This past month our staff have been experimenting with some open source software to layout and print some of our September print publications.

We've been devotees of both Adobe InDesign and Adobe Pagemaker primarily because of their flexible abilities for desktop publishing. However this month we switched some of our PC designers and editors to Scribus "an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout."

I installed Scribus on my own laptop a few months ago to start fooling around with it and to see how easy it would be to make the transition. The interface is quasi-InDesign and has many of the same features. I like how, different from installing Adobe Design Premium and then getting hit with lots of add-ons like Device Central CS3, Scribus is clean and light(er). There have been some groans from staff who don't like to change, but the changeover has been relatively painless. Some font issues, but nothing major.

One of the reasons for the gradual change has been the increasing costs associated with Adobe that don't seem reasonable when there are great open source solutions like Scribus. Lots of open source solutions are now coming on strong and forcing potential conflicts with old pricey stalwarts. Photoshop has potential competition with this smart image resizing algorithm and Flash has huge competition with the easy-to-use (I have it installed) Synfig.

Note: open source does not mean free. There are also costs associated with servicing and support. However, the transparency of the companies and groups that usually produce open source services give me greater peace and satisfaction.

Along with installing Scribus, a few months ago I installed Ubuntu on a partition on my laptop, but I'll talk about that sometime in the future. We already run 95% Linux on all our web servers and my goal is to have 95% Linux penetration in all our offices by next summer.