It must be the warmer weather. Ubuntu happenings are springing up everywhere in Boston. Just five days after Boston fans gathered at an upscale downtown nightspot to celebrate the release of Hardy Heron, Ubuntu’s latest operating system, a local school technologist kicked off a new organization to promote open source software in education.

Michael Selva, who works at Saint Stephen’s Armenian Elementary School in Watertown, Mass., attracted some 25 teachers and technologists to the kickoff event for a new group called Moving to Open Source Software in Schools, or MOSSIG, drawing attendees from many nearby communities and as far away as New Hampshire and Maine.

An offshoot of Massachusetts Computer Using Educators (MassCUE), the new group aims to wean educators from proprietary software. In November 2006, Selva himself became an advocate of open source after finding Saint Stephens’ computer hardware and software out of date and too expensive to replace. Converting a Dell server and 11 workstations to Kubuntu, a version of Ubuntu, and obtaining open source software for work and education proved just the ticket, he said.

Selva plans to follow up with working meetings on the first Tuesday of every month during the school year, starting at 7 p.m. May 6, at the school. He also plans an adult education program in open source for teachers and a hotline at mossig@googlegroups.com. He can be reached at (617) 605-7429 or atms@saes.org.

The success of open source software (OSS) has software giants like Microsoft running scared, OSS pioneer Bruce Perens says. Although most IT shops today use OSS such as Nagios, Samba, Apache and other programs, the open source community is still in a vulnerable spot, as software vendors use their patents to gain unfair market advantage and even take control of OSS products and standards.

I talked with Perens recently, and our topic was what IT managers need to know and do about the state of open source software. Perens says that IT managers are in the best position to lobby proprietary software vendors to protect and not attack the OSS community. IT shops are those vendors’ customers, after all, and have some clout; whereas, the large majority of open source developers — mostly self-employed or volunteers — are poorly equipped to stand up to major corporations that are trying to grab ownership of OSS.

Proprietary software vendors are both co-opting open source and, as stealthily as possible, trying to destroy OSS with software patent threats. If proprietary software vendors succeed in stymieing OSS development, technology innovation will slow down, and interoperability in heterogeneous environments will be difficult, if not impossible, to attain.

Protecting OSS will help IT organizations retain the ability “to purchase software without becoming tied to that [software vendor] for other software” to manage or complement it, Perens told me.

The protection of open standards should also be on IT pros’ agenda. Once a proprietary software vendor gets hold of rights to software standards, there are few obstacles to that vendor expanding those rights. Perens urges IT organizations to support the International Standards Organization (ISO). Established to govern the process of patent distribution, ISO working to adapt standards to the reality of the current marketplace. Most companies need interoperable software for many functions, from exchanging Microsoft Office documents to sharing databases across systems. The ISO needs the support of IT leaders in order to support the development of software interoperability amid pressure applied by proprietary vendors.

“Software patents are a problem especially for open standards, because they may prevent a standard from being usable by everyone,” Perens told me. ” If there’s a royalty or discriminatory licensing to the patent, that usually rules out open source implementations.”

With ISO/IEC 26300, Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0., the ISO did address business software interoperability in 2006. This requires all office documents to be able to be sent from one software system to a competing software system without having to be re-formatted.
In the U.S., it has been hard to stop software vendors from filing or expanding software patents that lack integrity and bankrupting OSS startups with lawsuits. U.S. “lawmakers are so in thrall to big-media lobbyists that they do not even realize that counterarguments to copyright extensions exist,” said Professor at Stanford Law School and founder of the Center for Internet and Society Lawrence Lessig.

U.S. antitrust suits have gotten few results; but, in 2007, the European Commission filed the largest antitrust suit against Microsoft yet, for withholding information that would let rival vendors defend themselves from product integration, rolling out a penalty of $1.3 billion.

But, Perens pointed out, this was merely one step forward in a larger struggle.

This blog post was written by Pam Derringer, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com’s news writer.

You’ve got to hand it to Vyatta Inc. The Belmont, Calif-based startup daring to take on Cisco Systems Inc. with free, downloadable open source router software is a hands-down winner when it comes to chutzpah.

As those in the news biz are painfully aware, the standard company description at the end of every press release (known as “boilerplate,” and rightly so) is typically jammed with as much meaningless jargon as a commuter-packed, rush-hour subway. But not Vyatta’s.

Vyatta starts by saying its “networking solutions (An empty word that should be exiled) provide an alternative to over-priced, inflexible products from proprietary vendors.” Zap No. 1. But that’s just the warmup.

Then it continues: “Our customers are smarter, better looking, and drive much nicer cars than purchasers of big-name products.” Zap. No. 2. Wow. This is getting personal. Way personal.

