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IBM and Canonical push onto African netbooks

IBM and Canonical are buddying-up to sell a new business application bundle combining Ubuntu and Lotus for small, cheap computers in Africa. Under the pact, IBM is tying together various Lotus client applications running on top of the open-source operating system for the country's lower-end devices like netbooks, thin-clients, …

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Anonymous Coward
Jobs Horns

Worries of a Conspiracy Nut

This sounds great, but if the CIA get wind of this will they insist IBM insert Trojans so they can destabilize African economies at an agent's whim?

RW

IBM Lotus

I use it and prefer it to Open Office; it seems a little less clunky.

The important point to note, however, is that the native file formats for IBM Lotus are ODS and all the rest: the same as Open Office. I can edit a presentation in either package, or a WP document, or a spreadsheet.

So, though the program code isn't open source, the file formats are: you can always escape from the embrace of IBM if so inclined.

The one failure in the design of IBM Lotus was leaving out the ability to import .wk4 files. Lotus handles the .123 files introduced some time after R5 of the original Lotus 1-2-3, but that leaves a huge body of spreadsheets still unreadable.

James Anderson
Happy

Will we be receiving hand written spam?

EXCUSE HAND RITTEN LETTER PLEASE, SOMEONE GIVING ME NICE PC WITH ABSOLUTLY AWFUL LOWTUS NUTS, AND I CANNOT NOW SEND EMAIL.

HOWEVER I AM HAVING 2,123,000,000,000,000,000 Scottish Pounds in MOST Royal Scottish Bank THAT I CANNOT ACCESS BECAUSE OF SILLY LOCAL LAW.

I AM KINDLY................

Anonymous Coward
Gates Horns

Aids, famine, war, and now LOTUS!?

... as if the poor buggers didn't have enough to worry about.

On a more serious note, I applaud them for trying to head the MS juggernaut off at the pass in the developing world, and wish them luck.

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