Claude Almansi wrote: >Burrokeet (? http://www.burrokeet.org/ a kind of FOSS Office suite? > > Burrokeet I know something about, though the main people behind Burrokeet are on the list (or so I believe). Ross Gardler is one of them, and can talk about the project better. But I'll take the opportunity to wax poetic on the way *I* see it.
At the St. Lucia conference, 'Open Source For Business', I got to see Burrokeet in action when Anil Ramnanan did his presentation. I wrote about Burrokeet here (http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/9627 ), and wrote about the conference here (http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/9618 ). But having had the time to consider Burrokeet outside of the context of what was presented, it really has a lot of potential on the internet. In a way, one could say it is a kind of FOSS Office suite - because it does take OpenOffice input, and will generate - on the server - PDFs, HTML, and I believe other formats. That in and of itself is quite useful - Anil demonstrated it by *using* it for his demonstration. The handouts were generated PDFs from his demo, printed out, and his actual demonstration was live. It's hard to show the magic here, but - imagine that you write a document in an Office format (OpenOffice). Maybe you're a teacher, or a presenter, or maybe even a student. From that one file, you upload and automagically have all of these other formats. You're not chasing down different tools for the jobs; it's all right there. On demand. Another thing of note - this was developed in Trinidad and Tobago, and is the first standalone application developed in this country (I'm here until Saturday morning...) using an Open Source license - and people got *paid* to do it. I believe that IBM funded the first part of this, and now it's available for all to use and modify. The name itself is derived from a traditional Trinidad and Tobago Carnival character (and Carnival got done yesterday). It's a success story. Burrokeet will hopefully continue evolving. -- Taran Rampersad [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linuxgazette.com http://www.a42.com http://www.worldchanging.com http://www.knowprose.com http://www.easylum.net "Criticize by creating." — Michelangelo _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
