As the article describes, iRadeon is a new company that integrates and sells support for three open source programs:

• SugarCRM from the SugarCRM project on SourceForge
• Atutor online course composition
• NetOffice project management

The company is positioning itself as a competitor to Salesforce.com, providing cheaper services per sales person. SugarCRM is targeting the same market by creating the SugarCRM open source software, which iRadeon is using, as well as proprietary extra software. IRadeon does not have those proprietary extra tools, but it is integrating the open source version with two other open source tools.

It will be interesting to see if both companies can thrive with their different business models, while providing sufficient revenues to continue development of SugarCRM software.

On the first of December, I gave a lecture at Parliament’s Portcullis House in London. The talk was titled “Open source software in government” and in the leadup it was wonderful to meet and receive help from so many Free Software experts in the UK and USA.

The talk was covered in Newsforge by Bruce Byfield:

When Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli agreed to deliver a seminar on “Open Source in Government” to parliamentary staff members and representatives of local government in the United Kingdom earlier this month, he planned to introduce his audience to some basic concepts. However, when he got there, he found that most of the audience was already familiar with the concepts. As a result, instead of educating people in public life, he may have done more than he hoped – he may have helped to create an ongoing forum in which the free and open source software (FOSS) communities, political lobbyists, and members of the governing Labour Party and the opposition Conservative Party can work together to promote the use of FOSS in the governments of the United Kingdom.

Better Desktop is a fascinating site developed by Novell, the company that owns SUSE Linux. They have conducted over 200 usability tests of users struggling with Linux and made the videos available for open source software developers. Genius, and kudos to Novell for investing in this resource.

By the by, a note on the video format: Theora. This is an open source alternative to MPEG, Windows Media etc., just as Ogg is an open source audio alternative to MP3. RealPlayer 10 plays format and it is the format I shall be storing all my videos in from now on.

Data from the National Venture Capital Association:

Through the third quarter this year, at least 18 companies have received funding, totaling nearly $145 million put into companies with “open source” as part of their business plan description.

In 2004, there were 12 companies funded, bringing in $70 million.

The latest round of open-source companies are seeking to build a business mainly around open-source database or middleware. By contrast, the first wave of open-source start-ups in the late 1990s mainly focused on Linux.

In 2000, venture capitalists invested $226 million in open-source companies, which got on average $19 million in funding. So far this year, the average funding is $8 million.

Virtualization company XenSource grabbed the most money this year with $23 million, followed by SugarCRM with $18.7 million, and SpikeSource with $15.8 million.

An interesting article from Singapore’s CIO magazine:

. According to Gartner, only about 1 percent of companies in the and Europe currently use Linux on the desktop, and only 3.2 percent are expected to by 2008.[…]

Meanwhile in China:

According to ’s Ministry of Information Industry (MII), almost 70 percent of all software purchases last year were of Linux-based products. Meanwhile, provincial governments, installed 45,000 desktops with Linux operating systems.

Now private businesses are following suit. Local government agencies are subject to a national mandate to install legal copies of software by the end of this year, says Qi Zhang, who heads MII’s electronics and information products department.

Early adopters of desktop Linux include major enterprises such as government-owned railways and telecom companies, says Chris Zhao, president of Red Flag, a major Chinese Linux vendor. Tokyo-based Turbolinux recently announced an enterprisewide deployment with ’s largest commercial bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of .

Chinese users are running open-source versions of Office as well as homegrown software designed for specific applications, such as the software used by bank tellers.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government is considering requiring that government agencies use open-source software.

This ties in with a recent article from the Economist:

Without home-grown technology, India and China have to depend on foreign firms, and they do not like it. China, in particular, has seen a surge in the royalties it is paying to foreign firms, and is trying to stem the flow. When Qualcomm’s boss went to China in 2001 to negotiate royalty payments for his company’s third-generation mobile-phone standard, he agreed to accept less than what he charges others. Within a year, China was working on developing its own 3G wireless standard. If it succeeds, Qualcomm will see its royalties shrink further.[…]

The number of patents applied for by Chinese inventors at America’s patent office is small, but it increased sixfold in the 1990s. Taiwan, an island with 23m people, went from almost nothing in the 1980s to fourth in the number of patents granted, after America, Japan and Germany. “If their continental cousins have the same behaviour, I don’t know how many millions of patents will fall on our heads in a couple of decades’ time,” says Dominique Guellec, chief economist of the European Patent Office.

Over the last year I have been reading in Red Herring magazine that venture capitalists are heavily investing in startups with an open source software business model. But the statements were vague as the deals are behind closed doors. So it is nice to read some numbers from this article:

Remember a year or so ago when you could probably name most of the open-source companies in the market? Try doing that now when the number of startups has skyrocketed to several hundred. While this massive growth appears reminiscent of the dot-com boom before the bubble burst, experts in the field stress that the second wave of the open-source revolution, Open Source 2.0 if you like, is unlikely to play out in quite the same way. However, that’s not to say there won’t be some upsets along the way.[…]

Fast forward to the preparation for OSBC West in April this year in San Francisco, and again in the run-up to the upcoming OSBC East, and Asay and his colleagues were looking at over 150 companies for the showcase for each event. “We’re getting really good quality and not just quantity,” Asay said.

