Foss And Education, a presentation delivered on Software freedom Day 2011

Foss And Education, a presentation delivered on Software freedom Day 2011
PUP Quezon City

Foss and Education

Introducing the Wiki Concept

There are lots of online collaboration tools and document management systems. Wikis, however, remain a simple way of creating large, shared information repositories.

DokuWiki to be specific, but it’s more the idea and use of wikis in general .

Regular readers will know that I’m the first to jump up in support of Wikipedia (as long as it’s tempered by a critical eye and thoughtful users). And I’ve used wikis more generally, whether in class or in various jobs for document management and collaboration.Hosted wikis like those offered by Wikispaces, wikis embedded in tools like Moodle, and have stood up small wikis for special projects. All good stuff.

More recently, though, personally I’ve turned to scribd.com, Google Sites and Google Docs to manage most of my documentation needs. Used together, they make for a pretty robust solution that lends itself to collaboration.

Sure, Google Docs and Sites could handle this, but this felt like a job for a wiki.Classes that require collaboration on an extensive document or that will be used for longer-term reference or guidance (as this particular set of documents will also be). Needs wiki.

Having a look at  the open source DokuWiki, for a few reasons.

1. It’s free
2. It’s incredibly simple to set up. All you need is FTP access (with write privileges) to a single folder on a web server. The DokuWiki folder and subfolders get copied to the server and the rest of the install happens via an install.php file that is accessible via any browser.
3. It’s fully text-based; there are no databases to install or access and files are stored as text making them readable outside the wiki and easily transported to other wiki instances.
4. It’s incredibly fast.
5. It’s very well-documented.
6. It’s customizable with templates and easily installed plugins.
7. The default installation uses a wiki markup syntax, but a WYSIWYG editor can be installed for novice users.
8. It takes a while to get the hang of creating namespaces (essentially directories) and pages for people used to a non-wiki interface, but once understood becomes quite simple for all users to extend the wiki and clearly organize files.
9. It has basic authentication, roles, and access control lists built in, but can easily be connected to a database or LDAP server for more sophisticated authentication needs
10. It scales very easily.

DokuWiki isn’t perfect, of course. Without a bit of thought, the paths that it displays to each document can be cumbersome and navigation isn’t as intuitive as it should be. However, in the brief time that it took me to set it up and have people (even those new to wikis) working together and building our documents, I was able to ensure pretty immediate utility. We can refine later; the goal was to start collaborating fast on a space that could live and be used by a growing group for months to come and we achieved that goal in a day.

Taking a Look at some educational tools available combining use with gmail:

Taking a Look at some educational tools available combining use with gmail:

Exchange 2010 - When combined with a Microsoft Desktop, the eCAL, and the extreme discounts afforded to education, there simply was no better combination.

Zimbra - Close second, but to get something that competed with Exchange you had to go with Zimbra Pro (I think it was called Enterprise before VMware purchased it). But the education discounts were not very good to be perfectly honest and the collaboration part would have cost just as much as our end to end Microsoft platform.

Google - Tied with Microsoft Live@EDU. I have a love/hate relationship with Google. They are becoming the new Microsoft from 15 years ago which is dissappointing. I like their tools, but increasingly to get the full google experience you need all things google which essentially means Chrome. I feel like shortly they will start making things only work on ChromeOS or Android forcing people to move away from Microsoft and Apple. The two biggest issues we had though was the poor integration with Active Directory (and the moving "student data" into the cloud), and at the time we were doing the evaluation google had experienced several large scale public outages.

Microsoft Live@EDU - Essentially this reduced to hosted exchange. We might actually still move out students into this in some sort of co-hosted (staff in house, students in the cloud) model, but there was no significant cost savings. There still isn't much cost savings to move out students to the cloud because administration would still be the same, and only a tiny incremental portion of hardware would be saved.

One must as a rule in the Tech department to get Chrome out as as standard, or at least a dual standard. There are now active directory extensions so it can be managed almost as well as IE8/9, and with a competent tech group there are not many applications that must run in IE (some activeX sites still require it). There is little reason to not run two browsers *if* you can educate your end users. Right now we run Firefox and IE, but we are about to stop supporting Firefox and swap it with Chrome. Our education push happens later this fall.

