Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 12:49 am Post subject: Obama supports OpenOffice software for all government depts
This is pretty clever. Senator Obama is aware of the fact that the government pays millions every year in licensing fees to private software vendors, especially Microsoft.
One of his first executive acts will be to mandate conversion to Open Office software, which will instantly save millions.
Brazil did that long ago and is already saving.
(I'm so happy I'll never have to pay anything for software again. It's nice to see that in a few months the federal government will wake up too!)
Yes, and here is how it may all unfold. One of Obama's first executive acts may be to standardize all Federal offices to OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice is free, robust, stable and more than sufficient for 99 percent of government work. If any particular government office requires Microsoft Office, they'll be able to purchase it -- after explaining in a few sentences why OpenOffice is insufficient for their needs.
What do you get when all Federal offices standardize on OpenOffice? The effect of this is a second economic stimulus check. You get increased productivity at lower cost. Scratch that. You get increased productivity at no-cost.
But far more than that, you put this nation and the world on the path towards accepting free software as wholly mainstream. Within a few months of the Federal government standardizing on OpenOffice, several large U.S. corporations will standardize on OpenOffice. School districts will soon follow. State governments, more often followers than leaders, will pull up the rear.
Brazil, a country with great foresight and leadership, has standardized free software in their schools. That means 100 million students in Brazil will have several years more experience using free software than students in the United States. In a competitive, flat world market, schools in the United States cannot afford to be left behind like that.
Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 04:40 am Post subject: Re: Obama supports OpenOffice software for all government de
David Traver wrote:
This is pretty clever. Senator Obama is aware of the fact that the government pays millions every year in licensing fees to private software vendors, especially Microsoft.
One of his first executive acts will be to mandate conversion to Open Office software, which will instantly save millions.
Brazil did that long ago and is already saving.
(I'm so happy I'll never have to pay anything for software again. It's nice to see that in a few months the federal government will wake up too!)
Yes, and here is how it may all unfold. One of Obama's first executive acts may be to standardize all Federal offices to OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice is free, robust, stable and more than sufficient for 99 percent of government work. If any particular government office requires Microsoft Office, they'll be able to purchase it -- after explaining in a few sentences why OpenOffice is insufficient for their needs.
What do you get when all Federal offices standardize on OpenOffice? The effect of this is a second economic stimulus check. You get increased productivity at lower cost. Scratch that. You get increased productivity at no-cost.
But far more than that, you put this nation and the world on the path towards accepting free software as wholly mainstream. Within a few months of the Federal government standardizing on OpenOffice, several large U.S. corporations will standardize on OpenOffice. School districts will soon follow. State governments, more often followers than leaders, will pull up the rear.
Brazil, a country with great foresight and leadership, has standardized free software in their schools. That means 100 million students in Brazil will have several years more experience using free software than students in the United States. In a competitive, flat world market, schools in the United States cannot afford to be left behind like that.
SSA won't be converting to OpenOffice any time soon. If Obama is elected and issues such an executive order, the agency would ask for and would be granted an exemption. Simply put, SSA has far too many internally-developed production tools that we use that are dependent on Microsoft Office (specifically Word and Access) that would be nigh impossible to replicate using OpenOffice.
That being said, I've been using using the OpenOffice 3.0 beta 2 for a few weeks now at home and it seems surprisingly stable and robust for a beta release. However, the word processor only has a partial implementation of VBA, and the database component isn't even close to being in the same universe as Access for application development.
I'd personally be satisfied (and actually tickled pink) though if he were to force them to start using Firefox internally. I detest IE so badly, and yet every year more and more of our internal work depends upon using it....
What VBA processes have you been using in the office? I'm happy that the integration of the word processing and spreadsheet programs is stronger and easier to use in OpenOffice than in Microsoft Office's newest versions. Microsoft's inclination to not work well printing to PDF was nasty. OpenOffice is much cleaner when putting out a document that has embedded tables into a very clean PDF document.
Have you started to work with Ubuntu? I found the 64-bit version for AMD to be too restrictive in the range of supported drivers and software. I reloaded with the 32-bit version and all of the problems went away. It still flies just as fast and is about four times faster (from my subjective perspective) than the comparable software running on XP/Word on the same machine. I use a very fast computer. I have four gigs of ram and I am running a Athlon 64 X2 6000+ at 3 gigahertz. The video card is a Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS with 640 MB running two digital monitors. The bloat in Microsoft (and the necessary virus software) took away all the speed making the purchase of a fast CPU and the fast video card a complete waste money. Ubuntu lets it all come through the way it should. I suppose it would be impossible to have a desktop computer go faster in Microsoft no matter what kind of CPU or video card was used.
Everything on Connect is done with open source software from the Apache, to the PHP, to the MySQL, to the Mambo content manager. To the extent that comparable software is even available for purchase, who would spend anything for it?
I suspect the vast industry of proprietary software is in its early sunset. It will likely be impossible to compete in the marketplace with products that are just as good (or better) and free. The sooner government (including SSA) gets on the bandwagon, the better, IMHO. Not only should they save money now, but they should begin a smooth transition to the time with companies like Microsoft begin to seriously falter in their support only to go the way of hideously expensive proprietary office telephone systems. (They are not gone yet, but their days are numbered).
At this point I am beginning to think that anybody who pays for software is a chump. (Let me be clear that I am not advocating pirating proprietary software. I mean, shift everything over to open-source software. and stop wasting money.) _________________ David Traver
Attorney
Traver & Traver, S.C.