There is some good advice about evaluating the companies:

For a VC investment in open-source to make sense, the startup needs to be doing five things well, according to Tango. It must be targeting a large area of the market with its product, ensure there’s both a community to help with development of the software and a large pool of potential users likely to want to download the products, be sure its software will require support it can charge for, have expertise in the area of the market it’s aiming at, and finally, be patient. “These businesses take a while to build even when you’re in a large space,” he wrote in the e-mail, pointing to the long steady rise of Red Hat.

Most promisingly, the customers are arriving:

While OSBC West attracted many independent software vendors (ISVs) and independent hardware vendors (IHVs), between 20 to 30 percent of OSBC East’s expected 300 to 400 attendees will be CIOs, according to Asay.

It is always interesting to see how many different people outside the Arab world are trying to influence its citizens. In the same week that the BBC announced its new Arabic language satellite TV station, the Open Society Institute ran “a brainstorming workshop on advancing open source software for independent Arab media” in Aqaba.

Special attention was given to the products produced by the Prague-based Media Development Fund (MDLF). Martin Hala and Sava Tactic from MDLF reviewed their campware products, especially `campsite,’ which is being used by media outlets throughout the world.

The Open Society Institute, as its web address suggests (www.soros.org), is funded by the billionaire George Soros. He seems a nice man, having funded photocopiers in Hungary in the 1980s as a way of fostering free expression and dissemination of ideas.

Now, he is a major donor to the Media Development Loan Fund, which sponsored the workshop, and funded the development of several Campware products.

These are actually rather good, including Campsite for news publishing, LiveSupport for radio broadcasting, Cream for customer relationship management, and Dream for newspaper distribution management.

I am considering using Campsite for a new site I am forming with colleagues for the UK - a sort of The Onion for scientists - but of course the real target of the software are the heroes of free speech in the Arab world. Sadly, what they need most is freedom from harrasment by our governments, rather than more publishing software, but every little helps.

With all the fuss about podcasting on iTunes lately you might be forgiven for thinking that Apple invented podcasting, and you can only listen to podcasts through its iTunes software. Not so.

Podcasting is a misnomer, and a better name is probably audioblogging. It allows the creator to make an audio file (in MP3 format) available to the listener through an RSS feed. This has the same advantages as the RSS capabilities of Thunderbird and provides a link for the MP3 file itself. I use this to listen to the New England Journal of Medicine’s podcast.

Today I found a nice alternative, iPodder. It is a separate program that manages all your podcast subscriptions is rather polished.

This is an interesting story about a Florida court case involving breathalyser manufacturers:

Lawyers representing more than 150 defendants who have been charged for driving under the influence of alcohol in two Florida counties will file the request.

They argue that they have a right to see the source code of the alcohol breath analyser that was used to determine their clients’ guilt.

Which reminds us that the freedoms of Free Software are about much more than price - a transparent society with fair legal process depends on the opening up of source code. As software affects more of our lives expect to see citizens demanding more freedoms.

This is an interesting example of what Free Software allows - others can build on your cool tool to create more cool tools.

In this case, Mobility Email have built software on top of Thunderbird’s email application and the PGP encryption. The result is a safe email solution that can fit onto any hard disk-like device, including an iPod shuffle or any USB stick. All your email is stored on the device, along with your passwords. Connect the device to any PC running Windows and you can send emails and read your old messages. But as soon as you take out the device all traces of your emails and passwords disappear from the PC, maintaining your security.

There is a whole chapter devoted to Thunderbird in the book, and another that explains how Free Software thrives on such development.

A new version of FreeMind is out, and it can now create JPEG picture files from your mind maps. Very clever, and another reason I recommend FreeMind in the book.

Open-source ECM tool nears release

Software provider Alfresco is putting finishing touches to the first release of its open-source technology to help businesses manage their data.

The London-based company said the software, also called Alfresco, is one of the first nonproprietary examples of enterprise content management (ECM) products, which help a large company automatically keep track of all its data, smoothing search and indexing activities.[…]

“I had chosen to live in Britain and, looking at what succeeds in Europe right now, I realised that open source was one of few things that can create a global market,” Newton said during an interview at the JBoss World conference in Barcelona on Tuesday.

Peru’s green light to open-source software:

Peru’s Congress passed legislation that would require public institutions to consider using open-source software as an alternative to proprietary, licensed rivals when evaluating bids from software vendors.

[…]Congress voted 61-0 last Thursday to approve the legislation, which would mandate “neutrality” to guarantee public institutions a choice between proprietary software, like Microsoft’s, and open-source software, which some users consider more stable, adaptable, cheaper, and less susceptible to viruses and hacker attacks.

[…]The new law would also prohibit any public institution from purchasing computer hardware that utilizes only one software platform or “in any manner limits information autonomy.”

This week’s column from Michael Robertson covers GUPS - the Global University Phone System. This allows universities to use the internet to make telephone calls to each other.

