Joomla Now Powering Over 2,600 Government Sites - Crosses 23 Million downloads!

At Twin Geckos we've been using Joomla for years.  Way back when it was called Mambo and after a dispute over trying to lock it down the project forked and became Joomla.  Since then Joomla has exploded!  

According to BuiltWith, of the top million websites using content management systems (or CMSes), three systems own more than 75 percent of the total market share: WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. (All of which are open source, by the way.) Many are likely most familiar with WordPress, which TechCrunch has covered quite a bit (and uses to power most its sites, for full disclosure). WordPress is the most popular CMS on the Web, running 62 percent of the top million websites that use a CMS, according to BuiltWith, with Joomla now ranking second at 10 percent.

There are a ton of these content management systems out there, even though the top 3 claim most of the market share. And, as BuiltWith’s roster shows, microblogging and blog publishing services are often grouped in with CMSes — as some are able to be customized into a CMS — even though their scopes tend to be far more specialized. Services like Blogger and Tumblr, to name two, are sometimes lumped in with CMSes and have attracted a lot of coverage in the press, some of which is for good reason.

See the Washington Post article.

Oracle gives up on OpenOffice after community forks the project

In a statement issued on Friday, Oracle announced that it intends to discontinue commercial development of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The move comes several months after key members of the OOo community and a number of major corporate contributors forked OOo to create a vendor-neutral alternative.


OOo is one of many open source software projects that Oracle obtained in its acquisition of Sun. OOo has long been plagued by governance issues and friction between its corporate stakeholders. Sun's copyright assignment policies and bureaucratic code review process significantly hindered community participation in the project. Oracle declined to address these issues after its acquisition of Sun and exacerbated the friction by failing to engage with the OOo community in a transparent and open way.


A group of prominent OOo contributors eventually decided to fork the project, creating an alternative called LibreOffice quickly gained momentum
. They founded a nonprofit organization called The Document Foundation (TDF) in order to create a truly vendor-neutral governance body for the software. LibreOffice is based on the OOo source code, but it also incorporates a large number of other improvements driven by its own developer community.


Most of the major companies that have historically been involved in OOo development have moved to stand behind TDF and LibreOffice, including Red Hat, Novell, Google, and Canonical. LibreOffice has also succeeded in attracting a significant portion of OOo's independent contributors. The ecosystem-wide shift in favor of LibreOffice has left Oracle as the only major party still developing OOo, forcing the company to compete against the broader community.


The power of the fork


When TDF was founded, the group's leadership invited Oracle to participate in the hope that the database giant would be willing to hand over the OOo trademark and allow the vendor-neutral governance body to take over stewardship of the project. Oracle rejected the idea and then went a step further by pressuring TDF supporters to step down from their leadership roles in the OOo project.
Read more here...


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This to me is one of the great things about an open project. It can't be bought and destroyed like a proprietary product. Instead the people behind it that were contributing to it's success create a fork and continue on.


Oracle learned the hard way that you can't just assimilate what competes against you like when it is an open project like you can with a closed one. Sun acquired MySQL and Oracle acquired Sun. Oracle owns the rights to the MySQL name/etc BUT it immediately forked many ways...


Drizzle, a lightweight fork of MySQL, released its first general availability version today. Drizzle is designed for multicore environments and cloud applications. Unlike NoSQL databases, Drizzle still uses structure queried language. Instead, it attempts to improve performance by cutting the database server down to its core.

MariaDB is based on MySQL and is available under the terms of the GPL v2 license.

It's developed by the MariaDB community with Monty Program Ab as its main steward.

MariaDB is kept up to date with the latest MySQL release from the same branch.

In most respects MariaDB will work exactly as MySQL: all commands, interfaces, libraries and APIs that exist in MySQL also exist in MariaDB. There is no need to convert databases to switch to MariaDB. MariaDB is a true drop in replacement of MySQL! Additionally, MariaDB has a lot of nicenew features that you can take advantage of.

Charles Leadbeater on innovation and open source

Sometimes it can be difficult for people not familiar with Open Source to understand what a BIG DEAL it is. In this slightly dated but still true speech by Charles Leadbeater he goes into great detail about how when the users become the producers great things happen. If you've never checked out TED it is a great source for ideas!

Rescuing a School Technology Program: Linux Thin-client Overview

Steve Hargadon, who spearheaded an OpenSource project to assist hurricane Katrina victims, clarifies the benefits of using Linux Thin-clients.

Like many schools, Grace Lutheran School struggled to keep up with the cost of computer technology. With 250 students and an annual technology budget of $15,000, Principal Dennis Fangmann had to be creative to keep his 60 classroom Pentium I and Pentium II computers running. Most of his budget was being used instead to keep the 16 staff computers and Windows network server current, leaving little for student computer upgrades.

What Mr. Fangmann didn't realize yet was that many of the student computers weren't even running well enough for the students to use. As he has since said: "The teachers didn't want to tell me, but as you can imagine, the Pentium I computers running Windows 95 were seen as dinosaurs by our older students." The solution was to convert those systems into Linux Thin-clients. Converting those 60 Pentium I and Pentium II computers for 250 students was relatively painless. Today the students benefit from having faster performance and the many pre-loaded OpenSource educational programs available for free.

Read more: http://reallylinux.com/docs/ltsp-oped.shtml

Windows package manager

 windows-package-manager

Npackd

If you have used any Linux platform or other open operating systems you've come to love the simple to use and almost bulletproof package management system that they used.  Now Windows has such a system!


