I was a little bit surprised when I looked at the Best Buy web site: Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 Windows and Norton AntiVirus 2008 Windows are both listed as accessories for the Asus EEE PC, which runs a dedicated version of Xandros Linux. Apart from the platform compatibility (just a minor issue) both software exceed the hardware specifications of the small PC (a very good product, by the way).
I have a question: would you buy any IT product from such an incompetent retailer?
According to Alfresco Open Source Barometer (you may find more here and here) OpenOffice.org is alive and well (and almost kicking Microsoft Office on the back in some countries, like Germany and France).
Glyn Moody writes:
One of the most interesting additions to the survey this year is a question about which office suite people use. Overall, OpenOffice.org chalks up a very respectable 24% to Microsoft Office’s 66%. This is a much higher penetration than I would have guessed for open source on the desktop, and suggests that among those adopting open source programs OpenOffice.org is doing really well – pretty much at the Firefox level of success. Sadly, the same cannot be said of the UK, which manages only 18% compared to France’s 28% and Germany’s 34% (the latter probably boosted, again, by the historical roots of OpenOffice.org in the German StarOffice suite, later sold to Sun).
I’ve asked Ian Howells of Alfresco some additional information about Italy. Of course, as soon as I will get them, I will write at least a post, but most probably a press release for the Italian press.
Tags: office suite, Open Source, openofficeNokia buys Trolltech, Sun buys MySQL, IBM endorses Ubuntu, the Asus EEE PC is a sales success and is featured almost everywhere, and so on. Open source is on the right track to get to the tipping point sometimes during 2008, the day when a VNU (very normal user) will decide to switch just because there isn’t any reason against doing it.
Lo rivela la stessa Microsoft in questo post del blog Port 25, che viene scritto dagli sviluppatori che operano all’interno dell’omonimo laboratorio per lo sviluppo di software open source. C’è anche un documento PDF che illustra la procedura in ogni dettaglio, e che è stato rilasciato con una delle due licenze open source che OSI ha da poco approvato a Microsoft.
Anche se la procedura viene “spacciata” come soluzione per l’analisi dei crash, è un’implicita ammissione della scarsa solidità del sistema operativo Microsoft (non ce n’era bisogno, ma fa sempre piacere vedere che il problema è condiviso anche da chi lo ha generato).