GUPS is powered by open standards and Linux. Each school uses a secure Linux computer that acts like translator from the school’s phone system to SIP an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standard, which is then connected to the Internet. (It’s imperative to use an open standard like SIP so the entire world can work seamlessly together rather than have a hodgepodge of silos controlled by one company interested only in profit maximization.) Because the computers run cost-effective Linux software they cost under $600. This one-time cost can permanently reduce - and eventually eliminate - phone charges.

Think what this could mean for developing countries like Bahrain, where international telephone charges are so expensive.

Michael Robertson, by the way, is the founder of MP3.com and Linspire. The latter is a very user-friendly version of the Linux operating system that was described in the chapter “Go all the way with the GNU/Linux operating system“.

By popular demand, you can now download the Plucker version of “Free Software for Busy People". Plucker is like Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat but it is entirely Free Software and it is optimised for handheld computers. You can read how Ms Yates used the software in the chapter “Finding Free Software to suit your needs“.

A Wiki is one of the wonders of the web - a tool that makes a qualitative leap in what human beings can do. Basically, a Wiki is a website that allows the reader to change the writing. Every page has an “Edit this page” button and clicking it allows the reader to become a writer.

Wikis are mentioned several times in the book “Free Software for Busy People". For example, Mr Salah Al-Din, the Arab teacher, uses a Wiki for Bahraini constitution. The Wikipedia is an enormous Wiki website that has become encyclopedic in its coverage. Ms Salah Al-Din regularly consulted it because of its integration into the Firefox web browser.

When most people first learn about Wikis they are scared by it - surely that is too much freedom? Surely, if anyone can write anything the writing will be worthless? The web must be full of vandals moving from Wiki to Wiki, removing what little good content there is and replacing it with misinformation?

The reality is that the system works rather well. It seems that the good writers vastly outnumber the bad ones, and that the good writers regularly and reliably remove the bad writing. So apart from being an enormous resource available free of charge, the Wikipedia is also an enormously good resource.

So much so that the Economist is now referring to it - witness this week’s profile of Roman Abramovich. The article only references one website for further information about Mr Abramovich, and that is the Wikipedia page.

And although the Wikipedia is run fully democractically - anyone anywhere can make a change without needing anyone’s permission - Wikis can have editorial control. That is what Microsoft Encarta is taking advantage of with its announcement of the new “Edit this page” button. Readers will be able to submit changes for review by the editors. The submission form encourages the inclusion of references and supporting evidence for the contribution, which is a nice twist. But the principle is the same - Wikis work well.

Hend Al-Khalifa, from Al-Riyadh newspaper, has interviewed me for her Internet and Communications (انترنت واتصالات) column. I will be translating the interview over the next few days, in the meantime, my thanks to Hend fo allowing me to explain the book to my fellow Arabs.

وأتوقع أن الكثيرين سيبدأون بقراءة الكتاب لغرض توفير المال. فالبرامج الحرة أو المفتوحة موجودة ويمكن اقتناؤها بالمجان، ويمكن للقارئ أن يقتصد بحصوله عليها آلاف الدولارات لقاء كل جهاز حاسوب يمتلكه. على أن الهدف الأساسي للكتاب هو تبيان الفائدة الجمّة التي يمكن أن يجنيها المجتمع من تمتعه بالحرية التي يبثها استخدام البرامج الحرة والمجانية في آن.

Translation:

I expect that many will begin reading the book to save money because Free / Open Source Software tools are available free of charge. The reader that uses them can save thousands of dollars for each computer they own. However the main aim of the book is to show the reader the great benefits to society from the freedom provided by Free Software.

Great news for America’s healthcare system - Mediacare is providing free installation of Vista medical software.

In what could prove to be a watershed move Medicare – the largest source of funding for medical and health-related services for people without health insurance - has announced that it will give away a version of the Vista open-source EPR to family practitioners across the US. Although many US doctors use computers for billing and administrative purposes it is estimated that relatively few yet have computerised patient records.

The US Government has committed to developing a national health infrastructure and ensuring that every citizen has an electronic health record by 2014.

Vista is one of the software products covered in the book, first as part of Dr Digitalis’s search for electronic patient medical record software, then as part of the “Giving back to the Free Software community” chapter. It has been developed by the US Department of Veterans Affairs and has been used for over 20 years, making it one of the most mature and secure medical records software systems in the world.

Within a few hours of the book being announced on BoingBoing, people began helping with corrections for the site. Ah, the spirit of Free Software.

My thanks to James and Nick, and to Ted O’Neill for correcting typos.

And special thanks to Dinesh Copoosamy for helping me debug the shopping area of the site. He spent a while explaining the bugs in the code and pointing me to the solution.

More help is always appreciated - keep the improvements coming!

It’s been 11 months since I started writing “Free Software for Busy People“, and it’s now finished.

The web and PDF versions are available free of charge. You can also buy the book from CafePress.

My aim is for the book to be read by the general public - people who do not know about Free Software, let alone understand why it matters. Such readers do not usually read blogs. But I did write the book so that it is enjoyable enough to read in bed.

So, if you have a family member, friend or colleague who could benefit from this, please let them know about the book. I wish them happy reading and I thank you for letting them know about it.