial software”. From the petition details – “This could potentially save large sums of money at a time when the demands upon tax revenues are significantly increased”. Outserve is encouraging people who would like the Government to have a policy to look at open source to sign the petition online.
Petition link http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Open-Source/

If Open Source Business Software for SME’s is currently a niche market then Open Source Accounting Software must be a super-niche market. Although uptake of Open Source Accounting Software is small (especially compared to a Sage or a Quickbooks) there may be many more businesses and organisations who could take advantage of solution that are available if there was a greater awareness the software and its possible benefits.

To try and explain the current market for accounting software and some of the possible benefits of open source I have drafted a white paper. Producing this white paper for download has also given me the opportunity to try out a few different ways to make a document available.

The document embedded below is using edocr, flickr for documents which is a start up from a team including Manoj Ranaweera. Manoj also kindly submitted the edocr link to Digg and to Stumpleupon.

As well as hosting and embedding the document on sites like edocr and scribd I have also made it available for download on the Outserve website where we are using the Docman an open source component for Joomla. Docman is a great Joomla component for managing downloads (and uploads) which has good functionality and even downloadable themes. If you want to require signup/login to get access to a download then docman combines with the standard Joomla site registration to give access control although may not be the slickest solution.

If the format is useful then I intend to write other white papers on other areas that I think require further investigation and explaination

There was much excitement around the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 last month. Download servers were overloaded with the initial demand and many tech blog posts were written. But now the dust has settled it is a great time to look at some of the reasons that this version of the ever popular open source office suite could offer serious competition to its proprietary equivalents.

10 reasons to (possibly) stop using Microsoft Office and start using OpenOffice.org

1. Its Good Enough.

The latest release OpenOffice.org 3.0 provides enough functionality from an office suite for probably 95% of the computer users in the world. Most people’s use of Word Processors and Spreadsheets are not pushing the functionality now available. For the 5% or less of ‘power-users’ a closer look is required to understand the differences and how these can be overcome. Often if there is a specific issue someone else has also had this problem and very probably found a solution, as often is the open source way.

2. Familiar Consistent Interface

In the last 15 years most office suites have settled on a pretty familiar interface with consistent layout and descriptions, With the release of Office 2007 Microsoft have completely changed the interface of some but not all of its office products. OpenOffice.org uses a very familiar ‘classic’ interface which would be recognisable to most users allowing them o be up and running very quickly.

3. You Can Redistribute

Being able to redistribute copies of OpenOffice.org for free is incredibly useful especially if you are an organisation. For example a school could give copies to all students and parents and  a company could give all employees and partners a copy. Currently parents are feeling pressure to purchase copies of Microsoft Office as their children are using it at school or worse still are pirating it.

4. Extensions

Just as Firefox, the very popular open source browser, there is a full ecosystem around OpenOffice.org including extensions. These are where someone has added a particular piece of functionality that they wanted. These extensions can be downloaded from http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/ and easily installed. There are many extensions available but currently some noteable and popular extensions are ‘Writer Tools‘ adding some useful functionality for Word Processor users and Google Docs integration allowing you to automatically transfer documents to Googles on line office suite.

5. Open Formats

The default format for OpenOffice.org is ODF (OpenDocument Format) each program has its own ODF format Writer has .odt. Calc has .ods etc. With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 Microsoft’s own office suite will support ODF. This means that an OpenOffice.org user will be able to exchange documents, edits and updates with a Microsoft Office user all using an open standard format, this really is a great step forward. Of course there are many other products that support ODF, not just the two mentioned, from web applications such as Google Docs and Zoho to office suites including IBM Lotus Symphony and WordPerfect Office. Until Microsoft catches up OpenOffice.org can not only read and write .doc and .xls but can also read the new Microsoft 2007 format .docx and .xlsx. I have spoken about open formats before but suffice to say sharing and preserving documents in an open format has many benefits for individuals and organisations.

6. PDF support

OpenOffice.org has been ahead of Microsoft Office with regard to PDF’s for a long time making it easy to produce documents in a PDF format since early versions. Now there is an official extension which allows you to open and edit basic PDF documents within OpenOffice.org.

