CDRA and Open Source

What and Why Open Source?

Over the past few years we have become increasingly aware of the growing Open Source Initiative or movement across the globe - initiated by Linus Torvalds developing and putting Linux (a free alternative to Windows) out into the public domain.  It is an interesting and quite unique movement driven by an odd assortment of computer geeks, savvy security- and cost-conscious corporate and government IT managers as well as anti-Microsoft consumers and activists.  We have been encouraged to learn of many governments and businesses in many countries who have shifted away from Microsoft and other proprietary software to Open Source.  Perhaps it is time for the development sector to have a closer look.

We must credit Sangonet, a South African ICT ngo, who have through their conferences and website promoted discussion and raised consciousness about the issues of Open Source.  Their portal is worth a visit (see below for links).  The Mark Shuttleworth Foundation is also pouring resources into the Open Source Initiative and deserves praise for their support for schools and civil society.

Open Source software has dominated the network and web server world for the past few years (as Linux), edging out Microsoft, and now with the release of OpenOffice 2.02 a free and comparable alternative to Microsoft Office is in the public domain (see below for the weblinks to download it). While OpenOffice 1 just didn't cut the ice, OpenOffice 2.02 is almost identical to Microsoft Office and can convert and work with MSWord documents (.doc format).

Not only does Open Source offer increasingly good, sensible, transparent and low-cost technology but it puts forward a different and radical concept and vision of economics, innovation and development.  Open Source is several things - most importantly it values transparency which means that the software code is non-proprietary, accessible and open to the world to examine, to learn from and to change - individually and collaboratively.  This makes possible, in the age of the internet, the many horizontal (learning) networks of computer programmers across the world who collaboratively develop continually improving software - made freely available over the internet. 

There is a cost - a local cost where some organisations require the software to be installed and configured, but the economics of this revolves around local computer industries, creating and supporting jobs in the neighbourhood.  In the Microsoft approach and vision we have to buy the rights to their software (which incidentally we cannot resell by law), often costing R1000s of rands for a basic suite - almost all the money goes back to Microsoft in the USA to pay highly secretive teams of software developers and of course to further line the pockets of the richest man in modern times, if not in history.  We now have a real choice to make.

CDRA starts to move to Open Source

We feel that the values of the Open Source Software movement are compatible with ours in many ways. But the transition from our dependency on Microsoft and other proprietary software is not easy.  CDRA started the journey a few years back moving our network and mail server to Linux.  The next obvious move was to OpenOffice (Windows version) but the first versions were still too rough and patchy.  This year OpenOffice 2.02 was been released and as described above it stands shoulder to shoulder with Microsoft Office.  Some of us are starting to use it - in fact one of us has uninstalled Microsoft Office and has been happily using OpenOffice 2.02 as well as  Mozilla Firefox instead of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express.  We have experienced no problems with average use and only a minor translation issue with some graphics being nudged a little up or down.  But tables, tables of content, footnotes and stylesheets have worked perfectly when using a Word document in OpenOffice.  The word processor does do some things a bit differently but with the help menu these can be sorted out soon - a collaborative learning approach for these with work colleagues will make this even easier. Some other browser and email software we are experimenting with from Mozilla are pretty much identical.

Others in CDRA are feeling cautious, wanting to move to OpenOffice but worried that the difficulties they have had in the past will have to be repeated - we have to respect that people experience technology very differently and expect a careful and slow transition.  Certainly we know that we need never buy proprietary, commercial software again.

So our challenge over the next year or two is to help others in CDRA to take the leap - with encouragement and coaching.  After that we anticipate moving away from Windows itself onto Linux which will make the process almost complete.

Open Standards in word processing - Open Document Text - .odt versus .doc

The developers of OpenOffice have focused their attention for some time on being compatible with the Microsoft .doc format and they have done a pretty good job.  But if that is their only focus they will always be playing catch-up to Microsoft.  So a new Open Document Text standard format for word processing - with the .odt extension - has been collaboratively developed and released as an alternative to the Word document format. 

It is not clear whether this transition will be easily made by many people because the Word format is so pervasive but we feel it is worth attempting.  So to support this the documents released on our website will increasingly come as both Word files (.doc) and as Open Document files (.odt).

Working Collaboratively towards Open Source

We will continue to tell the story of our transition to Open Source.  We welcome any communication from people around these issues, seeking and offering advice from any useful experiences - yours and ours. 

Please contact Rubert (rubert@cdra.org.za) or Doug (doug@cdra,org.za)

Links:

Sangonet - www.sangonet.org.za/portal/

OpenOffice.org - where you can download the entire suite of word-processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation and drawing software for free - www.OpenOffice.org  or  http://download.openoffice.org/2.0.2/index.html

Mozilla - where you can download an open source internet browser (Mozilla Firefox) and email software (Mozilla Thunderbird) - www.mozilla.com

Website of the Open Source Initiative - the global collaboration - http://www.opensource.org

The Open CD - another site to find open source software - www.theopencd.org/