Monthly Newsletter

Dear readers,

In this edition, we talk about:

- Knowledge Base: What's new in OpenOffice.org 3.0?

- LinuxDays 2008 in Geneva: some quotes from exhibitors and visitors that summarize this successful event

- Videogames: LemanGames' summer training camp

- Open Source news: starring Firefox, Microsoft, Adobe and Google

- Partners news: Pentaho changing licensing, Novell releases the latest version of OpenSuse

It's a fact, Open Source deployment is growing at a fast pace, and so is Linalis. We are pleased to announce that Steve Adams as been appointed as our new managing director ; we are also still recruiting.

Moreover, as a part of our improvement process, we are reorganizing the website. Please feel free to send your suggestions to webmaster@linalis.com

Kind regards,

Michaël Dupont

mdupont@linalis.com
+41 22 348 30 15

The next major release of the most utilized of the Open Source office suites is planned for this summer. There are a lot of expectations and the competition is harder than ever with the new Microsoft Office and the increasing popularity of web applications. The current growth of Open Source isn't enough, the next OOo will have to be brilliant to be successful.

What's new in OpenOffice.org 3.0 ? In this article published in IBcom, we've gone through the new features of OpenOffice.org 3.0. Read the article.

LinuxDays 2008 proved to be a success and confirmed its position as the most important Open Source event in Swiss Romande, with more than 600 visitors, more than 40 conferences and 21 exhibitors.

But dont't just take that from us, here are just some of the comments we received:

Sun Microsystems: "We had the opportunity to present the last release of OpenSolaris 2008.05. We gave away all of our Live CDs (approximately one hundred) in one days, proof that this revolutionnary OS receives a lot of interest from the Open Source community."

Microsoft: "LinuxDays was the chance to show our activities in the fields of Open Source and interoperability, and to show that this kind of collaboration benefits as much Microsoft as the community."

Debian:"LinuxDays was an event with a lot of big companies (for example Microsoft, Sun, HP) but in the same time there was a very friendly atmoshere, allowing direct contacts with exhibitors."

SwissLinux: "The Swisslinux.org team was pleased to attend to the 2008 edition. We met there a lot of Open Source fans, from the professionnal programmer to the newcomer who discovered Open Source a few days ago."

State of Geneva: "2008 edition of LinuxDays was as good as we hoped: high level conferences, interesting exhibitors and a relatively good number of people."

A visitor : "To sum up, it was an interesting day in several ways: I discovered numerous promising software solutions, businessmen and providers specialized in Open Source, as well as a definite "marketing effect" since the first thing I did the day after was to install Ubuntu alongside Vista on my desktop!"

Following this success, we are now planning the 2009 edition, and you can contribute to make it even better by sending us your suggestions. Already planned for next year is a closer partnership with OpenExpo, the next one taking place in Zurich, September 24 and 25.

But LinuxDays 2008 is not completely over yet! You'll soon be able to download the audio records and the slides of the conferences. Some of which are already available in the download section of the LinuxDays website. Feel free to subscribe to the new RSS feed!

We remind you that summer training sessions of our partner LemanGames will take place July 7-19 and August 4-15, 2008 in the Linalis building. Two weeks of intensive training during the school and university holidays:

- Overview of the videogames industry

- Overview of the different kinds of jobs in the field of videogame

- Information systems (PC, console...)

- The Open Source 3D engine Panda3D

- Programming with Python and C++

- 2D / 3D programming

- Make a first video game

These sessions will be a maximum of 12 attendees ; for ages between 12 and 20.

Stategic move or real will to interoperate? Microsoft surprises everyones by announcing announcing native support for ODF in the next revision of its Office suite, while its own format, competitor to ODF, will only be available in a future release. Microsoft doesn't stop here and will also take part in ODF development.

At the same time, Adobe frees Flash format specifications (SWF for vector graphics and FLV for video) with the Open Screen Project. The company hopes this will help to spread its technology onto a variety of new platforms (mobile devices, TVs...)

Google releases Google Gadgets for Linux, and makes them Open Source under the Apache licence. This is part of Google Desktop, a cross-platform desktop search program allowing miscellanous gadgets to be displayed on your desktop, like the weather, the latest headlines, monitors of all kinds and other useful (or not) stuff.

We will soon see the release of Firefox version 3. For the occasion it is aiming to set a Guiness World Record for software downloads.

Pentaho has just announced that the next release of Pentaho BI (Business Intelligence) Platform will be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2) Instead of the Mozilla Public License (MPL). The motivations behind this move are that the GPL is widely used as well understood by the market and legal community.

Have an overview of some of the services we provide in Business Intelligence

Next version of Novell's Linux distribution, OpenSuse 11, is coming June 19th. As usual, it'll include numerous new software and functionalities, with a special focus on virtualization.