Author: JT Smith
Author: JT Smith
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Author: JT Smith
“Two months after settling in as CEO in November 1999, Matt Szulik watched Red Hat’s stock price begin a free fall that would unnerve investors, drive away disillusioned employees, and raise questions about the company’s very existence.”
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Author: JT Smith
This new nonprofit organization is built upon CollabNet’s extensive
experience in working with and establishing the most vital open source
projects on the Internet today. The Software Conservancy holds the
copyrights for the donated openadaptor code, and works to ensure that the
code is, and remains, available to the general public under a single
standard license. It will also accept future donations of copyrights to
code, contributed to the openadaptor project, by Dresdner Kleinwort
Wasserstein, as well as by other organizations and individuals. The donated
source code and the open source development project for the worldwide
openadaptor community are hosted at www.openadaptor.org.
The Software Conservancy will consider accepting and holding similar
donations of source code rights from other corporations and individuals
interested in making open source code (as defined by the Open Source
Initiative) and free software (as defined by the Free Software Foundation)
available to the public. The Software Conservancy may also provide other
services, related to intellectual property and governance issues, relevant
to public software development projects creating open source and free
software.
“I’m pleased that Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein has chosen to make the
openadaptor source code publicly available through The Software Conservancy,
and thank DrKW and CollabNet for their support in creating this new
organization,” said Frank Hecker, president of The Software Conservancy and
open source business consultant for CollabNet. “I look forward to The
Software Conservancy receiving future donations of code from DrKW and
others, and hope that it can be of service to other projects creating
software for the benefit of everyone.”
“Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein believes that the openadaptor software
should be of benefit to anyone interested in the problems that it
addresses,” said Russ Goring, Deputy CIO, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.
“By donating the openadaptor copyrights to The Software Conservancy we have
sought to ensure that the openadaptor source code will always be publicly
available for anyone to use freely, and that the openadaptor development
project will be a cooperative effort among everyone interested in enhancing
the capabilities of openadaptor.”
The Software Conservancy is a nonprofit organization incorporated under the
laws of the State of California. Its primary role is to serve as an
independent, neutral organization to hold copyright to open source or free
software source code and to fulfill related functions with respect to public
software development projects creating such code. An individual or
corporation might donate open source code to the Conservancy if they are not
interested in acting as the copyright holder for that code. Similarly, an
open source project might look to the Conservancy as a neutral third party
that can provide a legal framework for developers to participate in the
project.
About CollabNet
CollabNet provides companies with solutions for collaborative software
development by combining a comprehensive Web-based environment and suite of
consulting services. CollabNet develops collaborative networks that enable
companies to share code within an enterprise, to give select customers and
business partners access to code, or to open the code to the wider open
source community. These solutions are designed for facilitating software
development across globally disparate communities and enabling corporations
to reduce costs and increase revenues. CollabNet is currently working with
customers ranging from hardware and software providers to companies from
industries such as finance, wireless, and pharmaceuticals. Brian
Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation, established
CollabNet in July 1999. For more information, see http://www.collab.net.
About Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein
Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) is the marketing name for the
investment bank of Dresdner Bank AG, a member of the Allianz Group.
Headquartered in London, Frankfurt and New York, DrKW provides a wide range
of investment bank products and services to European and international
clients through its Global Investment Banking, Global Equities and Global
Debt business lines.
openadaptor is a trademark of Kleinwort Benson Limited. Software Conservancy
is a trademark of The Software Conservancy. CollabNet and SourceCast are
trademarks of CollabNet, Inc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks
are the property of their respective holders.
Author: JT Smith
“Caldera is honored to receive this recognition for the OpenWBEM project,” said Drew Spencer, chief technology officer for Caldera International, Inc. “Since its inception, Caldera has remained committed to the Open Source community. Our objective with OpenWBEM, comparable to our intent with Caldera Volution Manager, is to make it easier for system administrators to manage heterogeneous systems.”
Started at Caldera, the OpenWBEM project is an implementation of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) WBEM standard. In essence, the OpenWBEM project creates a port through which standardized management of various computing systems is possible. The current version is completely usable, and the goal now is to port it to many platforms and to write providers.
