News from around the world
The European Parliament has decided that internet freedom is a component of EU foreign policy, according to the Dutch news site, Nu.nl. On account of this step, it shall be EU policy to condemn countries outside the EU as soon as they censor the internet or other means of communication. According to Dutch MEP Marietje […]
In the flood of news about open source deployments by the public sector around the world, the UK public sector is beginning to look increasingly isolated with its devotion to closed source, proprietary IT (I believe this is what the experts call vendor lock-in. Ed.). The latest bit of news to reach the lab is […]
OSOR reports that the Hungarian government wants to use the Open Document Format, an open, non-proprietary format for electronic documents, as a default for its documents. Zsolt Nyitrai, Minister of State for ICT, told parliament earlier this month that legislation to use ODF by default is being prepared. The ODF plans were announced on 1st […]
Yesterday in Berlin a court hearing took place in a case that could set a crucial precedent for the embedded industry. In the lawsuit between AVM and Cybits, AVM maintained that others should not be allowed to modify free software on computers bought from AVM, such as the widely used Fritz!Box. At the heart of […]
The Free Software Unit of the Secretariat of State for Technology of Tunisia’s Ministry of Industry and Technology has launched Taskforce Opensource, an initiative aimed at fostering the adoption and implementation of open source in Tunisia. The site’s home page states: This collaborative space is designed to collate your proposals and your comments on many […]
PC World reports that North Korea has started manufacturing computers, according to a report on North Korean state TV. The range of machines available consists of two for educational use and one for office use. The educational computers both run the same custom software and come in two versions: one is a netbook-sized laptop, whilst […]
Public internet access in libraries is a well established service nowadays. Indeed it’s been in existence here in Bristol for so long that one hardly ever gives it a thought. However, the other day Jules, the Bristol Wireless Treasurer, emailed the chief scribe with a tale from Albany in Oregon, where he’s currently sojourning. Jules […]
The H Open reports today that the desktop version of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has now officially reached its end of life. From 12 May 2011 (yesterday), no new updates, including security updates and critical fixes, will be available. The server edition of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS will continue to be supported until May 2013. Users of […]
Don’t ever let anyone convince you that techies survive on pizza, coffee and various flavours of ethyl alcohol. Here at Bristol Wireless, some of us are also great aficionados of Japanese food. Hence we were very interested by the announcement of the Bento Box laptop. To quote from Yanko Design’s original post… Bento is quite […]
Your ‘umble scribe picked his title ih haste, as it’s actually a series of teach-ins. 😉 Ubuntu Open Week is currently underway from Mon 2 May – Fri 6 May on IRC in #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat between 14.00 and 18.00 hrs UTC. In just 7 years, Ubuntu has become one of the world’s most popular […]
Are you enthusiastic about Debian and thinking about contributing? If yes, then the Debian Women project and the OpenHatch project want to teach you the basics. They’ll be will be holding an IRC event on Saturday 7th May to help people that want to compile their first Debian package from source, and apply their first […]
Yesterday the Gnome Project announced that the GNOME 3.0 release (as used in the latest Ubuntu release, now imminent, codenamed ‘Natty Narwhal’. Ed.) has attracted far more contributions from women than any previous GNOME release. This results largely from the hard work of the first round of the Outreach Programme for Women interns, who took […]
The Lancashire village of Wray (population approx. 500) became a true global village on Easter Monday with a world first – the live streaming of video and audio coverage of a village cricket match over the internet. The protagonists were Wray CC* vs the Rest of the World. The result: Wray won by 1 run, […]
The Register reports that File Transfer Protocol (FTP) celebrates its 40th anniversary this weekend. FTP itself was initially proposed by MIT‘s Abhay Bhushan in April 1971 for transferring large files over ARPANet, the forerunner to today’s internet. However, it still has its uses, unlike some earlier protocols (gopher anyone? Ed.), and its future looks assured. […]
2011 marks the 20th birthday of Linux (or GNU/Linux if you’re a purist. Ed.) and the Linux Foundation has released the video below to mark the event. Find out more about what’s happening to celebrate 20 years of Linux and penguin-powered computing at the Linux Foundation’s dedicated 20th birthday page.
If someone asked you what you would do with Linux when the cows come home, would your answer be: “Milk them”? If so, you can go to the top of the class; and no, don’t let the proximity of April 1st lull into a sense of incredulity. Agricultural equipment manufacturer DeLaval makes a robotic milking […]
News arrives that the Free Software Foundation Europe is 10 years old this month. This is a good age to start celebrating according to our sources. Consequently, FSFE is organising a small party in Berlin this evening at C-Base, Rungestraße 20, 10179 Berlin. All free software supporters are invited and those coming along are asked […]
Osor reports that the Dutch could save €1-4 bn. per year, if the public sector moved to open source software, according to calculations done by the Ministry of the Interior. The ministry deemed the report ‘unsound’ and wanted to keep it under wraps, but Dutch Members of Parliament demanded access to the report. The report […]
Whilst the venerable Debian distro names its releases after characters in the Toy Story film, the popular Ubuntu distro – a spin-off from Debian – uses a formula of an adjective plus wildlife name to characterise its twice-yearly releases. Mark Shuttleworth, an early space tourist in a previous life and now the leading light behind […]
LibreOffice, the free, power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Linux, Macintosh and Windows that forked from OpenOffice following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle in January 2010, has now got a new website. So reset your bookmarks to http://www.libreoffice.org/ LibreOffice is community-driven and developed software and the project comes under the wings of […]