As for using IE with gmail, We have not found any problems at all. Disabling compatibility view pretty much resolves any issues at all, and make sure your flash and java are current is all that should be required. I have found that some VLC plugins have recently been causing me grief with Chrome indirectly causing Flash to crash, but I don't quite understand why. I can repeat this with tools like uStream on demand,,, removing VLC resolves it.

Finally, people should  considered the actual Gmail tips? They have some pretty good stuff on there, not to mention the icons for the ninja make people smile every time. :)

https://mail.google.com/mail/help/tips.html


Something else:

Has anyone looked at Karoshi Linux, Moodle or Joomla recently?

Karoshi Linux (now the Linux Schools Project) http://www.linuxgfx.co.uk/demo.html has been around for quite a while, comes with a rather full & integrated suite of features, driven by LDAP, with a Samba PDC to support Windows clients, It sports Moodle, Joomla and standard e-mail. Moodle has all manner of integration modules written for it. Is this not groupware-ish enough for a stand-alone school, or even a small school district?

Now, I'm curious what features Exchange and Zimbra provide that add value to the process flow of an edu organization besides the functional equivalent of email & scheduling. Are the needs pretty basic, or is it the drive for customization that leads bigger schools to big packages with big support?

Also.... at what scale is this discussion? If we're talking an entire school district, then Microsoft pretty much has the school district market sewn up with their discounting & the typical IT budgets of a municipal school district.

For smaller- to-mid-sized individual, independent schools, it used to not be cost effecting to become a Microsoft shop (w/ the lack of per-seat discounts afforded the district-scale organizations).  MS changed their site & district pricing to accommodate smaller districts and/or independent schools.
There's so much that could and should be done, but the sad state of primary & secondary education IT is stuck in a short-sighted quagmire. The small schools can't afford the help to drive innovation, the bigger schools just throw money at the problem.

LibreOffice Release Out

The Document Foundation’s LibreOffice, the OpenOffice office suite fork, is on a winning streak. No sooner than Ubuntu lets the world know that LibreOffice is its office suite of choice, than the next day the first full, shipping version of the program, LibreOffice 3.3, is released.

LibreOffice 3.3 includes numerous new features when compared to its OpenOffice parent. To my mind, the most important of these for modern office workers is that it has much better import and export tools for Microsoft Office 2007 and above OpenXML formats. Love them or hate them–I hate them myself–more and more businesses are using these formats and being able to work with them is becoming a business-critical feature. In addition, LibreOffice can also now import Adobe PDF, Microsoft Works, and Lotus Word Pro documents and has better WordPerfect document import facilities.

Screenshots: New features from LibreOffice 3.3

According to The Document Foundation, “LibreOffice 3.3 also incorporates all the new features of OpenOffice.org 3.3, such as new custom properties handling; embedding of standard PDF fonts in PDF documents; new Liberation Narrow font; increased document protection in Writer and Calc; auto decimals digits for ‘General’ format in Calc; 1 million rows in a spreadsheet; new options for CSV import in Calc; insert drawing objects in Charts; hierarchical axis labels for Charts; improved slide layout handling in Impress; new easier to use print interface; more options for Changing case; and colored sheet Tabs in Calc.”

The Document Foundation also states that it will add new features faster than OpenOffice because its “community of developers has been able to build their own and independent process, and stand on their feet in a very short time (in relation to the size of the code and the ambitions of the project).” Indeed, this in part why the fork happened. Regardless of how one sees Oracle’s management of Sun’s former open-source projects, OpenOffice was long known for being very slow to update compared to more agile open-source projects.

As Michael Meeks, Novell Distinguished Engineer and Document Foundation community member told me, “The growth and output of this community, in just a short period of time, underscores the need for and importance of a truly open project dedicated to creating the best office suite available–period. Now that we have gotten started we only expect the project to pick up steam and there is still plenty of work to do for everyone from developers to artists to translators. With new contributors joining every day, LibreOffice will continue to deliver the innovative features and functionality that users want. ”

Looking ahead, Caolan McNamara, Red Hat’s Desktop Engineer in charge of OpenOffice.org and now LibreOffice, said in a statement, “We are excited: this is our very first stable release, and therefore we are eager to get user feedback, which will be integrated immediately in the code and released very soon. After February, we will be moving to a real time based, predictable, transparent and public release schedule, according to the desire of the Engineering Steering Committee and the requests of the users”. For further details, see the LibreOffice development roadmap.