Npackd (pronounced "unpacked", previously Windows® Package Manager) is an application store/package manager/marketplace for applications. It helps you to find and install software, keep your system up-to-date and uninstall it if no longer necessary. You can watch this short video to better understand how it works. The process of installing and uninstalling applications is completely automated (silent or unattended installation and un-installation).
This is a terrific way to install open/freeware software in an efficient manner.
Another option which I often use is http://www.ninite.com 


ATTENTION NEW USERS! Only a few packages are detected (this may change in the next version). Npackd can only update and remove packages that were installed using it. Please also do not remove packages installed by Npackd through the control panel.


That given, this is STILL pretty cool!
If you run windows check it out.

Study Concludes Using Open-Source Textbooks could save students up to 80%

"Open Source" is about a lot more than Free Software; the idea is catching on in a lot of circles.
The first non software 'Open Source' thing I remember is Open  Cola - an Open Source Cola.  While the OpenCola.org site is long dead the information is freely available just like anything else Open Source.
The next example existed BEFORE open source software and probably in part spawned the idea... Open Books - Project Gutenburg - which saved books which were out of publication and released them to the world. If you love the classics you can find over 33,000 of them for free at gutenberg.org.
The idea has caught a hold in education with Open Courseware!  You can gain access to the same class material a person at MIT receives for free!!  Sure you can't get your degree that way but if you're on a quest for knowledge there is probably more than you could consume in a lifetime!

Open source textbooks are the latest wave.  Students spend on average $900 per year on textbooks that are worth a fraction of the value after the class is over.  Some teachers like Professor Rubin and other educators are feeling their pain and are trying out Open-source Text Books which reduce that cost to under $200 per year!

“For a number of faculty, they make an assumption that if a book is free then it must be a poor book,” he said. “And that’s not necessarily true. E-books are going to be the wave of the not-too-distant future.” says Rubin

Rubin is not the only one talking about and experimenting with new e-book technology, which includes open-source books that offer free, customizable online textbooks to students and professors.

Textbook company McGraw-Hill Education recently launched a new online textbook interface called “Create,” which gives professors the ability to produce their own textbooks by choosing content and tailoring course materials to their liking, company spokeswoman Mary Skafidas said.

Read more about it here

Being Productive On The Cheap

Way back in 1998 I was just a guy that fixed computers and tinkered with Linux, OS/2, Windows, and what was to became Internet because I liked it; eventually it launched my career.  I didn't have a lot of money so I was naturally drawn to 'free' software for both it's free as in free beer and free as in freedom aspects.

  

Linux wouldn't be what it is today without GNU which promotes free software.  Linux is the engine and GNU software is all of the little parts on the car.  Without GNU software Linux would be pretty boring.  It's more than just free as in $$$ it is free as in freedom.  The philosophies behind GNU stuck with me and became a part of who I am.

Free software is a matter of freedom: people should be free to use software in all the ways that are socially useful. Software differs from material objects—such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasoline—in that it can be copied and changed much more easily. These possibilities make software as useful as it is; we believe software users should be able to make use of them.

 “Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.”

GNU spawned a software license called the GNU Public License or as it is usually referred the GPL; the gist of all of the GPL licenses are that the software is free (as in freedom) and no one including the owner can put a piece of GPL'd software back in the box.  If they later close the source code the code that was released under the GPL is still free to be used and expanded.  This simple idea rubs a lot of companies the wrong way because they can't buy out their competition.  They try to but it seldom works because if the project had merit someone will pick it up and run with it.  

There is a lot of great software you can use for FREE that will make you more productive.  Below are some of my favorites:

PDFCreator - (this is a Windows only program) For the longest time I thought Adobe Acrobat let you create documents from scratch.  When I finally got around to getting the full blown version I was appalled that it could only touch up, hilight, and make forms out of what you created with something else.  Since most people just create a PDF from a document they've already created PDFCreator is all they need along with a free PDF reader like Sumatra PDF!

KompoZer (formerly Nvu) - KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing.  KompoZer is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.  I've been using i for years on Windows and Linux.


Dia - Dia is inspired by the commercial Windows program 'Visio', though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape. 


Gimp - GNU Image Manipulation Program is one of my favorite GNU programs.  It isn't Photoshop but it is close enough for me!  It is great for image editing, cropping photos, creating new graphics, etc. 


LibreOffice - Create documents (Writer), spreadsheets (Calc), presentations (Impress), and manage a databases (Base)... sound familliar?  Best of all it is free of any licensing fees and you can help them improve it!


Mozilla Firefox - A terrific web browser for Windows, Linux, and Mac.  It has a ton of plugins you can load to make it your own and it just keeps getting better!


Mozilla Thunderbird - A terrific email client for Windows, Linux, and Mac.  It has a ton of plugins you can load to make it your own and it just keeps getting better!


Filezilla - A great file transfer client and server that works on Linux, Windows, and probably Mac.



Notepad++ -  Lets face it.. the notepad app that comes with windows could be a lot better.   The open source community made a better solution!

CamStudio - Records activity from your screen and audio from a microphone into AVI video files and can also convert the AVIs into Streaming Flash videos (SWFs) using its built-in SWF Producer.  You can make your own software or process demonstrations for FREE!

With the software above youcan create presentations, documents, websites, databases, even demonstration videos!   Try out the programs above; you'll love them!