7. More Software

There is only one edition of Openoffice.org the ‘all of it’ edition. There are more programs with OpenOffice.org when compared to the Home and Student Edition of Microosft Office. OpenOffice.org includes a Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation program, Vector Graphics program and a Maths calculation program.

8. Cross Platform

For the first time with version 3.0 OpenOffice.org now runs natively on Apple Macs (OSX) both for intel processors and the older PowerPC processors (strangely the PowerPC version is not available from the main download page but is available from other places on the web like http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/3.0.0rc4/ where you can download RC4 which is the final released version). It has long been the office suite of choice for most Linux versions and of course has a full Windows version. Added to this support for BSD and Opensolaris it really is true cross platform application. Having a fimiliar inteface across platforms using Open Formats has many advantages but ultimately offers flexibility. For example you may have to use Microsoft Windows at work but use a Mac at home and want to share a document with a family member who runs a new netbook running Linux, all this is easily achievable if all pc’s are running OpenOffice.org.

9. If you already run Microsoft Office (or another office suite) there is nothing stopping you installing OpenOffice as well.

You can run more than one office suite. Using OpenOffice.org does not have to be an all or nothing situation and can be introduced gradually.

10. Its Free

OK, I deliberately put this point last as I believe it is not the reason to use OpenOffice.org. All of the 9 points above are more important than it being free. If OpenOffice.org is not fit for your purpose then I would not recommend using it and would say have a look around for some thing else.

Ultimately it will come downs to an individuals or organisations circumstances as to whether they could switch to OpenOffice.org. In the case of new businesses I would like to think they would choose to use OpenOffice.org before paying for a proprietary equivalent. Hopefully what version 3.0 does show is that OpenOffice.org has a bright future. Already we are seeing support for OpenOffice.org and open formats by enterprises and exciting projects like QuasiWiki, ODF@WWW and O3Spaces which use OpenOffice.org to help collaborative working.

The future is bright, the future is OO.o (well for me at least).

I am giving a short workshop at the upcoming IAAITC’s Business Continuity and Risk Management Summit where I will be talking about open source security software. As I have only got a short time and I think it is quite topical I will be basing the workshop on open source encryption software. It appears that not a week goes by without a story in the newspaper about a laptop/hard drive/CD/USB stick containing sensitive and confidential data being lost or left in a train/taxi/car park. Events like this are inevitable as data becomes more and more portable. Of course we should continually work towards minimising these situations but one of the best practical steps a practice can take to protect data is to ensure that any ‘at risk’ confidential information is encrypted. The latest saw a USB RAM stick of confidential Government information found in a car park in Cannock, Staffordshire. Link to the news story here.

It was noted that the USB was encrypted so at least that was something but as detailed below many of the ‘proprietary’ encryption systems on USB sticks have been compromised.

At this stage it is worth defining what encryption is:

‘Encryption is the process of transforming information using an algorithm called a cipher. Once data has been encrypted then it can only be read by users who have the encryption key.’

Using software to encrypt data has been used for a long time by governments and large organisations. Today it is becoming common place, often being found on the better quality USB RAM sticks. The problem with a lot of the software supplied with such devices is that it is often ‘proprietary’ meaning that the source code of the software is in itself a secret. At first this may appear to be the best approach, after all does the code being a secret not make the solution more secure?

What has actually been proven time and time again is that security through obscurity is no security. Good security software’s source code should be available for all to see to ensure that it is secure. The science of encryption is well documented and any software implementation should be made available for checking. Many of the proprietary systems have been compromised by attacks and often it is a case of ‘when’ not ‘if’ they will be compromised.

Truecrypt (www.truecrypt.org) is one of the best known and well trusted encryption software programs available today. Truecrypt, as recommended above, is free and open source, meaning that anybody can see the source code. Truecrypt will work on Windows, Apple Mac and Linux operating systems and can be setup to encrypt a whole drive, a single folder or a portable device like a USB Flash RAM stick.

The one possible downside of Truecrypt is that it requires a client install to read a an external drive like a USB or portable drive. If it is required to be able to use a portable devise on a machine that would not have Truecrypt installed then for Windows users there is FreeOTFE (www.freeotfe.org) which is free and open source encryption software that can also be installed on a USB stick and does not require a client install. FreeOTFE can also be used on a Microsoft PDA.

As well as other open source security software the latest version of Linux Ubuntu 8.10 comes with encryption built in making it even easier to keep you laptop data secure.