LibreOffice 3.3 is now available for both direct and BitTorrent downloads. There are versions for Windows; 32 and 64-bits RPM package Linux distributions, such as Red Hat and Novell; 32 and 64-bit DEB package Linux distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu; and both PowerPC and Intel Macs.


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Sabily : Looking at a Muslim-oriented Linux Distribution of Linux:

Sabily is an operating system, like MS Windows or Mac OS X. Without an operating system, a computer is unusable, and Windows is not the only OS available!

As Sabily is free,and already includes all software one needs in one's everyday tasks, and its customized specifically for Muslims. And though one doesnt buy licensed Windows (as is the case most of the time in the Philippines,One should not use pirated copies because then it means supporting Microsoft by adding to the impression it's the only OS available.

Where is Sabily Based?
Its dervied from the  Ubuntu operating system as a groundwork. Ubuntu is a GNU/Linux distribution whose goal is to provide an easy-to-use, up-to-date, stable and free system, also for companies. Sabily customizes Ubuntu by removing, modifying and adding software, and also customizes the graphic design to make a system adapted to Muslims.

There might be a question as to if there is company like Microsoft which develops Sabily?
Since it was built by a community of voluntaries coming from all over the world (France, Tunisia, Egypt, Indonesia etc.). The maintenance of this software depends on this community, but one can as well participate, as a developer, a graphic designer, a tester or if simply just to share ideas.

What are the main features of Sabily?
The main software are: Zekr and Mus-haf Othman (Quran study tools), Minbar and Firefox-praytimes (prayer times applications), Monajat (application that popups prayers every predetermined time), Hijra (islamic calendar) and WebStrict (parental control tool). Arabic language is also well supported. And of course the graphic design is also customized (see screenshots).

What other software are included in Sabily?
OpenOffice (word processor, spreasheet, presentation), Firefox (web browser), Pidgin (instant messaging), F-spot (photos management), Gimp (image manipulation program) and other multimedia software (video/audio). All of this in included in the "small" version of Sabily, but the "full" version contains dozens of other software! (educational software, tools and entire Quran recitations.

One simply has to download the ISO file and to burn it on a DVD, then to start your computer from the DVD. You will have the choice to test or to install the system. In a first time it is advised to test it because it is safe for the computer, nothing will be written on the hard disk. Sabilycan be even tested directly from Windows, by using a Virtual Box image.

 

It used to be called Ubuntu Muslim Edition but the name was later changed perhaps due to the feedback of some of its users.

Here are some of the features available on its 10.04 series (following the standard *buntu release system:

F-Spot replaces the GIMP
PiTiVi video editor added
GNOME 2.30
New themes: Ambiance and Radiance
New wallpaper
Linux kernel 2.6.32
New nVidia hardware driver
Gwibber social media application
Faster boot time, with a different look and feel on the bootsplash screen
Ubuntu One adds contacts and bookmark sharing
Ubuntu One music store integrated into Rhythmbox
Ubuntu Software Center 2.0

For those who aren’t familiar with them, Zekr and Thawab are Quranic study tools. The parental controls use Gnome Nanny to filter the web, email, etc. Based on what I saw of it, Gnome Nanny looked like a reasonably good parental filter. Muslim parents will have to be the final judge of whether or not it’s really enough to make the Internet safe for Muslim children.

It stumbles a bit though when it doesn’t always provide native language translations of some of the Arabic content.

Since it’s based on Ubuntu, Sabily is fine for beginner, intermediate or advanced Linux users.

For Muslims who have computers and have children around, one definitely give Sabily a download.

