On the heels of last week’s announcement that it’s joining the OpenOffice community, IBM today announced the launch of IBM Lotus Symphony, a free desktop application suite, reports The New York Times. 

According to the report, Lotus Symphony consists of three free programs — word processing, spreadsheets and presentations –- and will compete directly with Microsoft Office.  

The Times continues: 

IBM’s Lotus-branded proprietary programs already compete with Microsoft products for e-mail, messaging and work group collaboration. But the Symphony software is a free alternative to Microsoft’s mainstay Office programs — Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The Office business is huge and lucrative for Microsoft, second only to its Windows operating system as a profit maker… 

IBM executives compare this move with the push it gave Linux, the open-source operating system, into corporate data centers. In 2000, IBM declared that it would forcefully back Linux with its engineers, its marketing and its dollars. The support from IBM helped make Linux a mainstream technology in corporations, where it competes with Microsoft’s Windows server software. 

CNET News also has a good report on the Symphony announcement, while IBM executive Ed Brill writes today on his blog: 

I’m excited about this announcement on many levels. First, it shows the strategic nature, based on current and future plans, of IBM’s investment in delivering the editors in Notes 8 as well as through other channels.  Second, it offers something from the Lotus brand focused on the end-user/consumer. Third, it demonstrates the strength of IBM’s commitment behind desktop alternatives (Linux, ODF, etc) to the broader market — which should help with all distributions of OpenOffice.org-based editor tools, today and tomorrow. 

In the name of self-promotion, to get the full story on IBM’s decision to join OpenOffice and its implications for the open document format, check out this article I wrote on the topic last week.

The results are in from the Antivirus Fight Club at LinuxWorld, and, as expected, Clam AntiVirus, an open source project, did quite well when measured against commercial products.The competition was much more involved than initially described to me by Dirk Morris, CTO of Untangle. There were three rounds in the fight. Each antivirus product faced three groups of viruses.

First they faced a set of five test viruses (harmless files used for testing antivirus technology) from the European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research (EICAR). The second set consisted of 12 “in the wild” viruses collected by Untangle. The third set consisted of 17 viruses submitted by the public.

Overall, Kaspersky performed the best of any AV product. It stopped 97% of the viruses thrown at it. Clam AntiVirus performed second-best, with an overall catch rate of 91.4%. In third place was Norton, Symantec’s consumer AV product, which had an overall success rate of 88.6%

The worst performers were SonicWall (54.3%), Hauri (45.7%), Fortinet (45.7%) and WatchGuard (2.9%).

In his summary of the Fight Club results, Morris wrote that he is “surprised by how poor [sic] many of these solutions are performing. … Our goal in this test was not to scare people, or even drive people away from some vendors. We simply want to encourage discussion. Tests like these need to be open and transparent

There are bound to be some skeptics about this test. As one reader commented, this sample size of viruses is somewhat small. Would it be useful to introduce a larger test set of viruses?

Also, for some reason Untangle left Trend Micro out of this competition. Perhaps if there is a rematch, it will be included.

Projity announced this week the beta release of OpenProj, an open source, on-demand project management application that the San Mateo, Calif.-based SaaS vendor says is a “complete replacement” of Microsoft Project and a perfect fit for SMBs.  

According to Projity CEO Marc O’Brien, OpenProj has a similar user interface and virtually identical functionality as Microsoft Project. The two applications are also interoperable, meaning OpenProj can open all native Microsoft Project files, and vice versa. 

As an open source application, OpenProj is downloadable over the Internet for free, compared with Microsoft Project’s licensing fee of $1,000. Making the switch to OpenProj from Project, therefore, costs nothing, O’Brien said.  

Still, can an open source application ever truly replace a long-entrenched Microsoft offering like Project? The odds are slim, to say the least. 

But O’Brien has high hopes for OpenProj. He believes SMBs will be attracted to OpenProj not just by its nonexistent price, but also by its compatibility across multiple platforms — Linux, Unix, Mac and Windows –- and its accessibility from any PC with an Internet connection. 

In addition, O’Brien said Microsoft’s market positioning of Project makes it vulnerable. 

“It’s interesting because Microsoft Project is part of the Office family of products, but it’s not bundled in any of their suites,” O’Brien points out. “We think that gives us an opening.” 

OpenProj is currently available in French, English and Spanish versions, but in a sign of Projity’s lofty worldwide ambitions, other foreign language versions, including Mongolian and Tibetan, are in the works, O’Brien said.   

Since its announcement at LinuxWorld in San Francisco on Tuesday, where he said it received a standing ovation, OpenProj is getting a “couple thousands downloads a day,” according to O’Brien. Ultimately, “We’re expecting between 7 and 11 million users very quickly,” O’Brien said. Lofty ambitions indeed. 

In a narrow sense, it is probably accurate to say that OpenProj can “replace” Project on any given PC or in any given SMB: It looks and sounds the same as Project and can perform all the same functions. But it is unlikely OpenProj will ever “replace” Project in the overall project management marketplace. With over 28 million registered users worldwide, Microsoft Project seems to have its heels dug in too deep for that.

The usually united open source software community is on the brink of civil war, according to a recent Boston Globe article. The impending blowup is over last year’s deal between Microsoft and Novell, which some say could open up other open source vendors to patent infringement suits by Microsoft. 

The Globe’s Hiawatha Bray writes: 

 “As part of the deal, Novell agreed to compensate Microsoft for features in Linux that Microsoft claims to have patented. Critics say Novell has betrayed other Linux vendors and made it easier for Microsoft to threaten Linux companies with patent infringement suits.” 

But Linux vendors are not the only ones in jeopardy. Companies that use Linux and other open source software, including SMBs, could also face legal action.

Hiawatha continues:  “Brown, the [Free Software Foundation’s] executive director, said that those who buy Novell’s version of Linux will be shielded from Microsoft patent litigation. But people who buy from other Linux companies are still exposed to patent lawsuits, even though all versions of Linux are nearly identical.” 

So will Microsoft actually bother suing every SMB that uses non-Novell-purchased open source software? My guess is probably not, but then again… 

“…within days of signing the deal with Novell, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told guests at a software industry conference that Linux contains Microsoft intellectual property. ‘In a sense you could say that anybody who has got Linux in their data center has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability,’ he said, suggesting that Microsoft might demand compensation from Linux users not covered by the Novell agreement.”