October 15th 2008 is Blog Action Day. The idea is is to raise awareness of world poverty through blogging, which think is a fantastic idea. I think we are still trying to understand the power of blogging and every year the blogging world changes so radically that I think we need to constantly re-assess its effect. It will be really interesting to see the stats after the event and see what the impact is.

Anyway the point is to blog about poverty not about blogging. The guidelines are that the post should be relevant to yourself or your interests and fit in with the style of your blog so, probably, predictably I am going to blog about how I think open source software can help poverty throughout the world from Africa to Accrington. I am certainly not the only person who is taking the topic of open source as the subject of their Blog Action Day post which encourages me that there are plenty of other people who think the same way as me. I have also not tried to read these posts yet as they would be far better written than mine and would no doubt influence me so I have tagged them and will read them later.

The use of technology can only help even the poorest of nations. All our efforts should be to help these nations grow economically and become self sustaining so that they are less reliant on outside help. Technology can help any economy grow (and has, see India, China, UK etc) especially as it can remove physical barriers such as location. The internet especially is a great leveller as it allows anyone with an internet connection and the skills to compete whether you are in San Francisco or Saigon (sorry Ho Chi Minh City). Skills are the important requirement and that can only come from education and facilities for the young (and old) to learn (I am not dismissing the importance of broadband availability but that should probably be the topic of another post).

Now this was basically the aims of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project and the fallout from the once Open Source project being ‘bought’ by Microsoft can be seen all over the internet. Now I do not want to fall into Microsoft bashing here and I quite understand that a poorer nation is not going to thumb their nose at Microsoft and Bill Gates support but I think in the long term it is the wrong decision. The path that emerging nations take now can fix their decisions for a long time to come.

The advantages of open source software to emerging nations.

1. Open Source is free (OK free as in freedom not free as in beer), that means that they are free from license costs and that means free today, free tomorrow and free forever. Now proprietary companies may offer free versions, reduced cost versions or may even pay for them to use the software. But why are they really doing this and what are their longer term aims, who knows? I don’t and probably neither does the country who accepts such a deal. It maybe an extreme analogy but just like the crack dealer the first couple of shots are always free as that is all it takes. We see this in our country where office products are supplied to schools and universities at a fraction of their normal cost but this ensures the perception that these are the only products that the emerging students could ever use. What ever happened to teaching transferable skills? When did schools become an exercise in proprietary products? (I think the answer to that is 1995).

2. Freedom – real freedom in so many ways. To be able to share any of the software with anyone so they can teach others and learn from others without any fear of license restrictions and recrimination.

3. Education. There are two sides to education, of course all people can learn to use the software but because the source code is available people can learn from the programs code. OK this is small percentage of people who can be so technical but to an emerging economy these people are crucial. These are the people who through technology can help, with lots of other people with other skills, to bring prosperity to a nation. At a key point in a nations growth we should not be putting up barriers to learning.

4. Another important education point is training material. Ubuntu for example has teacher and student training documentation fully available and many other open source projects have excellent freely available training documentation. What a lot of this material requires is translation to other languages and this is why open source can be so strong. We have seen that a large open source community will create translations both of the softwares language, localisation and of the documentation. Information and documentation can be released under Creative Commons licenses continuing the open source methodology through the documentation.

5. As much as these points relate to say an African nation or other poorer countries they also apply in affluent societies like our own, in the UK. I believe, like many, that every household should have a computer and a broadband internet connection. In the UK the majority of homes can have this both logistically and financially. Where there are poorer homes there are various schemes to assist but there is an excess of second hand hardware available which could run free and open source software. These can provide education software and office suites plus much much more. But add an internet connection and it opens up huge learning possibilities. There are currently schemes to assist broadband into poorer homes. I know that I for one would give up my satellite/cable TV subscription to pay for broadband if money was the only issue especially if I had children in the house.

Adoption and promotion of open source software needs to happen at a governmental level in richer nations to encourage poorer nations to follow suit. There are some great examples of government all over the world promoting and adopting open source e.g. Brazil (52 million children) and France.

My message to everybody is – the open source community wants and needs emerging nations and they need the open source community.

What can we do? What can you do?