Finally, it compliments its customers as “thought leaders.” Attitude can go a long way in helping a David challenge a Goliath.

(A disclaimer: The boilerplate from Cisco, the market share networking leader, is brief and to the point. Much better than most. But it’s a lot less entertaining.)

As a closing note, I’m a native New Englander, so I didn’t have to read Vyatta’s company backgrounder to know that the startup was based in California. No kidding. Its boilerplate has California hip written all over it. Back to my long, impatient wait through gray skies and snowy driveways for our all-too-short New England summers.

The OpenDocument file format isn’t really something we cover a lot here on the Log or on SearchEnterpriseLinux.com, but from time to time I like to check in on it for no other reason than Simon Phipps from Sun Microsystems said a “Digital Dark Age” would descend upon us all if we didn’t get the world to adopt it. It’s also all about open standards, which for a guy who covers Linux and open source is a Siren’s Song.

It was a cool and completely foreboding premise: in the not so distant future documents of all kinds will be unreadable because the software that created them was proprietary, locked, and access expired with its creator. Basically, anyway; Simon put it much more eloquently than that (he has an accent).

Work has progressed since then thanks to the efforts of the OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance, for short), and today a milestone of sorts was reached. The ODF Alliance is an organization of governments, academic institutions, non-government organizations and industry dedicated to educating policy makers, IT administrators and the public on the benefits and opportunities of ODF.

“During September and October, there were more than a dozen announcements of new or improved application support for ODF,” said Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF Alliance. “These recent announcements are a clear reflection of the strong and growing demand for ODF in the marketplace.”

In total, there are now more than two dozen ODF-supporting text, spreadsheet, and presentation applications announced in the past three months, including some big name ones listed below:

• IBM’s Lotus Symphony includes an ODF-supporting word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation tool. (http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa)
• Apple’s Text Edit, new release with the Leopard OS, provides reading and writing support for ODF. (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html#textedit)
• Corel WordPerfect Office Beta allows users to open, view, and edit ODF. (Corel web page)
• Adobe’s Buzzword, an online word processor recently acquired from Virtual Ubiquity, will add support for ODF. (http://www.adobe.com/special/buzzword/faq.html)
• Sun ODF Plug-in 1.1 for Microsoft Office adds more languages and improves the import and export of ODF files into Microsoft Office, increasing the interoperability of the plug-in. (http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/)
• Mozilla’s Firefox lets you view ODF and other OpenOffice.org formats in your browser. (http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2007/09/openofficeorg-documents-within-firefox/)
• OpenOffice.org version 2.3 is an update of its open source office suite that provides native support for ODF and offers security, performance, and database improvements. (http://development.openoffice.org/releases/2.3.0.html)

The struggle against Microsoft — and, really, that’s what this is — continues…

Anyone out there following this OOXML (Microsoft’s Office Open XML standard) debate? I have to admit, the whole OpenDocument thing has fallen to the wayside this year ever since I covered it ad nauseum in 2006. Seems I’ve been missing some heated discussions, to put it mildly.

Today, it seems, I can’t go a minute without reading a blog post or news article about the OOXML ISO approval process. Marino Marcich, the managing director of the OpenDocument Alliance, wrote me this morning with an update:

While we await official confirmation of the ballot results, it appears that Microsoft’s Office Open XML failed to secure the necessary 2/3 vote among so-called P members of ISO. The large number of reported “no” votes (15) and “abstentions” (9) demonstrates the depth of concern around the world over OOXML’s interoperability and openness. The “no’s” included some of the fastest growing economies in the world and major industrialized countries, in stark contrast to ODF, which was approved unanimously (31-0) by ISO in 2006. ODF remains the document format of choice for governments, as it is now being considered for use by countries in every major region of the globe. Microsoft has every right to seek the ISO label for OOXML, but, as the ballot results show, it has a long way to go before it earns it and can be considered a truly open, interoperable document format.

Other vendors, like Sun Microsystems, support the ODF standard and cite a “Digital Dark Age” will form in the future if open standards are not adopted for our documents. What they argue, in layman’s terms, is that documents created under closed formats, like Word, will be unreadable in the future. Currently, documents are created by public sector agencies using different applications that may not be compatible with one another. The aim of the bodies like the ODF alliance is to use an open standard file format like OpenDocument that enables governments and their constituents to use, access and store documents, records and information both today and in the future.

It would appear that the ODF Alliance is please with this result today. That bodes well for ODF as a standard, even if it’s not enjoying those same successes here in the States. With that unanimous vote by ISO in 2006, however, it makes me wonder why this is the case.

EDIT: This is not an outright rejection. Instead, the ISO rejected “fast track” approval status for OOXML.