Plan-B for Software Documentation

While Everex started selling its low cost PC for <$200 at WalMart, it now offers the motherboard, CPU and OS bundled for $60. Add some memory and a hard drive ($40) and salvage an old computer case, power supply, keyboard and mouse ($0) and your are up and running for $100 and a little sweat equity.

LinuxDevices.com has an in depth report about Everex’s plans for its Linux and Google applications based $200 PC. LinuxDevices reports that Everex hopes to sell 50,000 to 60,000 PC’s through WalMart. The main concern for profitability are the support costs, which Everex hopes to keep under $30 per sale.

The developer board comes with the CPU and a DVD containing the ready to install gOS Operating System. According to the article, gOS is an Ubuntu based Linux distribution with the Enlightenment Window manager for the low cost PC is called gOS like in Google OS for its inclusion of all Google online tools available and pre installed. The vision is to use online Google tools for Search, E-Mail, Calendar, Bookmarks, Text Documents, Spreadsheets, and more. If needed local applications, such as the office suite OpenOffice.org are included as well. gOS is also open source and available for download, but it appears the version delivered with the board or the PC is pre configured to the hardware and adds programs for multimedia (playing mp3, DVD, etc.). You can’t expect an abundance of performance from the Via C7 processor, however, it does a good job with web browsing and running basic applications and multi media playback.

I don’t know how you visualize ecosystems, for me they resemble a picture of a jungle with lots of nurishing water, beautiful plants, colorful birds and some dangerous snakes lurking on trees.

The newest take on the multitude of products derived from OpenOffice.org is to call it an ecosystem. While Sun Microsystem thinks the multiple distributions of OpenOffice.org are an ecosystem, I often feel lost in the Jungle that is. Lets list the well known distributions:

• OpenOffice.org - the “Original”
• StarOffice - the commercial version from Sun Micosystems
• StarSuite - a sun distribution targeted at the Asian market
• StarOffice from Google - a free commercial (?) distribution
• OpenOffice.org Novell Edition - free version with new developments by Novell and in the pipeline for integration into the “Original”
• NeoOffice - a distribution with integration into Mac OS X Aqua UI, also contains some Novell additions
• Retro Office - a distribution from the NeoOffice project, adding some of the Novell derived integration but not the Aqua UI integration
• … various commercial distributions that sell the office suite with minor alterations and support plans

The jungle becomes more dense if you consider that Open Office calls its development steps “release”, while Sun counts Star Office in “version.” I find it also confusing that Sun Microsystems does offer support with its commercial Star Office but also offers support plans for Open Office.

I do welcome various distributions of the same core open source base. However, what confuses me is the product strategy of Sun. Wouldn’t it be much easier if they offered a commercial OpenOffice.org Plus packages with the add ons that can’t be licensed under open source licenses? This would simplify the value for the buyer and unify the support plan offering. It would also put the power of Sun’s advertising behind the whole project and put more mindshare into Open Office, while still retaining Sun’s ability to make money from its work.

Google pack has added StarOffice 8 to its line of essential applications. StarOffice is the commercial version of OpenOffice.org produced by Sun Microsystems, adding non free elements such as fonts and spell check library. You can buy StarOffice for $70 for a single license from Sun Microsystems, while Google gives it away.

This addition of Sun products to the Google pack stems from the Multi Year Strategic Agreement between Sun Microsystems and Google, reached in October 2005. The installer includes also a Java runtime environment, used by some components of StarOffice and on the list of software components Sun likes to distribute.

I currently happen to be with my Laptop in Barcelona, Spain. However, my PC is set up en_US with US time zone, etc. Now for Google I seem to have become a Spaniard now. When I type in www.google.com I get redirected to www.google.es, when I search something in the Firefox searchbar I get results from www.google.es. When I go to websites that serve Google AdSense, I get served Spanish advertisements.

This is nuts, because I do not speak Spanish and I can’t read it and my browser is set to the languages en, en_US, ge and pt. So no Spanish. And the site I visit, the business network LinkedIn is only available in English. So why is Google serving me like I’m a native, just because my IP address is currently in Spain?

Can anybody tell me how this is useful for me (do NO evil) or for the advertisers (do NO evil)?

In my book this is evil. It breaks the HTTP protocol, because that says the browser does determine what languages it prefers to accept and not Google or its misguided idea of localization. If they want to show me advertisement that are local to my location, fine. But please in a language that I do understand. Otherwise Google is waisting its ad space.

Dell Computers is further responding to its customer’s public request. After offering some of their PCs pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux, they now offer an increasing number of PCs with only a minimal set of pre-installed software packages. Gone are the AOL installers, the music players, the DVD player programs, if the customer wishes and specifies so at the time of order.

However three programs remain:

• Google Tools - for correcting misspelled URL’s
• PDF Reader - To read documentation delivered in this format
• Anti Virus Software (trial versions) - “Because customers expect their computers to be protected at first boot”

To me only the Acrobat Reader makes sense, as not being able to read the documentation is not very helpful. Although one could offer the documentation either in MS Help format or in HTML, both being universally accessible with the plain operating system. Although HTML could be debatable, once IE is stripped. but in most cases some kind of browser would be installed.

