Open Source

A Time for Decision

2009/04/13 By Rob 1 Comment

April 15th is Tax Day in the United States, the day by which we must file our income tax returns for 2008 and pay any balance due.

The day before, April 14th, is also a day of reckoning, with another outstretched hand asking for our money. This is the day which marks the end of “mainstream support” for Microsoft Windows XP and Office 2003. After this date, licensed owners of these products will no longer receive free support and updates.

Depending on how consumers respond, one of three things will result from this end of life.

Users migrate to Vista/Office 2007
Users stay on unsupported Microsoft products for the near term and wait for Windows 7/Office 14 to come out in 2010.
Users take the opportunity to evaluate the available alternatives, including open source.

Since Windows XP is the most widely-deployed version of Windows, and Windows is the most-widely deployed operating system in the world, many licenses will be up for grabs as IT shops decide what to do next. Especially in these tough economic times, upgrading to Vista just to see Vista become obsolete in less than a year doesn’t make sense. But neither does remaining on an unsupported version of Windows.

This is a significant opportunity for alternatives, such as Linux and other open source applications, to increase their representation on the desktop. We should spend the next nine months making it especially easy for Microsoft’s seemingly unwanted and expendable Windows XP and Office 2003 customers to migrate to better alternatives. The Windows/Office release calendar and economic conditions have combined to make this a huge upgrade cycle. In 2010 almost everyone will be looking to upgrade. An opportunity like this does not come every year. Let’s make the most of it!

Monopoly Freedom Day

2009/01/23 By Rob 5 Comments

Each year the Tax Foundation, a 70-year old nonpartisan tax research group based in Washington, D.C., issues a press release on Tax Freedom Day, the day in the year where the average American worker has earned enough to pay their taxes for the year. In 2008 Tax Freedom Day was April 23rd. Of course, this is a rhetorical device, since we really pay taxes throughout the year, at various rates, and not all at once, but it is a useful device that illustrates the relationship between wages and taxes.

So, this got me thinking whether this same analysis could be applied to what I’ve been calling the “Monopoly Tax”, the excess price we pay for products from a monopolist when adequate open source alternatives are available.

Let me take a stab at the analysis. First, let’s look at the price of two entry-level PC’s, identical except that one comes pre-installed with Ubuntu and OpenOffice, while the other comes pre-installed with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. I’ll use Dell’s Inspiron 530/530n as an example. Same chip, same RAM, same monitor, same drive, same graphics, everything the same, except one comes with Linux and the other has the Microsoft software.

Dell Inspiron 530 with Microsoft Vista/Microsoft Office = $818.00
Dell Inspiron 530N with Ubuntu/OpenOffice = $428.00

So the “monopoly tax” in this case is $390, or 48% of the total cost of the system. Now that amount is probably not going to crush you or me. But for a student, a small town library strapped for funds, the recently unemployed, or a family in the developing world, this is a huge difference.

We can further quantify this by calculating the date of “Monopoly Freedom Day” for countries around the world, based on per-capita income. If you purchase a new PC on January 1st, you will work up until Monopoly Freedom Day just to pay the excess cost of the non-open source software. Up until Monopoly Freedom Day the fruits of your labors are not going to you, you family or your community. Your wages are going to Redmond, to fatten the stock portfolio of the wealthiest man in America. Think about it. You know that Microsoft has. With the poorest countries in the world being the ones who would benefit most from using open source to avoid paying the Monopoly Tax, Microsoft has started a new “Scramble for Africa” in order lock them into a costly cycle of technological dependency in a new colonialist campaign.

