Chief scribe
Yesterday The Document Foundation, the organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice suite, announced that GNOME Foundation and KDE e.v. have joined the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation (TDF). In a reciprocal move to consolidate their relationships, TDF also acquired seats on the boards of both the GNOME Foundation and KDE. These reciprocal […]
With the Olympic Games being held in Rio de Janeiro this summer, lots of eyes are being turned on the city. Some of those eyes are being turned on the city’s slums – known locally as “favelas” – with some surprising results. For instance, Techinsider has discovered that Rocinha, the city’s and Brazil’s largest favela, […]
GNU Taler should provide a new payment system that provides users with anonymity and docks to the existing financial system without making Bitcoin and other crypto currencies superfluous.
This week the House of Commons is due to debate the Investigatory Powers Bill, the latest version of the Snoopers’ Charter (news passim), that will allow the United Kingdom’s police and services to regard the entire UK population as potential organised criminals, suspected terrorists and other assorted ne’er-do-wells and enable those same services to monitor […]
Today many people have digital content they created years ago and stored in obsolete and proprietary document formats. Very often these old file formats cannot be opened by any application on the user’s current operating system, leaving the users locked out of their own content. However, it is not just individuals that are affected: public […]
OwnCloud founder Frank Karlitschek, who was CTO at OwnCloud Inc. until four weeks ago, has established a fork of OwnCloud with Nextcloud – and is offering commercial support via a new company.
Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind putting the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite in the cloud, has announced the release the first production grade version of Collabora Online, its flagship cloud document suite solution. Codenamed “Engine”, it is targeted specifically at hosting and cloud businesses who wish to support both commercial and consumer […]
Over the last 19 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has been the steward of the Open Source Definition (or OSD), establishing a common language when discussing what an Open Source licence means. In addition, the OSI has maintained a list of licences known to be compatible with the OSD. This is being taken to […]
Today the United Kingdom witnessed the annual, anachronistic, Ruritanian pantomime otherwise known as the State Opening of Parliament, an event performed by the unelected in fancy dress which marks the formal start of a session of the UK parliament. The substantial part of the ceremony is the delivery of the Queen’s Speech, written for her […]
Bitkeeper, the version control system originally used in the development of Linux is now available under the Apache licence. In the meantime open source alternatives such as Git and Mercurial have dominated the market.
Scientists and engineers from the Universities of Bristol and Western Australia have developed a technique for efficiently simulating a “quantum walk” on a new design for a primitive quantum computer.
It has emerged that so-called “superfast” broadband (defined in this instance as 25 megabits per second (Mbps) Ed.) will not be provided automatically to tens of thousands of remote rural homes, the Western Daily Press reports. A Government consultation document says it is likely that many people in such areas would not want to be […]
Open source software was an essential element in the work of 2 Bristol modern languages tutors who have just won an award. The University of Bristol has announced that Marcella Oliviero and Andrea Zhok have won first prize in the 2016 Apereo Teaching & Learning Awards (ATLAS) for a project that helped first-year students in […]
Stoke-on-Trent City Council is examining the possibilities of installing free public wifi in the city centre (Hanley), whilst Ludlow Town Council has ruled out free public provision due to lack of funds.
Yesterday a press release from CERN announced that its CMS Collaboration unit had released more than 300 terabytes (TB) of high-quality open data. This includes over 100 TB, or 2.5 inverse femtobarns (fb−1), of data from proton collisions at 7 TeV, making up half the data collected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by the […]
At the end of April a CiviCRM meet-up for the South-West of England is taking place in Bristol, kindly hosted by One25. The meet-up’s date and time are 27th April 2016 from 5.00 p.m. to 7.00 p.m. The venue is One25’s offices at 138A Grosvenor Road, Bristol, BS2 8YA (map). This event’s programme will include: […]
News arrives from CiviCRM, the free and open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, of 2 free events later this month in London. First of all NfP Services is hosting a free seminar at its London offices with refreshments and lunch included. The seminar will be held on Tuesday 19th April from 10.00 a.m. to […]
A blog post earlier this week from The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, the popular free and open source office productivity suite, gives details of the first bug hunting session for the forthcoming release of LibreOffice 5.2. There is also a page on the session on the LibreOffice wiki. This initial session will be […]
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the University of Bologna have developed an open source microprocessor enabling the development of devices for the Internet of Things (IoT).
UbuCon Europe 2016 will be the first conference dedicated to the European Ubuntu community and will be held in Essen, Germany from 18th to 20th November 2016. The organisers are promising two days full of talks, workshops, demonstrations, exhibitions and (hopefully) great food. There will be social events in the evenings will give delegates the […]