1. Raise awareness of Blog Action Day.

2. Write a blog post for Blog Action Day.

3. Comment on a blog post offering your opinion or support.

4. Tag and submit posts to sites such as digg, delicious, reddit and many of the others you can think of.

5. Use and promote open source software (probably one of the best things you can do to help)

6.Encourage others to do so (three generations of my family run ubuntu and openoffice)

7. If you have children or you are in education ask what approach your school/college/university has to open source. If they have no approach ask them why not. Easy and simple question question Are you using Microsoft Office? Why would you not look at OpenOffice.org? Read this.

8. Email your MP if you live in the UK (I did) and ask him what approach he has to open source software and to explain the policy of his party – he should know and if he is a labour MP should explain why there policy is generally not to look at open source.

I will also be attending Birmingham Social Media Surgery for Blog Action Day 2008 to see if can help local charities.

I saw another blog post that said that they would donate $1 for a every comment on their Blog Action Blog post up to $100. The best I can do currently is 50p per post up to £50. All I ask is that if you have any links relevant to this post like open source resources or other relevant blog posts please put them in your comments. Also If you have a relevant charity that you would like to see my donation going to please put a link to it in your comment. If you have no links please comment anyway (even my family might want to comment hint hint). All comments (except obvious spam) will be counted up to £50 (i.e. 100 comments) and all charities will be considered but if there is not a suitable charity e.g. ‘open source helping poverty somewhere’ in the world them it will be Oxfam or a charity promoted by Blog Action Day. I will blog the amount and the charity.

Like many things Open Source alone is not going to end world poverty but it could certainly help educate and grow economies, it certainly won’t be a hinderance.

Please comment.

Every day it seams a new version of someones favourite software is released somegreatphotosoftware version 5.5.5 or thebestmusicplayer version 1,1,01. Little excitement is seen around the world except by the group fanboys and girls of that product waiting for the latest and greatest, checking the new features list for whistles and bells like children crossing off their Christmas present list (and equally frustrated when the one special present/feature is not delivered as expected).

But every now and again new versions of software come along that can affect many people and that can take a product mainstream. The best example of this was probably Windows 95 and both Word and Excel both had landmark versions that saw them over the ‘tipping point. (there are many reasons for the Word and Excel success including price and distribution but both products required to be at a level of maturity and usability for popular widespread adoption).

For many followers of software the upcoming release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is possibly just such a release and there is a belief that this could be the tipping point for OpenOffice.org leading to worldwide adoption from schools and colleges to homes users and businesses of all sizes.

At this point it is worth explaining what OpenOffice.org is. Without a large marketing budget Openoffice.org is not the most well known. Openoffice.org (sometimes known as ooo the .org is always shown as someone else owns the trademark to ‘open office’) from Sun Microsystems is an open source equivalent suite of products to Microsoft Office or other office suites (yes there are few others still left). Where Microsoft has Word Openoffice.org has Writer where Microsoft has Excel OpenOffice.org has Calc. For many these two programs cover 95% of their software use but Openoffice.org also has equivalent presentation programs and a database. It does not include an email and calendering application although there are many alternatives to Outlook but does offer programs for drawing and mathematical formulae.

For the ‘iPhone generation’ this is not a release full of the latest whiz bang features and cutting edge innovation (c’mon this is office software) but the final product appears a more complete office suite that could have all the functionality for the majority of users. OpenOffice.org has been the office suite of choice for most Linux distributions for some time and a version for Windows has had a reasonable adoption but up until now there has not be a native Apple Mac version, yes you could install it with some messing around or you could even use a Mac modified version called NeoOffice. Now finally with the release of version 3.0 there is a full Mac version (intel only not power pc) and it should not go unnoticed that the most popular software purchased for Mac’s is Microsft Office. Until the recent release of iWork for the Mac there was no popular complete office suite apart from Microsoft Office. With so many new and young users of Mac’s OpenOffice.org have a real opportunity, after spending a lot their money on the hardware not everybody wants to spend more money on Microsoft Licenses.

