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Local Newspapers Use F/OSS For a Day
An anonymous reader writes "The Journal Register Company owns 18 small newspapers, and in honor of the July 4th holiday and Ben Franklin, the company's newsrooms produced their daily papers using only free software. The reporters were quick to note that 'the proprietary software is designed to be efficient, reliable and relatively fast for the task of producing a daily newspaper. The free substitutes, not so much.' I applaud the company for undertaking such a feat, but I hope their readership's impression of free software won't be negatively affected by the newspaper's one-day foray into F/OSS."
I believe we're in another "free" vs. "Free" situation here. The summary implies that it was an experiment to transition to F/OSS software. But the word "open source" never appears in the article.
In the associated video, they call it a "Ben Franklin" experiment and make reference to the "A penny saved..." quote. In the article the only software projects they list are Scribus, which is indeed open source, and Google Docs, which is gratis but not open source. (I have no doubt Google uses plenty of open source to run Google Docs, but it is not an open-source product from the user perspective.)
The article doesn't go into enough detail to really say much else. No doubt they ended up using lots of open source to satisfy their "free" (gratis) requirement, but I suspect they used plenty of freeware, and ad-supported stuff as well. Without much more information I don't think we can say much (positive or negative) about how well open source tools can replace proprietary tools in publishing.