Summary Table:

Name of distribution:	Ubuntu Muslim Edition (Sabily) 10.04
Web Site:	http://www.sabily.org
Price:	Free
Pros:	Excellent selection of software, including some very useful Islamic applications. Beautiful selection of screensavers, as well as attractive Islamic wallpaper.
Cons:	Leans too heavily on the Arabic language and doesn’t always provide English translations in applications for those who don’t read or speak Arabic.
Suitable For:	Beginner, intermediate or advanced users.
Summary:	Sabily 10.04 is a fine update for anyone looking for a Muslim version of Ubuntu. It takes all of Ubuntu 10.04′s new features and gives them an Islamic flavor.
Rating:	Above average

Google for Education

Using Google as an educational tool.

Students, teachers and staff can share ideas more quickly and get things done more effectively when they have access to the same powerful communication and sharing tools. Google Applications provides email, sharable online calendars, instant messaging tools and even a dedicated websites to faculty, students and staff for free. There's no hardware or software to install or maintain, since everything is delivered through a standard web browser -- anytime, from anyplace.

We have tested this with our students in AABC, as part of the classes conducted by the faculty is online, they are allowed to use the tools of their choice, skype, yahoo messenger or Google.  And with the google package, we were able to maximize learning and introduce our students

You can mix and match from the following services for your entire school :

Gmail - Offer email to your faculty, students and staff with 2 gigabytes of storage per account, search tools to help them find information fast, and instant messaging built right into the browser (chat can easily be disabled for the whole school if you don't want students to be able to IM with their accounts). One good thing nowadays is that Gmail has both video and talk capabilities.

Google Talk - Teachers and students can call or send instant messages to their contacts for free -- anytime, anywhere in the world. Imagine the possibilities for people collaborating on projects from different locations.

Google Calendar - Everyone can organize their schedules and share events, meetings and entire calendars with others. You can even publish the school calendar on your website to let families know about events like back-to-school nights, homecoming and vacation days.

Google Docs - Students and teachers can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations and then collaborate with each other in real-time right inside a web browser window.

Google Sites - Create a class site and edit it the same way you'd edit a document -- no technical expertise required. Your site can bring together all the information you want to share with your colleagues and students, including docs, calendars, photos, videos and attachments.

Blogger-Teaching the use of blogs to enhance their communication skills also is another way of allowing them to express themselves.


With schools who are looking into new productivity tools to enhance classroom learning and participation, using google as a part of your tools in enhancing classroom instruction can be both a transformative and learning experience.

Increase the school years? Or increase the quality of education?

Increase the school years? Or increase the quality of education?

Headlines burst out saying that the current education secretary was proposing adding to more years to Basic Education meaning 12 years. Among the reasons stated were the following: 1. additional enhancements in skill sets for employment, preparing them for college (academically), and making our students globally competitive.

Laudable if the government has enough resources to begin with considering the public knowledge that the government budget was siphoned by the previous administration (according to the present president). For an educator sitting at the helm of Government and the agency tasked to formulate and oversee guidelines in implementation of educating the hope of tomorrow; that's a big job.

But it seems that the present education secretary has been sitting in an ivory tower to start talking about immediate curriculum revisions, adding another year; and wasting the time of curriculum developers in order to make a wishlist of the best educational system he can dream of.

In the 80's we were sitting in a class of 20, in the 90's in a class of 40, now i guess a class of 60-70 is an average class in public schools. Add to this fewer classrooms, fewer teachers, books, chairs and even classroom time. More time is spent on the average by every kid on DOTA than the class room. Gone are the days when one goes to school for 8 hours a day.

The education secretary should've considered all of this before jumping the gun on the wrong issue to be addressed. Considering that our curriculum is defective; how can one see the proposed remedies and solutions if one does not answer the basic question of adequacy. The basic adequeties such as classrooms,armchairs, books,teachers and classroom time.

Activists have been critical of previous administrations for lack of attention to education on the basics that we have previously mentioned has been on the banner stories whenever the opening of classes would come in; and would always be the rallying cry of every youth leader marching the streets.

The emergence of a so-called people's mandate who was elected for president meant he would be selecting the best minds to make the first steps towards recovery and healing of this nation.

Would that decision mean that we will have better equipped public schools? Or an error that would make the parents and students suffer for 12 years?