The other compelling reason to look at OpenOffice.org is formats. OpenOffice.org 2.x could read and produce .doc, .xls and other proprietary Microsoft formats and this should be improved in in version 3.0 plus the addition of being able to read .docx, .xlsx and .pptx (which is more than Microsoft office 2003 user can do as standard) Openoffice 3 will not be able to produce in these ooxml formats but in my opinion that is a good thing. One of the greatest benefits of using open source software is also adopting open formats the default format forOpenOffice.org is ODF (OpenDocument Format) each program has its own ODF format Writer has .odt. Calc has .ods etc. With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 Microsoft’s own office suite will support ODF. This means that an OpenOffice.org user will be able to exchange documents, edits and updates with a Microsoft Office user all using an open standard format, this really is a great step forward. Of course there are many other products that support ODF, not just the two mentioned, from web applications such as Google Docs and Zoho to office suites including IBM Lotus Symphony and WordPerfect Office.

With full cross platform support, fully open source, really useful open formats supported by the major players and a Firefox-like extensions-ecosystem has OpenOffice.org’s time come? Only time will tell. I hope so.

It is no secret that in the United Kingdom we are far behind many countries in our use of open source software. Now there are no doubt many reasons for this both social, economic and political but a major factor must be the approach of the Government. The Government has direct influence over the public sector the biggest consumer of IT and also over Education which lays many of the foundations to our use of computers.

At a time when we can not be far from an election the Labour party does not appear to have a coherent policy on open source software. This is in stark contrast to the other major parties who take all opportunities to say how much they love open source. Now I am as cynical as the next person and of course it is very easy to be a crowd pleaser when you are in opposition and delivering on your promises appears a long way off.

Even with plenty of sound bites it was still difficult to get a clear picture of each parties approach towards open source. In a true unbiased fashion I have listed in alphabetical order what I could glean from the major parties:

The Conservatives website was actually quite good, has relatively easy navigation and a reasonable search facility. They are also very keen to advertise there ‘Web 2.0′ badges with Twitter, Facebook, Bebo and Myspace links. With successful use of Web 2.0 and social networking in The Barack Obama campaign I am surprised that all parties are not so positive with their use of social networking.

The following comments were taken from speeches

David Cameron

“We will follow private sector best practice which is to introduce ‘open standards’ that enables IT contracts to be split up into modular components. So never again could there be projects like Labour’s hubristic NHS supercomputer. And we will create a level playing field for open source software in IT procurement and open up the procurement system to small and innovative companies…

Full details on The Conservative website

“What it is about is better and more effective government. The problem is that the cultural change has not taken place in government. There isn’t a level playing field for open source software. As it stands, too many companies are frozen out of government IT contracts, stifling competition and driving up costs.

“Taking into account the experience of companies and public sector bodies, it is estimated that the Government could save at least 5% of its annual IT bill if more open source software was used as part of a more effective procurement strategy. That adds up to over £600m a year. The internet age is transforming politics and has the capacity to transform government. Let’s start being open source right now.”

George Osborne talking about new media

Instead of experts deciding which order to rank the web pages in, the on-line community decides collectively by its actions.
Another example is Linux. Linux is the open-source operating system that is the main rival to Microsoft Windows.
Linux is constantly updated and improved. Yet no one owns Linux. No one is directing the improvements or updates. The code is available on-line and thousands of independent programmers make changes, fix bugs, and add new features – all for no personal gain.

Full details on the Conservatives website

OK the Green Party may not be seen as a major party in the UK but it would still be a shame not to give them a mention when presumably they would be so supportive of any open source initiatives. To be fair there is not a great deal of information about open source to be found from the greens but that maybe understandable given their resources and what they may see as the core messages. Never the less there are a few sound bites about such as:

Open source software should be more widely available in order to help reduce the ‘digital divide’, according to Dr Caroline Lucas, Green MEP forthe South East. Liberal Democrats

The Labour Party’s website, at least to me, appeared the least friendly (no Obama-esque Web 2.0 friendlyness here) and offered no real information on open source. Further digging around only really turned up criticism for their lack of policy (again this is to be expected – it is politics) and overall it was disappointing.

The only interesting thing I found out about (not open source related) on the puffbox blog here was that they do have a twitter account “UKlabour” (“Labour” was taken by the Irish Labour Party – ooh that must hurt!)

The Liberal Democrats website may not be as slick as The Conservatives but they do have a creative commons license on their site and appear to be the only party who talk about using open source software themselves:

Rugby based Open Source IT Consultancy credativ has been awarded a contract by the Liberal Democrats to provide server migration and support for its IT systems that are based on free open source software.