Country	Monopoly Freedom Day
Luxembourg	Jan 02
Ireland	Jan 04
Norway	Jan 04
United States	Jan 04
Switzerland	Jan 04
Qatar	Jan 04
Austria	Jan 04
Denmark	Jan 04
Netherlands	Jan 04
Finland	Jan 04
United Kingdom	Jan 04
Canada	Jan 04
Belgium	Jan 04
Singapore	Jan 04
United Arab Emirates	Jan 05
Greece	Jan 05
Australia	Jan 05
Japan	Jan 05
Israel	Jan 05
France	Jan 05
Germany	Jan 05
Italy	Jan 05
Cyprus	Jan 05
Spain	Jan 05
New Zealand	Jan 06
Slovenia	Jan 06
Korea	Jan 06
Czech Republic	Jan 06
Portugal	Jan 06
Malta	Jan 07
Kuwait	Jan 07
Barbados	Jan 07
Trinidad and Tobago	Jan 08
Argentina	Jan 09
Saudi Arabia	Jan 09
Poland	Jan 09
Croatia	Jan 10
Mauritius	Jan 11
South Africa	Jan 11
Chile	Jan 11
Russia	Jan 11
Uruguay	Jan 12
Malaysia	Jan 12
Costa Rica	Jan 12
Mexico	Jan 12
Romania	Jan 13
Bulgaria	Jan 13
Kazakhstan	Jan 14
Brazil	Jan 14
Belarus	Jan 15
Bosnia and Herzegovina	Jan 15
Turkey	Jan 15
Thailand	Jan 15
Tunisia	Jan 15
Panama	Jan 16
Iran	Jan 16
Colombia	Jan 17
China	Jan 17
Ukraine	Jan 17
Azerbaijan	Jan 17
Venezuela	Jan 18
Peru	Jan 20
Serbia	Jan 20
Fiji	Jan 24
Morocco	Jan 24
Lebanon	Jan 24
Jordan	Jan 24
Sri Lanka	Jan 25
Armenia	Jan 25
Philippines	Jan 25
Egypt	Jan 27
Ecuador	Jan 29
Jamaica	Jan 31
Syrian Arab Republic	Feb 01
India	Feb 04
Cuba	Feb 04
Vietnam	Feb 08
Ghana	Feb 18
Pakistan	Feb 18
Uzbekistan	Feb 26
Zimbabwe	Mar 01
Bangladesh	Mar 04
Côte d’Ivoire	Mar 24
Kenya	Apr 08
Nigeria	Apr 22
Congo	Jun 09
Tanzania	Jun 13

Unlocking the Wordhord

2006/11/01 By Rob Leave a Comment

I have a backlog of shorter items that I’ve accumulated in recent weeks that I’d like to share with you. I hope you find something here interesting.

First, congratulations to OpenOffice.org and KOffice, who both recently announced new releases. In my mind the notable features include an improved extensions framework in OpenOffice 2.04 and leading MathML conformance scores and command-line (UI-less) scripting for KOffice 1.6. Combined with the recent release of Firefox 2.0, it feels like Christmas has come early this year!

I get the feeling that there are more good things to come. Eike Rathke blogs about order of magnitude performance improvements in load time for large spreadsheets, a fix targeted for OpenOffice.org 2.1.

Some emerging technology at Adobe, a project codenamed “Mars”, which appears to be a reformulation of PDF, based on open standards such as SVG, PNG, JPG, JPG2000, OpenType, XPath and XML, all sitting in a Zip container file. There is a voice in my head saying, “This is important”. For example, could we have a single container file that included both ODF editable content as well as Mars/PDF for high-fidelity presentation? That way you can hand a document to someone and they can either view/edit it in a full heavy-weight editor, or get a fast high-fidelity read-only rendering. Both modes of use from the same file. To make this, and other cool things happen, Mars and ODF will want to synch-up on things like packaging, manifests and metadata. Adobe, call me ;-)

Two new ODF whitepapers to note. J. David Eisenberg looks at ODF and XForms and how they work together in OpenOffice.org, using a wrestling club application form as an example. Of course, source code is included. “Opportunities for innovation with OpenDocument Format XML” is the title of a new IBM whitepaper also just posted.

A couple weeks ago I participated in a roundtable discussion on ODF at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, held by the TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue forum. You’ve probably already read Jame’s Love’s post on it on The Huffington Post. If not, take a look. Since I tend to spend my days with two kinds of people, the technical and the very technical, it was good to get out and hear a different perspective on the issues.

A familiar face at the Berkman Center was Sam Hiser, who has a new post, at once both visceral and witty, called “Pretending Interoperability”.

Finally, in order to increase the signal-to-noise ratio in this blog, I’ve instituted a new comment policy. Those comments which are outside of the prescribed bounds will not be published.