The utility of Google Tools just for mis typed URL’s strikes me as odd. I don’t like this kind of technology, because it tries to guess what I want and the guesses are more often than not correct.

Last, but not least, trial version of Anti Virus Software, because customers expect it to be installed? You must be kidding me! Doesn’t the current versions of MS already include such protective software? So why need another trial version installed? I don’t like and use any of these resource killers. But this argument does not hold water for me.

So I guess Dell simply has long running contracts with these vendors and it can’t easily bail out of them. With Dell’s responses to its customers wishes, I’m hopeful, sooner or later these things will be gone as well.

It will be interesting to see how this will change the landscape. Removing such programs from PC’s will certainly be not too good for Dell’s bottom line in the short run, as the vendors of these pay a hardware manufacturer to install them. It also should have impact on the companies that use these methods to market their products. One option we might see, is that Microsoft, the still predominant player in this market either needs to lower its prices to make up for the lost revenue or it will integrate these into the OS upfront and make up for its shrinking share of business. However, Microsoft is expanding the OS functionality into anything that has successfully be developed by others. MS included web-browser, anti virus, firewall, multi media player, video creation, and much more and bundled it as part of the OS. We all know what followed.

I’m still waiting for OpenOffice.org as optional install.

Most user of Plan-B for OpenOffice.org don’t notice, but we do deploy Google Analytics to track visitors and a myriad of other data.

However, I’m a bit disappointed about Google Analytics last update. While the added features are much appreciated, I have to notice that a lot of buttons and links getting to this functionality are broken. I can’t set my own date range for the analysis anymore and I can’t click on the link for the new (re-appearing) hourly view.

I guess I’m getting what I’m paying for. After all this service is free.

If you are a Writer, using OpenOffice.org as you main tool, Dimitri Popov’s “Writer for Writers and Advanced Users” might be the book for you to read. And Dimitri does know his OpenOffice, as he also publishes the “WriterTools” extension. WriterTools in version 0.7.1 includes features such as:

• Lookup Tool - select text and lookup it up in several online references, including Cambridge Dictionaries, WordNet, and Google Define.
• Google Translate - select text and translate it to different languages using the Google Translate service.
• Email Backup - Backup your currently open document per E-Mail.
• Multi-format Backup macro - saves the currently open text document Writer) as Word, RTF, and TXT formats in one command.
• Open FTP Document - open a document stored on an FTP server and work on it locally.
• Convert to DokuWiki converts the current document into DokuWiki format.
• Start/Stop Timer - keep track how long you work on which document and save the data in the accompanying WriterDB database. Use it as you please, such as for billing etc.

This set of tools utilizes the new OpenOffice.org extension infrastructure. Which seems to gain momentum in general.

I find the DokuWiki macro real nifty. I bet, if it would be MediaWiki as output, a lot of Wikipedia authors would become OOo converts.

Apparently, interest to use OpenOffice.org as a tool to other means is growing. I just discovered that OpenMRS, an open source Medical Record System framework, plans to use OpenOffice.org as an alternative Data Entry mechanism.

More precisely, Matthew Harrison proposed this project for the Google summer of Code challenge, and apparently got accepted. Michael started blogging about his project. Currently he is reading up on OpenOffice.org macros programming and XForms, which he intends to use for formalized data entry.

Google’s summer of code pays student interns for the summer to create open source code for many open source projects. It has been quite popular with students from around the world. While the stipend of $4,500, is nice compensation for something a student might do anyhow, it is a lot of money to many students in other countries. In any case it does help many open source projects to get some additional resources which they mentor and help to achieve the project’s goal.

OpenMRS is an initiative to build a much needed medical record system framework, that is affordable for developing countries to manage their are number of patients or such diseases like AID/HIV. Impressively, the project is only one year old, but has implementations in seven countries and collected millions of patient observations.

Google has a new lab project “Google Accessible Search” which ranks the results for ease of accessibility.

This new service (currently on Google Labs) adds a small twist to Google web search: in addition to finding the most relevant results from Google as usual, Accessible Search further prioritizes results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. When you search from the Accessible site, you’ll get results that are prioritized based on their usability. This tends to favor pages with few visual distractions, and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op’s technology, which emphasizes search results based on specialized interests. (from Friends of Google newsletter)

Search for “tutorials” on Google (regular) and you find 468 millions of results and on top are some that are reach in graphics. The first item is Section 508 compliant. However, the second item, Sun’s Java tutorials violates this important accessibility test.

Search for “tutorials” on Accessible Search and you’ll find a different set of supposedly clear cut text based websites with no or little images. In my test this is not to obvious. Number one, the University at Albany, has only a header image. However number two, CProgramming.com, does create pop-ups, is quite image rich and fails the Section 508 test as well.

I’m not sure if this is so helpful for blind people or those with other impairments.