What the Liberal Democrats do have is John Pugh an MP who appears to know what he is talking about when it comes to open source software and open standards. Some great information on John Pugh on the Open Rights Group Wiki here http://www.openrightsgroup.org/orgwiki/index.php/John_Pugh_MP

John Pugh as quoted on the Open Rights Group Wiki

Westminster Hall debate Government IT and Software Procurement 9 October 2007

… Four things ought to be avoided. The first is a lock-in, an indefinite commitment to a single proprietary solution—endless licensing renewal that the Government simply cannot get out of. Secondly, there must obviously be interoperability; its absence will always be a problem, because it limits the growth and integration of whatever software has been bought, as well as one’s choice of supplier. Thirdly, it is preferable to have access to the source code, so that if necessary people can understand what they have. Finally, it is extraordinarily helpful to have a good skills base on the client side, so that people know what they are dealing with.
On that basis, one would expect the Government to have made use of the growing British open-source software industry, which is by and large highly successful, although there are exceptions. It is successful in a number of operations known to all, such as eBay, Amazon, banks and stock exchanges and so on. …

More about John Pugh can be found at his website http://www.johnpughmp.com/ which runs on Joomla the open source CMS (Content Management System).

Bournemouth 2008: Vince Cable speech

We’ve got to stop the gravy train of management consultancy in government; stop questionable government IT projects like that for the NHS and insist that procurement is from the cheapest, open source; and take an axe to the overgrown thickets of quango land.

More here http://www.libdems.org.uk/conference/bournemouth-2008-vince-cable-speech-982960;show

Overall the main parties policies could be a lot clearer on open source and maybe in the run up to any election they will make more definate statements but for now I will continue to follow this area with interest.

This Saturday is Software Freedom Day (Worldwide). From The Software Freedom Website:

Software Freedom Day is a global celebration and education of why transparent and sustainable technologies are now more important than ever. With over 200 teams in 60 countries participating, it is a fantastic event to get your schools and communities involved in. Go along to your local event or start your own event and meet a wide range of people, all working together to help ensure our freedoms are maintained by the technologies of tomorrow.

Locally to me the nearest event, I am aware of, is in Manchester organised by Manchester Free Software details here.

With family commitments I can not go to Manchester on Saturday but it makes me think about what I can do at a personnel level to promote free and open source software. I recently did an Infopoint (http://infopointproject.org) at the Trentham Gardens (Stoke) Northern Computer Market. The purpose of an Infopoint is to promote free software by giving away copies of the Opendisc, and Linux Distros. I gave away mainly Ubuntu. Northern Computer Markets support this by offering free tables where they can. Althought the Infopoint projects website has not been updated for a while Infopoints are still active around the country often supported by local Linux User Groups.

Alan Cocks who is an active organiser of Infopoints and LUG member has also organised the Bracknell Software Freedom Day event details here. I would like to do another Infopoint in the near future possibly in Wolverhampton.

I am also helping my family use free and open source software with my parents and son using Linux Mint and my wife using Ubuntu. I think that helping friends and family use free software is a small thing that all free software enthusiasts can do (and I am sure a lot already do). With two children in primary school I also want to understand how schools are (not) using free software.

A map of all Free Software Events worldwide is here.

Just found this post on Alan Lord’s blog The Open Sourcerer celebrating 25 years of GNU.

The video is now on youtube (as below) but for the freedom fighters it is available in ogg vorbis format here which can be played on VLC the cross platform media player or as Alan quite rightly puts it:

If you are one of those poor souls still using proprietary software, you might need to read this first. The video is encoded in Ogg, a free an un-patent encumbered format that is really free to use. Of course you could go and download a free operating system too and rid yourself of the shackles and chains which Stephen so eloquently describes.

Good documentation can separate great software from good software. Documentation is an area where open source often beats proprietary solutions hands down. Often up to date and user friendly documentation for proprietary software does not exist, is not available or is restricted by software vendors or resellers for commercial gain.

Many, but not all, open source solutions have a far more open and collaborative approach to documentation recently highlighted by Compiere’s launch of their wiki.

The definition of a wiki aptly taken from Wikipedia, which of course is the most well know wiki, is as follows:

“A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites.”