The answer lies before your eyes.

10 reasons why your kids should be using Linux

 As It professionals and Educators, we speak mostly of the professional aspects of our jobs. The problem is, when we go home and, in many cases, our IT work continues. Part of it involves keeping our children’s computers running and running well. Sometimes, that job can be a bigger challenge than the task of keeping the adults in our business up and running.

But why put yourself through this when you can install Linux on a machine for your child/teen and avoid the headaches? article , are 10 good reasons why you should do just this. In the end, you can decide for yourself whether they’re reason enough to migrate those young users away from other operating systems

1: Viruses/malware

This reason is always at the top of our list. We all know kids are prone to opening and installing things they shouldn’t. Because you can’t watch your children 100 percent of the time, you can’t know where they’re getting those applications or attachments from. You can make sure those machines have antivirus and anti-spyware, but why even take the chance? When your kids are using the Linux operating system, this concern becomes moot.

2: Security

This can be summed up easily. If you don’t give your children the root password, they can’t run with root privileges. Of course, you hit a little snag when using a distribution like Ubuntu. For any sudo-based operating system, you will need to edit the /etc/sudoers file to give your young users the privileges they need.

3: Cost effectiveness

Let’s say you have a younger user who is getting a hand-me-down machine that needs an OS reinstall. If you don’t have that copy of Windows around, you’re stuck purchasing a new copy. This can also be applied to any number of applications you might have to pay for. Avoid these costs altogether by handing that child the same machine running Linux. You won’t have pay for the OS license or any application that child might need or want. On top of that, they’ll have the Add/Remove Software tool ,where they can hunt around and find just about anything they would need… all on their own! You can also run a modern distribution on much less hardware than you will need for Vista or Windows 7.

4: Age-specific tools

Did you know there are distributions/software groups designed specifically for young adults and children? There is Sugar, geared for K-6, Edubuntu, for ages 3-18,LinuxKidX, for ages 2-15, Foresight Kids, for ages 3-12, and many others. These age-specific tools are well suited for the group they target with graphics and language tuned for the age range. And some of the distributions geared specifically for younger kids lock the operating system down tightly so that only certain tasks can be run.

5: Netbooks

Little kids make great netbook users. They have smaller hands and fingers that can handle a cramped keyboard, and they can easily sit with a small machine in their lap. And the Linux operating system is ideally suited to run on netbooks. You can install either a full-blown OS or a netbook-specific OS, along with whatever software you need on the netbook, making it an excellent choice for the younger audiences.

6: Agile learners

If you put a Linux-based machine in front of a young user, you won’t hear complaints like, “Why can’t it run Quicken!” or “I need my custom payroll app to run on this!” Most kids will master the Linux operating system quickly (and adroitly), with a minimal learning curve. Young minds adapt so well, your kids won’t have any trouble adjusting to any differences. You could probably sit a child down with a Gentoo box running CDE or AfterStep and he or she would have it figured out in less time than it took you to explain what Linux means.

7: Staying in step

I know this one will bring out the ire in many readers. I’m not saying any operating system is used more than any other. But Linux is used worldwide. Many countries as a whole have adopted Linux. The future of Linux is very bright — and it seems to be getting brighter. So why not give your children a head start on what could possibly be the future of the PC? This also applies for those fledgling IT pros out there. If Windows is so user friendly, kids spending most of their time on Linux should have no problem grasping Windows. In fact, I would argue that it will enhance the child’s ability to fully grasp the operating system and how the PC really works.

8: Learning opportunities

Open source emboldens education. It practically screams, “Open me up and learn!” What better way to help youngsters learn than by giving them the ability to do just that? With really curious children, the desire to learn is extraordinary — so why lock them down with closed source software? When a child is exposed to open source software and an open source operating system, the educational opportunities are limitless.

9: A lesson in community

This one might seem a bit of a stretch… but I am an idealist, so I hope you’ll go with it. Teaching children the value of open source software helps them understand community. Although your young users aren’t likely to open up the source code of the applications they’re using, in today’s constantly evolving, community-driven world, they need every advantage they can get as they grow up. Having a sound understanding of open source will help them to understand, at an early age, what it means to really work with and for a team. Using Linux at such an early age also indirectly teaches children the benefit of volunteering — something many of us need to learn more about.

