Sam Ramji of Microsoft announces the SourceForge Community Award for Best Project for Education, won by OpenOffice.org. Sam underlines the importance of affordable software for education, both for teachers and students.

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microsoft, openoffice, award

EnterpriseDB has just announced the results (PDF download) of a recent survey of open source database usage.

A few data:

- 83% have yet to pay for the use of their open source database.

- 11% did migrate away from Microsoft SQL Server, 6% from Oracle and less than 1% from IBM DB2.

- 9% have a preference for commercial databases that prevents the use of open source databases.

- 85% affirms that nothing prohibits their company from using an open source database.

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open source, research, migration, database

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, has said: “The great task in front of us over the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something that is stable and robust and not so pretty, into something that is art. Can we not only emulate, but can we blow right past Apple?”.

He added: “I see this [need] for free software - beautiful, elegant software. We have to invest in making the desktop beautiful and useful. The iPhone, for instance, is effectively a pure software experience”.

Being a Windows/MacOS user, and a close watcher of the Ubuntu distribution (which will replace Windows sometimes in the future, although I will probably keep on using XP as long as I can, just because I’m lazy), I saw this objective getting closer and closer with every new release of Ubuntu.

Today, MacOS X is the best flavour of Linux in terms of usability. Therefore, any Linux distribution should be able to emulate the “look and feel” of MacOS X with a few tweaks and a better integration with hardware platforms.

This, in my opinion, is the real challenge, as a Linux distribution must be compatible with most personal computers while MacOS X has been developed for a specific hardware. The technology, though, should be capable of solving this problem.

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apple, innovation, iphone, macos x, open source, linux

Yochai Benkler, the leading intellectual of the information age, explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization.

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open source, innovation

I have been mumbling quite a lot on the editorial strategy of this blog. Originally, I wanted to cover marketing of open source software following my experience about OpenOffice.org. I have soon realized, though, that the open source industry is too much technology oriented to read marketing stuff.

I have been silent for a while, trying to figure out a solution. Although some people start to write about the “end of blogging”, I didn’t want to give up.

I have eventually found a solution. “Open Opinions” will cover open source marketing with interviews to the people that actually handle the task inside companies and communities. I will ask questions (I actually am a journalist), and I will also be one of the people that will answer my questions (call them self interviews).

I will start this new editorial strategy with a self interview. I have been quiet for a long time, for several reasons. I have several things that have been eating me up inside and I need to get them off my chest.

Stay tuned.

Just brilliant… MacOS X is actually the best implementation of Linux, followed by Ubuntu. The gap is closing, although Ubuntu will never get where MacOS X is because of the better hardware integration of the latter (although you pay the integration and the ease of use with stability, as the MacBook is definitely the most fragile of my three machines - Ubuntu, Windows XP and MacOS X - being the first one that slows down and then freezes when I open more than 100 tabs with Firefox).

When Microsoft will stop maintaining and supporting Windows XP, I will definitely switch to Ubuntu and MacOS X. With a little bit of research, I have been able to configure the two PCs in the same way, using mostly open source software. Switching between the two machines is just a question of syncing a few directories.

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microsoft, apple, windows, macos x

CIO.com has conducted a survey of IT and business executives, collecting data from 328 respondents. The results of the survey show that 53% of the respondents are using open source applications in their organization today, and an additional 10% plan to do so in the next year.

Among those currently employing open-source solutions, the primary uses are operating systems such as Linux (78%), infrastructure applications, such as back end databases and Web servers (74%), and software development tools like Eclipse (61%).

Business application use isn’t far behind: 45% of the respondents are using desktop applications such as OpenOffice.org, and 29% use open source enterprise applications (the most popular being collaboration tools, customer relationship management tools and ERP applications).

Close to three in five respondents (58%) strongly agree or agree with the statement that Linux is reliable enough to depend upon for mission-critical applications.

The primary reasons of open source adoption are financial: lower total cost of ownership (59%) and acquisition costs (56%) lead the pack, followed by greater flexibility (32%) and access to source code (30%).

Unfortunately, there are still barriers to adoption. The primary reason is product support concerns (45%), followed by the awareness or knowledge of available solutions (29%), security concerns (26%) and lack of support by management (22%).

Software quality issues are cited as a primary barrier to adoption by 20% and customization concerns by 15%. So if you’re trying to sell the boss on the virtues of open source, spend more time on reassurance about tech support availability and quality than you do on customization opportunities.

While more than half of enterprises use open source today, the degree of intimacy with the philosophy varies quite a bit. Companies may often (43%) or sometimes (24%) treat such applications as just free software, although 49% contribute to the community and 11% have open-source committers on their staff.

You can find the CIO.com article about the survey here.

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open source, research

I usually don’t like podcasts, which I find a lot less entertaining than music, but this time I’ll make an exception for Raven Zachary. You can download the MP3 (31 minutes, 7.1MB) from this link to listen to Raven’s opinions about “Microsoft Office ODF support”, “JBoss in a Red Hat world”, “How to destroy a community”, and “How open is your open source vendor?”. Enjoy.