To learn more about OpenWBEM, go to http://www.openwbem.org/. For more information about Caldera products and services, visit http://www.caldera.com/.
Caldera International, Inc.
Caldera International (Nasdaq: CALD) provides “Powerful Choices” for businesses through its Open UNIX, OpenLinux and SCO OpenServer product lines and services. Based in Orem, UT, Caldera has representation in 82 countries and 16,000+ resellers worldwide. Caldera Global Services provides reliable localized support and services to partners and customers. For more information on Caldera products and services, visit http://www.caldera.com.
Caldera, the Caldera logos, Caldera Volution, OpenLinux, SCO and the associated SCO logo, and SCO OpenServer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Caldera International, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Caldera Global Services is a service mark of Caldera International, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other brand or product names are or may be trademarks of, and are used to identify products or services of, their respective owners.
Forward Looking Statements
The statements set forth above include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. The Company wishes to advise readers that a number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Those factors include the failure of the products described above to operate as designed due to incompatibility with some platforms or other defects; our reliance on developers in the open source community; new and changing technologies and customer acceptance of those technologies; the Company’s ability to compete effectively with other companies; failure of our brand to achieve the broad recognition necessary to succeed; unenforceability of the GNU general public license; our reliance on third party developers of components of our software offerings; claims of infringement of third-party intellectual property rights; and disruption in the Company’s distribution sales channel. These and other factors, which could cause actual results to differ materially, are also discussed in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Author: JT Smith
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Author: JT Smith
Author: JT Smith
For many organizations that produce substantial publications (something bigger than your average church newsletter), the industry standard layout program is Quark. And that can be a shame, at times.
While Quark does have many good features, it can be difficult to learn. It also costs about $300 for an educational license. However, it’s when you try to use it in a networked environment that your hair tearing begins in earnest, especially if you’re using Mac OS clients and a Unix-like server. This is where I am.
The Retriever Weekly, the college paper of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, uses Quark Passport on Mac OS 9 clients talking to a Linux server running Netatalk. Attempting to use Quark to work on files on the server is frustrating, as it often corrupts files when attempting to save over the network, apparently due to its temp file handling. Single and double quotes are sometimes mangled or lost between the writers and the final print edition. It also can’t seem to import RTF files without losing the italics, which has forced us to use the DOC format (and so indirectly caused several virus problems). The setup requires us to use hardware dongles, which is annoying if you upgrade your Mac to one that uses a different type of keyboard (you have to mail your dongle back to them to get the right one). And being OS 9 software, it sometimes just explodes.
Enter Scribus. Scribus, released under the GPL, aims to be a replacement for Quark and competing products such as Adobe InDesign. At version 0.5, it looks to be well on its way.
Because Scribus is included in Debian unstable version, installation was a snap. Just to be thorough, I also tried compiling it, which was as easy as with most modern programs of this size (./configure, make, make install). Firing it up, I noticed that it started quickly enough, and took up a smallish footprint (though I didn’t have any very large documents to test).
The layout and tools were straightforward, with a mix of menus and buttons. Creating a document is likewise straightforward, with several useful options (page size, margins, and an option for automatic columns). Placing and moving text and image boxes is easy, with the ability to create oval and custom five- or more-sided boxes (which are really necessary for newspaper layout).
File and edit functions
The file menu is as one would expect, with the ability to print, and save as EPS, PDF, or using Scribus’ own XML-based format. The non-binary native format is nice, both for the sake of supporting it in other programs and for processing it with standard text tools such as Perl, vi, etc. Scribus can only have one document open at a time, though you can run multiple copies of it. The ability to read Quark files would be extremely useful, though I can imagine that this may prove to be difficult to accomplish.
The edit menu has the standard options: cut, copy, paste. One noticeable hole here is the lack of an undo function. It would be helpful to have a sophisticated undo function that maintains a long history and lets you undo select actions, but even a simple “undo the last thing I did” would be welcome. Additionally, Scribus doesn’t appear to be able to actually edit templates yet.
Options for individual text or image boxes are set via the style and item menus. These include fonts and colors, and also the ability to not print the image box, which can be extremely useful. You can also change the shape of boxes from here, and the multiple duplicate function could come in handy.
