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The 10 Coolest Open Source Products of 2008
An anonymous reader writes "Open Source Software is about more than just the Linux operating system, and 2008 brought advances in the form of OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony, Firefox and Android. But Linux is still the heart of the FOSS movement, and this year brought key developments in the operating system as well. Here's a look at the coolest open source products to come across the transom in 2008." Along roughly similar lines, davidmwilliams points out the year in review of the iTWire's "Linux Distillery" column.
Android *is* new - but is hardly newsworthy by now.
They're saying that MS Office costs $150-200, and OOo, being free is therefore $150-200 less than that.
I think.
.there is enough of everything for everyone.
5 of the 10 are just Linux distro's. Ubuntu 8.10 AND 8.04 were both on the list as seperate entries!?!? And Lotus Symphony, a version of OOo, was listed along with OOo as seperate products. For the most part this could have been condensed down to:
Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice, Android
Which is so boring a list that it's of no use to anyone actually using open source already.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Actually as far as a medium to large organization is concerned, OpenOffice wouldn't be free in accounting terms. There would be training and admin costs on top of that -- which would initially be high. Training is expensive, and there would be a re-productivity curve for employees too, and thus a resultant increased cost again. It's probably a show stopper for many companies. While they do have to pay licences etc for MS Office, they don't really need to provide training in most corporations as Office knowledge is an expected skill to have, and most IT depts are familiar with it too.
Which brings me to the fact that the real key to having the oft-heralded Year Of Linux, is to have a Year of the Office Replacement first. (I'm not sure that Open Office is currently anywhere near that happening). MS Office / Exchange are the whole key to Microsoft's dominance, not the OS. Find a viable solution for that, and Linux will follow.
These are all projects with mainstream corporate backing.
In my opinion the list should include projects done by people who don't have vast sums of cash to back them.
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I'd have to say that the most interesting "product" that I've seen this year is an electronics microcontroller platform called Arduino. It started pre-2008, but it has shot up in popularity and had a writeup in Wired this year. The board is open source (blueprints and source code are Creative Commons), and people are making a wide range of alternative form factors with special features.
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Training? You must work in some different office to everyone else. No-one gets training in the latest weird shit MS Office pulls. I'd like evidence that such training is widespread, or even happens.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Why would there be training in using Open Office? Or Microsoft Office for that matter?
I work for a company with about 90,000 employees world wide. I think our local office (300 employees) has maybe two Microsoft Office installations, and I can't remember anyone talking about getting training in either of those packages. We have, however, had training in using Lotus Notes
What next? Training in using a fucking printer? Turning on the monitor?
Granted, I work for a company insourcing tech support, but still - why would anyone need training in using another office suite than the one they're used to? If they can't work out the differences on their own in a few days, they shouldn't be using office software to begin with.
It's more than that, it's the entire ecosystem of third party stuff that's based on the assumption that Office is available. Off the top of my head, we have:
1)Export from JDE (yes this can do CSV, not nearly as useful)
2)Export from GL reporting package (no real alternative provided)
3)Addon for Excel that's basically a macro package into the JDE financial, again no ready replacement
4)Edit functionality in our Enterprise Content Management system
5)Export functionality from our fixed asset software, no alternative but raw dump
etc.
All of that could be worked through but it would be at a VERY significant cost and possibly at the cost of choosing a significantly less useful alternative. The good news is that more and more stuff is going web based, the bad is that a bunch of advanced functionality still relies on Office.
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you only have to distribute your source if you're linking against other gpl code. I haven't looked at the actual product but from what i saw on their site they're just distributing an unmodified qemu with a nice gui to run it. this means that since they're not linking against it (if they are in fact doing it this way) they wouldn't need to release anything from a legal standpoint, though they do need to have some kind of notice about the license of qemu and where to get its source IIRC.
Try IBM's version.
I don't really have any problem using OpenOffice, but it's kludgey. and pretty slow.
Lotus Symphony, on the other hand, seemed very polished to me, and significantly quicker.
It's still not Office 2000/2003, but it is worlds better than the pile of excrement that is Office 2007. Which, by the way, I have not heard more than 5 people say they like, including the previous side-post.
I would even say that, personally, I like the spreadsheet application in symphony better than excel in most instances; They have quite a bit of experience with those, so it makes sense.
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