TheOpenCD 1.4 Released

Lykos writes "From OpenCD's website: 'TheOpenCD is a collection of high quality Free and Open Source Software. The programs run in Windows and cover the most common tasks such as word processing, presentations, e-mail, web browsing, web design, and image manipulation.' This is a great little package to leave lying around your friends' workplace to convince them to go opensource. =) Lots of quality programs in one convenient package."

Comments

Fred Fish

[tttonyyy]

Heh, reminds me of the old Fred Fish disks for the Amiga, crammed with free/shareware stuff. They were great days. :)

Re:Fred Fish

[quadong]

'everyone is used to just "downloading and installing"'

I think you have a narrow view of "everyone". The people around my office certainly seem to expect software to come on a CD. To many people, putting Free Software on a CD gives it the same emotional validity as the proprietary software that comes on CDs.

Re:Fred Fish

[Gadget_Guy]

The difference though is that you rarely had source with the programs (they were mostly shareware) whereas you _must_ have them now because of the GPL.

In the early days a lot of the Fish disks had source code on them. And they were pretty much all PD. And you used to get a lot of different things on each disk too. Then slowly everything began to go all shareware and massive, until eventually you got just one or two crippled programs on each disk.

I lost interest in them about then, and I would just pine for the good old days - when giving out the source code was not a movement, it was just what you did.

Re:Fred Fish

[booch]

It's interesting to note that Fred Fish is somewhat active in the GNU community. If you do a Google search, you can find several of his contributions and mailing list posts in several GNU projects.

Oh great

[cybermace5]

Now we'll see this CD turning up on eBay. There's a surprising amount of people selling Free software to uninformed people.

Re:Oh great

[Zordak]

Honestly, the guy is selling you a CD with OpenOffice burned on it for about $10. What's the big deal about that? Maybe I am familiar with it, but don't have the bandwidth, and I think it's worth the $10. Maybe I don't know I can download it for free, but dropping the $10 introduces me to something new that I had no idea existed. If you think the $10 is too much, lowball him on your bid and see if you get lucky. The guy appears to be getting a lot of positive feedback, so maybe a lot of people who would otherwise be locked into the Microsoft rut have found a viable alternative, and have decided that $10 was a fair price for enlightenment. Now, if he doesn't include the proper license, or in any other way breaks the law, then he has a problem. Otherwise, he's probably just an evangelist making a few bucks off of his preaching.

Really cool idea

[Black_Logic]

This seems like a pretty cool idea. I thought about something like this a while back. I'm not to familiar with windows any more. Would it be possible to have these programs execute straight from the cd instead of installing? That would defninitely come in handy at say, the school labs where you can't install programs and they don't have your favorite OS program installed.

Seems like a good list of programs, firefox may be a nice addition, though.

Wouldn't a Web portal be a better idea?

[hal2814]

I'm thinking that an easy to use Web portal to this kind of software would be a better idea. That way the user can get the most up-to-date version of the software and any new software deemed "worthy" of the list could be distributed to everyone by updating a Web page.

Already Slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys should probably have some kind of load-test kit before you publish stories from little-known sites. This happened many times recently.

It's interesting...

[AKAImBatman]

...how much my software has changed. It used to be that I'd use MS Office, Internet Explorer, Paintshop Pro, WinZIP, and other for-pay applications to get my work done. These days I find myself using FireFox, OpenOffice, JEdit, NetBeans, Cygwin, EnZIP, GIMP, and other Open Source tools. And nearly every one of them is superior to the application I replaced. Fascinating world we live in.

Re:Mirror here

[MartinG]

None of the mirrors listed there have this version yet. The page linked even says so.

Re:No it isn't.

[penguinoid]

So, would a CD Found laying around our office end up in any PC?

Yes. There are people who read spam. There are people who open random attachments. There are people who use AOL cds. There will be people who would read an unlabled CD.

In fact, I have a feeling that quite a few people would be interested in a CD that has a good picture and something like "Open CD" and url ending with .org on it.

Does it matter?