P.O. Box 459
Eagle, WI 53119
262-594-2096 (work)
403[at]traverlaw.com
What VBA processes have you been using in the office? I'm happy that the integration of the word processing and spreadsheet programs is stronger and easier to use in OpenOffice than in Microsoft Office's newest versions. Microsoft's inclination to not work well printing to PDF was nasty. OpenOffice is much cleaner when putting out a document that has embedded tables into a very clean PDF document.
Have you started to work with Ubuntu? I found the 64-bit version for AMD to be too restrictive in the range of supported drivers and software. I reloaded with the 32-bit version and all of the problems went away. It still flies just as fast and is about four times faster (from my subjective perspective) than the comparable software running on XP/Word on the same machine. I use a very fast computer. I have four gigs of ram and I am running a Athlon 64 X2 6000+ at 3 gigahertz. The video card is a Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS with 640 MB running two digital monitors. The bloat in Microsoft (and the necessary virus software) took away all the speed making the purchase of a fast CPU and the fast video card a complete waste money. Ubuntu lets it all come through the way it should. I suppose it would be impossible to have a desktop computer go faster in Microsoft no matter what kind of CPU or video card was used.
Everything on Connect is done with open source software from the Apache, to the PHP, to the MySQL, to the Mambo content manager. To the extent that comparable software is even available for purchase, who would spend anything for it?
I suspect the vast industry of proprietary software is in its early sunset. It will likely be impossible to compete in the marketplace with products that are just as good (or better) and free. The sooner government (including SSA) gets on the bandwagon, the better, IMHO. Not only should they save money now, but they should begin a smooth transition to the time with companies like Microsoft begin to seriously falter in their support only to go the way of hideously expensive proprietary office telephone systems. (They are not gone yet, but their days are numbered).
At this point I am beginning to think that anybody who pays for software is a chump. (Let me be clear that I am not advocating pirating proprietary software. I mean, shift everything over to open-source software. and stop wasting money.)
The majority of the stuff the agency uses now is based upon Access and Word, with full-blown applications coded in VBA. I've never particularly liked Office as a development medium simply because every new version of Office almost always breaks VBA applications from prior versions, meaning that you will have to recode to get applications of any complexity to work with new versions of Office. Of course, the agency changes versions at a glacial pace, so that isn't that big of a problem for them. I suspect that the earliest point the agency could break from Office will be in a few years when they eliminate the mainframe emulation software in favor of a browser-based solution. That move, when it happens, will also force a decision on recoding the available tools into a similar web-based form. We'll see about that...
Personally, I had a 32bit Ubuntu/Kubuntu box, but had to reimage it to XP back in January to recover some records I needed from an ancient oddball backup archive that couldn't be accessed any other way. I've put off changing it back as I'm seriously considering building a new quad-core machine in the next few months (I used to build all of my own, but the last two were purchased on the cheap from Dell without an operating system for hundreds less than I could have possibly built similar machines for). I'm a tinkerer at heart, so I plan to install a virtualization hypervisor of some sort along with a few terabytes of hard disk space to allow me to just tinker to my heart's content. At least that way, I can install anything I want subject to space limitations without being dependent on any OS. Even with my very limited exploration to date, I can tell you one thing: Virtualization is cool!
I'm not surprised you had problems with the 64 bit drivers in Ubuntu -- 64bit Windows exhibits the exact same problem, which is why it has never been a commercial success. The support just isn't there from the hardware manufacturers. However, commercial software packages (most especially 3d games) are beginning to hit the limits of 32 bit memory, so the situation ought to improve drastically over the next few years.
I do agree with you in general on the issue of free software, and for the most part use it where I can. In fact, there is a Office 2007 Ultimate DVD that I received for free from Microsoft in my bookcase that I haven't ever bothered to install because OpenOffice meets my needs.
My current install is a dual boot system. I left the XP-Professional in place and created a new partition for Ubuntu. The really nice thing about this setup is that XP sees the Ubuntu partition as a drive and assigns it a letter (just like it was its own hard drive) Likewise, Ubuntu sees the XP partition as a separate place on the system (local disk).
So, it's really easy to move files back and forth as needed. Also, copying critical files I have yet another backup of my photo albums (Picasa 2) telephone contacts and E-mail history (Evolution) and client database (Paradox 7) on the system.
When the system boots I can leave it alone and it goes right into Ubuntu by default. On the other hand, if I want to boot XP I simply select that from the menu during boot.
Using Visual Basic to automate is a mistake, I agree, especially for the reasons you gave.
By the way, I am moving all of my calendaring and e-mail over to Google so I can see everything anywhere on my new (and very lovely) iPhone 3G. It works like a charm. I still maintain my traverlaw.com mail addresses, but I can access them though POP3 on Google mail at any time via the iPhone. Nifty. By using the residual e-mail 20 gigabytes of filespace on Google as a drive, I can also backup all critical files there as well for an additional offsite backup location (free). _________________ David Traver
Attorney
Traver & Traver, S.C.
P.O. Box 459
Eagle, WI 53119
262-594-2096 (work)
403[at]traverlaw.com
You can post new topics in this forum You can reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
Traverlaw, Traver Law, Traver Law Offices, S.C., Traver & Traver, S.C.,
Traverlaw.com, SSAConnect,
Attorneys for the disabled and disadvantaged in all areas of Social Security
disability law, http://traverlaw.com,
http://ssaconnect.com, Connect, SSA Connect, Think Bigger,
Social Security Advice Connect, Social Security Disability Advice Connect,
"Social Security Disability Advocacy, Debate, and Professional News,"
the yellow and orange swoosh image, and the square favicon.ico image,
are trademarks and service marks of Attorney David F. Traver.
For information the about use of our copyrighted and trademarked material please call
262-594-2096.
CONNECT
FAQ
Search
Register
Log in