The tools and help menu options are fairly limited at the moment. The help menu displays informational boxes about either Scribus or Qt, and also brings up the currently empty online manual. The tools menu deals with hiding/showing the various toolbars. The extras menu contains only one option,
manage pictures, but it’s a really great option. It allows you to see the paths of your picture files, jump to the pictures within the document, and enable/disable printing. More importantly, it allows you to determine whether any picture files are missing (if you’re sending the document on a ZIP disk to your printing company and have forgotten to include some of your image files, for example), and to locate the missing files.
Looking at the working area
The working area is also coming along nicely. You have the ability to snap to and/or view a grid (or not), and a right-click on any text or image box will bring up a menu of common operations. You can show or hide the rulers along the top and sides, and display them in points or millimeters (inches would be nice, too). Text/image boxes can be rotated and have their contents flipped horizontally or vertically, and fine adjustment of position and width is also possible.
You can select a background color
from eight customizable colors, and also control the shading and “textdistance,” which is the distance the text is placed away from the border of the box. You can also set the attributes “Is PDF Bookmark” or “Is PDF Annotation,” though these are not covered in the English documentation, and I couldn’t figure out how to use them. For fonts, True Type and Type 1 Postscript are supported.
Scribus also has support for text chains, which are a must when working with a newspaper. A text chain allows you to specify “jumps,” when a story begins on one page and is continued on another, which occur frequently in newspapers. Specifying a text chain makes the text entered in one box automatically wrap to the next correct one. Creating and breaking text chains seems to work the same way as it does in Quark, and is fairly straightforward. A nice additional feature not included — which I’m not sure is even present in Quark — would be the ability to view the text chain relationships, perhaps as colored lines connecting the boxes. Attempting to create a text chain from a box to itself seems to hang Scribus, but this isn’t something you’re supposed to do anyway, and will probably not be difficult to check and prevent.
Still some features needed
Scribus looks great so far, but there are a few missing features and hurdles. The first is the aforementioned lack of an undo feature; everyone makes mistakes. Currently, Scribus has the ability to import text from plain text files. Importing text from DOC and RTF files would be very useful, and is necessary for an environment such as mine, where it is important to include formatting such as italics, and where content is submitted by writers and editors who will likely be using
the DOC format. Supporting the fancy features of the DOC format isn’t necessary, but the ability to import basic text and attributes (such as bold and italics) would be a big step forward in terms of my needs. It hurts to say this, but it should probably support “smart quotes” as well, if only to turn them into regular quotes.
As with many Open Source projects, documentation is a bit of a problem, though it’s certainly better than many. Some features, such as PDF Bookmark and PDF Annotation, could use more attention (any at all, really), but for the most part I managed to get by quite well on what was there.
Scribus is also facing the same problem that Linux itself is facing in terms of making it onto the desktops of designers: an entrenched software product that people have learned to tolerate. Many design shops had trouble when trying to use Adobe InDesign, because the printing companies wanted the documents in Quark format. Our printing company is more flexible in this regard, and the ability to export to EPS with CMYK color support may well be enough, but your mileage may vary. On that front,
Apple still has the upper hand over Linux distributions when it comes to making sure your photograph colors look the way you want. This is thanks to ColorSync, which tries to align your monitor with “real life.” An equivalent to ColorSync on Linux would be terrific, but an equally good move, for the adoption of Scribus, would be an OS X port of Scribus. Most design shops and designers are using Apple hardware, and exchanging this for Linux in an existing shop seems unlikely at the moment.
Additionally, Quark is the industry standard, which means that most designers are familiar with it and use it. The ability to read Quark files would be another giant step forward, as would the ability to save them (though even a commercial product such as InDesign can’t save in Quark format). A Quark plugin to read Scribus files might also be effective, but that seems like it would be a lot of trouble.
Finally, there is a program called Flight Check which is available for Quark, and does pretty much what the name implies: makes sure the documents are ready to send to the printer. This includes checking to make sure all the photographs are present (Scribus does handle this already), and also that the fonts are included. Something like this would be a nice touch.
Scribus is off on the right foot, and it has many features that are fairly advanced for a version number like 0.5. It has some sizable hurdles to overcome, but since it’s come this far, I have high hopes for it.
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Author: JT Smith
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