[crimson_alligator]

Maybe I'm blinded by my exposure to all different types of software, but does it matter if the widgets are different? For example, Mac users complain about the widgets on the Mac OpenOffice port. To me this makes absolutely no difference! It's mostly aesthetic. I've heard complaints that this makes the software 'unusable.' I don't even notice! In my experience you have to learn how each piece of software works. Whether they all look/behave the same is less important than how well each of them are designed. No, I'm not saying that widgets are totally irrelevant. But I'd rather use a CD full of good, free software using many widget sets than use Internet Explorer, Office, etc.

Have you tried, say, OpenOffice?

[stealth.c]

According to Apple's site, you can download X11 and then you're able to run X apps like OpenOffice. Is this not the case? Or are you specifically demanding a *real* native app? In which case--I dunno.

Re:convince...?

[Russellkhan]

"That's like somebody advocating the use of torx screws as opposed to phillips head."

As I see it, it's more like advocating buying from local coffeshops and video stores rather than giving your money to Starbucks and Blockbuster. The programs themselves are tools, but who gets your money does make a difference. Also, those producing the tools benefit from having more users.

The sad fact is, there's a company out there producing software with monopoly power. At times it has even been known to abuse that power. Some even suspect that this company is actively seeking more power and that it might begin being abusive to its customers if it feels that it has no competition to worry about. Open Source/Free Software is seen by many as a (perhaps the only) hope of competition in the software world. Personally, I find this to be reason to consider Open Source first when looking for software tools.

Re:No firewall?

[ozbird]

I tried it for a while, but its habit of downloading the entire multi-megabyte package every time there was a signature update was annoying (for dial-up users...)

I've since switched to AVG Free Edition Which also works great and has regular incremental updates.

Re:Open Source for Grandma?

[codepunk]

If she only does email and web browsing then Linux is exactly what she needs. Might suggest installing Fedora and all of the Livna.org goodies. Make her a user account, only you have root and all the problems will magically go away.

Re:Open Source for Grandma?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're setting up a web computer for a computer illiterate, consider a cheap machine with a decent modem that supports Linux. Install NOTHING on the hard drive. They use it on the off chance they want to save notes etc.

Then boot from a Knoppix CD. Each time they boot, every thing's new. If you really like your configuration, you can make a permanent configuration file. Just leave a 3x5 card next to the computer of what to type at boot time.

The minimal typing is a PITA but ask them which they hate more: 1) 10-20 seconds of typing each and every time they boot to a bug-free environment, or 2) day/weeks of groveling and asking some computer literate for help.

Re:No it isn't.

[bcrowell]

Leaving that CD around won't convince anybody to go to OpenSource software. I don't have the time to look at some CD that was left around by someone attempting to tempt me to 'go over' to their side.
Unfortunately, I'd have to agree based on my experience with using TheOpenCD and GnuWinII as tools for evangelizing free software. For me, the results were really disappointing. I teach physics at a community college. A lot of my students don't have much money, and it seemed to me like they'd just naturally be interested in free alternatives to Office, etc. I handed out free CDs on the first day of class, and got exactly zero interest. Not a single student mentioned having used the software. Not a single student started using OSS for doing graphs in their lab reports.

Some possible reasons:

• Hard as it may be for me (and other Slashdotters) to conceive, many people simply don't consider playing with software to be a fun activity.
• I don't think they say, "Hmm...should I spend X dollars for a legal copy of Office, or should I run OSS?" They say, "Hmm...should I spend X dollars for a legal copy of Office, or should I get a copy from my friend?"

I've gotten better results simply by putting my old FreeBSD box in the lab alongside the school's Windows machines. KDE is installed, and I think a lot of them just start using it without even realizing at first that it's not Windows. After a while, the message may sink in that this alternative at least exists.

Similar to MozOO.org

[Anonymous Coward]

All very similar to MozOO.org which has been around for a few months also. Only main difference is MozOO focuses on a few main applications and updates when they update. You should be able to guess. Mozilla and OpenOffice are the central packages. The two things most people will use.