Wiki Wednesday’s is a group of people who are interested in Wiki’s and social media. The next London meeting is on 13th August details here.

A have put a list of links to some of the most well know FLOSS business software wiki’s below but of course there are many more.

• SugarCRM Wiki – Main Page
  (tags: sugarcrm wiki opensource)
• Main Page – AlfrescoWiki
  (tags: alfresco cms opensource wiki ecm)
• Welcome to Openbravo Community – Openbravo wiki
  (tags: openbravo erp opensource wiki)
• Community Space – Compiere Community – Compiere Wiki
  (tags: erp compiere wiki opensource)
• OpenERP (Formerly TinyERP) Wiki
  (tags: wiki erp opensource openerp tinyerp)

There is no shortage of open source wiki software and MediaWiki is the software used and developed for Wikipedia is open source under the GPL. Of the above wiki’s SugarCRM, Alfresco and Openbravo all use Wikimedia.

I have now upgraded to WordPress 2.6 on most of my blogs. Some cool new features, I particular like the new options on images to reduce by a %. Great plugin for automatic upgrades here. The video supplied from WordPress is below showing some of the new features:

Floss Weekly is an excellent podcast from The Twit Network and Leo Laporte. Originally co-hosted with Chris DiBona it is now hosted with Randal Shwartz. It covers many different projects from the world of Free Libre Open Source Software but not usually open source business applications for enterprises. Until this week when it had John Roberts the CEO of SugarCRM talking about the Open Source version of SugarCRM. Well worth a listen for anyone interested in SugarCRM or commercial open source business software in general. Link to the podcast here

Openoffice.org 3.0 will soon be available (there is a second beta out now). Below is just a couple of quick links that I have come across in the last couple of days. When it is released I will write a piece on crossingplatforms.com as it should be truely compatable with the Mac. Up until now the Mac version has only been available with a work around or by using the Neo Office a mac native version based on openoffice

• OpenOffice.org 3.0: What to Expect?
  (tags: openoffice opensource software)
• Ten fantastic keyboard shortcuts in OpenOffice.org
  (tags: openoffice shortcuts)

Great video with John Locke from Freelock Computing who has now started twittering. John wrote the book ‘Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems’ and although it is a little out of date now it is still a fantastic book for anyone looking to understand the benefits of open source software. See a link to the book on good reads below.

John has an astounding knowledge of open source software and I hope there will be a new version of the book soon. In the meantine John is writng a great blog covering the latest in open source to accompany the book here.

Interesting article over at information week here discussing the 1st anniversary of the GPL v3 (GNU General Public License Version 3). Now although a discussion about Open Source licenses is a bit like naval gazing or in TWIT speak ‘inside baseball’, as with most legal issues what may not be very important today can become essential when things change (like ownership, control, intent etc.).

One of the software projects under the new GPL v3 is SugarCRM which is probably the most high profile commercial open source projects and as such comes in for plenty of praise and plenty of criticism. With the release of version 5 SugarCRM moved from the Sugar Public License (SPL) to GPL V3 (so they were never a user of GPL v2).

I thought it would be interesting have a look at the most well known Open Source Business Enterprise software projects (OK ‘most well known’ being a completely arbitrary list although I did look at the Sourceforge most active projects in the last 7 days ) to see what open source licenses they use. At this point please let me make it clear that I have no legal training and that the information below has been found on the web in various places, although I have tried to take most from the projects own website. Even if the list is 100% correct today it will no doubt become out of date very quickly. So, if the license that a piece of software is using is important to you, which I think it should be, I would confirm with the project directly. If you are thinking of using a piece of software in a ‘mission critical’ or even a mildly important area I would recommend taking professional legal advise from a person with software license knowledge. Anyway, upon researching I found the following (I have also put links to some of the articles I found at the bottom):

SugarCRM or at least the open source version currently known as Sugar Community Edition 5 -

GPL v3 (from Version 5) prior to Version 5 the Sugar Public License being a version of the Mozilla Public License with an attribution clause. Attribution clauses are explained at the bottom of this post.

Openbravo -
Openbravo Public License Version 1.1 being the Mozilla Public License version 1.1 with a permitted attribution clause. A copy of the license is available at http://www.openbravo.com/product/legal/license/.