10: Content filtering

Linux has numerous ways to handle content filtering for your young users. FromDansGuardian to SquidGuard to the manual editing of the /etc/hosts file, you can filter content in Linux far more granularly than you can in Windows — and just as easily. Add to this the ability to lock down what your young user can and can’t do (without having to add third-party software), and Linux quickly becomes a safe computing environment for your child.

How to sell clients on Linux

By Jack Wallen

(Jack Wallen shares tips on how to pitch Linux to clients. He also explains how convincing a client to go with Linux can have long-term benefits for your consultancy )

This article pas taken from TECH Republic. Something Foss Advocates should consider

In such a Windows-centric world, pitching Linux to clients who are not tech savvy is not as hard as you might think — you just have to know the product and know where (and how) the product fits into the client’s infrastructure. Here are some examples.

A client (an SMB with 25-50 users) comes to you with the following needs:

• Desktop for each user
• Networking infrastructure
• Server for email
• Server for Web
• Server for storage

The client states up-front that keeping the price as low as possible is key. Although this client may not be a cash cow for you, you know they are connected to a plethora of other possible clients, so you want to do as much for them as you can. Here’s how you can break this down to save them money, keep their systems up and running (with little maintenance), and ensure they refer you to their peers.

• Desktops: You will want to keep these machines on Windows; you don’t want to add Linux into the mix in such a way that will confuse the client’s employees.
• Networking infrastructure: This could be a grab bag of any hardware you want.
• Servers: You could go the Windows SBS route, but then you will have to deal with CALS and maintenance, which will raise the cost. Instead, this is where you can deploy Linux. You can either run all three systems on one machine (using a LAMP server with the inclusion of Postfix for email, ClamAV for antivirus, and rsync for storage). That server machine is going to run like a champ, costing the owner next to nothing in maintenance fees. So the client will save the cost of the OS and the CALS, as well as the cost of maintenance calls to effectively keep the server up and running.

However, let’s say that you have a client who shows an interest in Linux as a desktop environment, but he is concerned about that one application he must use that only has a Windows version. The client likes the idea of the stability and reliability of Linux, so he wants his employees using that desktop, but there is still that one application. What do you do? Virtual machines. This is a selling point that many consultants overlook. With the help of VirtualBox, your clients can run (with only the cost of the Windows license) that one application within a virtual instance of Windows on top of a Linux OS. To sell this approach, you should outline the following benefits:

• The stability and reliability of the Linux OS.
• Running the Windows application in a virtual machine means that, should something get corrupted (or break in any way) within the Windows virtual machine, the user can simply close that instance and open a previously saved, working, state.
• The virtual machine could be served up from the Linux server so that any user would have access. This doesn’t mean everyone can be running the same image at once, but it would make deploying an image easy (e.g., copy the image from one virtual machine to another).

Let clients try Linux

If a client wants to play around with Linux to see if it will fit their needs, a really good approach is to give the client a Live CD of a distribution and tell them to boot it up. The Live instance will not change their current OS, and they could get easily get an idea if Linux will work. You can take this one step further by rolling your own Live CD (with a tool such as SUSE Studio) and adding your branding to the desktop, as well as to applications you think the client will want and/or need.

See long-term benefits

There are so many ways to sell Linux to your clients. The biggest selling point is the reliability of the operating system. Will you make a lot of money using Linux? Not directly. But the customers you satisfy will keep coming back and send new clients your way.

Related TechRepublic resources

• The Linux consultant: The Maytag repairman of the IT world
• Linux can do that
• Assess open source products’ solvency for your client’s sake

Ubuntu? Personal and non-Geeky?