PostBooks Accounting/CRM/ERP by xTuple http://www.xtuple.com/)-

Common Public Attribution License 1.0 (CPAL) based on the Mozilla Public license with a Attribution clause as explained below.

ADempiere ERP Business Suite (www.adempiere.com) -

GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2).

Compiere ERP (http://www.compiere.com/) -

GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2)

JasperReports – Java Reporting ) -

GNU Library or Lesser General Public License (LGPL). LGPL was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License and other permissive licenses.

Pentaho (http://www.pentaho.org/) -

GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2)

Alfresco CMS – (http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Main_Page) -

GPL v2 + FLOSS Exception. The Floss Exception(http://www.alfresco.com/legal/licensing/floss_exception/ states basically that people using free software licenses noncompliant with the GPL can sill distribute Alfresco with their software without making their software GPL compliant.

Mysql (www.mysql.com) -

GPL v2 + FLOSS Exception similar to Alfresco see above.

Openoffice.org -

GNU Lesser General Public License v.3 (LGPL) from version 3 onwards

Many companies also offer an alternative commercial licenses including MySQL and Alfresco. Some Project previousley having licences with attribution clauses have moved to GPL V3. Although the GPL V3 is not worded as stronlgy as any attribution clause mentioned here although it does mention ‘The GPL requires all copies to carry an appropriate copyright notice’ this is expeted to be enforced as badgeware but inly time will tell.

Permitted Attribution License or ‘badgeware’ as it is sometimes called requires anyone using the code in a distributed form to show ‘for of attribution’ such as a logo or a badge on the user screens to show the source of the code. The applicable section from the Openbravo license is shown below. In the situation with SugarCRM and Vtiger, as
this clause was not in the license before there was no legal requirement for them to show any such badge and due to this SugarCRM changed their license to include this to stop this happening again.

A
permitted attribution license

II. Openbravo and Logo.

This License does not grant any rights to use the trademarks “Openbravo
” and the “Openbravo ” logos even if such marks are
included in the Original Code or Modifications.

However, in addition to the other notice obligations, all copies of the Covered Code in Executable and Source Code form distributed must, as a form of attribution of the original author, include on each user interface screen and on program start-up or login screen the “Powered by Openbravo” logo, visible to all users. The dimensions of the
“Powered by Openbravo” logo must be at least 89 x 24 pixels. When users click on the “Powered by Openbravo” logo
it must direct them to http://www.openbravo.com.

II.1
The official “Powered by Openbravo” Logos

or

Links:

• OSI approves ‘badgeware’ license | The Register
  nity to test out in the market if those nightmares are actually real,” Mayfield said. ®
  (tags: osi foss opensource licenses)
• SugarCRM, GPLv3, and the all-importance of brand in open source | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET News.com
  (tags: foss opensource sugarcrm licenses gpl)
• LKML: Linus Torvalds: Re: GPL V3 and Linux – Dead Copyright Holders
  Note from Linis Torvalds covering his view on GPL v3 for the Linux Kernel
  (tags: linux kernel gpl gplv3)
• Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses – GNU Project – Free Software Foundation (FSF)
  (tags: gpl faq opensource licenses)
• SugarCRM GPL v3 FAQs – SugarCRM
  Very useful page on SugarCRMs’s explanation og the GPL v3
  (tags: gpl opensource foss licenses sugarcrm)
• GNU General Public License – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Explanation of the GPL license. Cover all current version 1, 2 and 3 with a link to details on the Affero version.
  (tags: opensource gpl)
• Common Public Attribution License – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  (tags: opensource licenses)

• Tectonic » Code theft or liberalisation?
  Great Article on the original SugarCRM Badgeware issue going back to 2004. This link may bot work but the articale is available in the Tectonic Archives, just search for the title.
  (tags: opensource gpl licenses sugarcrm)
• Open-source badgeware [LWN.net]
  Explanation of Badgeware as created by an attribution clause in an open source license.
  (tags: opensource gplv3 sugarcrm licenses)
• TenderSystem – WordPress » Public license with attribution clause
  Interesting blog from Tender Systems onslecting an open source license with the ‘attribution clause’
  (tags: opensource licenses)
• The GPLv3, One Year On – Open Source Blog – InformationWeek
  (tags: gplv3 opensource licenses)