‘We positioned Ubuntu as a version of Linux that was personal and non-technical’ 
Mark Shuttleworth, Founder, Canonical and Ubuntu Linux on why he thinks Ubuntu will succeed on the desktop, where other equally famed competitors have failed
Having earned the distinction of becoming the first African to take a flight into space, Mark Shuttleworth undertook a voyage into another unchartered territory. He started the Ubuntu Linux project, with a goal to creating a high-quality desktop and server OS. ‘Ubuntu’—named after an African word which means ‘humanity to others’—has since then become the most popular GNU/Linux distribution. Ubuntu Linux has been positioned as a platform for the masses rather than being confined to the specialists.
Mark Shuttleworth, Founder, Canonical and Ubuntu Linux shared his thoughts with Srikanth RP on the increasing significance of open source, the roadmap for the cloud and why he thinks Ubuntu will succeed on the desktop, where other equally famed competitors have failed.
From an era when open source faced a lot of antagonism, now even competitors are opening up their code. How do you see this shift in terms of the future of IT?
I have no doubt in my mind that open source represents the future of the software industry. This can be clearly seen from the number of customer engagements involving Linux, and from the backing of huge companies such as IBM and Oracle. Even Microsoft today has backed away from its earlier rigid stance. The driver is clearly the success of open source. Today, end-user companies are skeptical of those companies that suggest that open source does not encourage innovation.


Unlike other Linux distributions, Ubuntu has managed to achieve a significant presence on the desktop. What have you done differently?
While Linux as a community has done extremely well in the server and data center space, the real challenge lies in taking Linux to the desktop. When we started the Ubuntu project, we quickly realized that distribution only plays a limited role in the success of the platform.
We focused on substantially improving the experience of the Linux desktop by making it more visually appealing and easy to use. We positioned Ubuntu as a version of Linux that was personal and non-technical. In a way, we have been pioneers in bringing the benefits of Linux to a larger audience. The results—as tracked by independent websites—show that Ubuntu has been steadily increasing in popularity over the past five years.
While Ubuntu is one of the most successful products in the desktop Linux space, it still has a long way to go before it can even think of upsetting the apple cart of a dominant vendor such as Microsoft. Why do you think Ubuntu will succeed (in the long run) where other equally strong competitors have failed?
With our platform, we believe we have significant opportunities to play on the server, cloud and the desktop space. By putting the user at the heart of our design, we have significantly enhanced the user experience.
For example, we have taken initiatives such as the innovative ‘100 Paper Cuts’ initiative organized with the Ubuntu Community which allowed users to nominate minor annoyances that impacted their enjoyment of the platform.
Till date, over 50 fixes have been committed. Industry leaders such as Dell have partnered with us to put Ubuntu on some of their desktop and laptop models. And evidence suggests that the percentage of users that do not replace Ubuntu on the device is growing. This is a time of great change in the IT industry, and we believe that we are in a
position to surprise established players.
How is Ubuntu performing on the cloud landscape?
On Amazon EC2—which is the dominant public cloud offering—Ubuntu is the Number One base OS for organizations building workloads to deploy in the cloud. With our enterprise cloud offering the same APIs as Amazon EC2, you can build your applications to run on either platform.
This means that applications that run on your private cloud can be seamlessly put into the public Amazon cloud, and vice versa. You can even configure the system to ensure that overloaded applications on a private cloud can expand to use resources from the public cloud. We are focused on simplifying user experience—be it the
desktop or the cloud.

Google Chrome Market Share Surges, Apple's Safari Dead In Water, Microsoft's IE Drowning Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-chrome-mark

April browser share numbers from Net Applications show a continuation from the same story we've seen over the last two years:

• Google's Chrome and Firefox are gaining lots of share
• Apple's Safari is gaining a tiny bit of share
• Microsoft's Internet Explorer is falling out of bed

The IE losses and Firefox gains are an old story. Microsoft shows no signs of staunching the bleed.

The more important story here is potentially that Google's Chrome is gaining share much faster than Apple's Safari. This highlights the power of Google's "open source" software model, as compared to Apple's integrated hardware-software combo. The software versus hardware/software model, of course, is what doomed Apple in its first battle to the near-death (against Microsoft). So it's worth watching this one closely.

Here are the numbers from Net Applications. Check out that steady Chrome gain. Check out how paltry the Safari gains have been despite the proliferation of Apple devices. (Click for larger)

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-chrome-market-share-2010-5#ixzz0pfiJkMiU