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Tag Archives: open source

Bristol University’s Martin Poulter appointed Jisc-Wikimedia Ambassador

Dr Martin Poulter, Senior Web Developer for Bristol University’s Economics Network and New Media Manager for the Children of the 90s project, has been appointed Jisc-Wikimedia Ambassador to facilitate a project to bring the academic world and Wikipedia closer together. Based at the University of Bristol, this joint project between UK education charity Jisc, which […]

Free software a priority in education says French parliament

The Senate and the National Assembly, the two houses of the French parliament, have agreed to make free software a priority for education, according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. This Wednesday last the National Assembly confirmed a proposal by the Senate urging higher education institutions to give preference to free […]

BananaBread – a browser-based 3D shoot ’em up

Le Monde Informatique reports that the Mozilla Foundation has published a shoot ’em up game – BananaBread – to demonstrate the capabilities of its Javascript libraries. If it works in Mozilla’s Firefox browser, all Javascript-compatible browsers are affected by these developments. No plug-in needs to be downloaded since everything is implemented in the browser. The […]

Italy’s South Tyrol region migrating 7,000 PCs to LibreOffice

With the migration from MS Office to LibreOffice, public sector organisations in Italy’s mostly German-speaking South Tyrol region are making their first major steps towards using freien software. Over the coming 3 years, will convert 7,000 PC workstations and thus save some €600,000 in licensing fees. Free software gained entry to Italian public sector organisations […]

Raspberry Pi boot camp in Bristol this weekend

This Saturday 15th June a Raspberry Pi boot camp will be taking place at At-Bristol, Anchor Road, Bristol BS1 5DB (map) from 10.30 am to 4.30 pm. Entry to the event is free, but does not include access to the exhibits of At-Bristol. The event aims to provide fun hands-on workshops for beginners through to […]

EFF objects formally to DRM in HTML5

On Wednesday this week the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a formal objection to the inclusion of digital rights management (DRM) in HTML5, arguing that a draft proposal from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) could stymie Web innovation and block access to content for people across the globe. The W3C’s HTML working group is […]

Bristol IT Megameet registration extended

News has just arrived via email that registration for the Bristol IT Megameet (news passim) on 1st June has now been extended until Friday 24th May. To quote from the email: Although we currently have over 250 people registered, with the very recent addition of a couple more sponsors, we are now able to take […]

Bristol hosts South West CiviCRM meet-up

On Thursday 23rd May, Bristol once again plays host to a South West meet-up for people who are interested in, using or developing for CiviCRM, the free and open source customer relationship manager package (as used by Bristol Wireless! Ed.). As with previous meet-ups, this next one will be held between 4.00 pm and 6.00 […]

Bristol IT MegaMeet registration closes tomorrow

On Saturday 1st June, UWE will be hosting the 2nd Bristol IT MegaMeet on its Frenchay Campus at Coldharbour Lane Bristol BS16 1QY (map). The event itself will be taking place in Rooms 2Q42 to 2Q50 in Q Block; more direction details and maps here. The event starts with a brew at 9.30 am, with […]

Privacy: another reason to avoid Skype

Some time ago we drew attention to the possible eavesdropping problems in using Skype, which is now owned by Microsoft (news passim). This has now been confirmed by German technology news website, Heise. Anyone who uses Skype, has agreed that Skype may also read too. Heise Security has found out that Microsoft actually avails itself […]

ISS migrates to Linux

Laptops for crew use on the International Space Station (ISS) are being migrated from Windows to Linux, the Linux Foundation reports. The reason for the migration, given by Keith Chuvala of United Space Alliance, a NASA contractor deeply involved in Space Shuttle and ISS operations was as follows: We migrated key functions from Windows to […]

Wikimedia Commons smartphone app released

Wikimedia Commons is a great resource: nearly 17 mn. freely usable media files that anyone can use for any purpose and to which anyone can contribute too! Contributing to Wikimedia Commons is also getting easier: it’s now possible to transfer images to the Commons database from an Android or iOS smartphone using a free and […]

Illegal procurement favouring Microsoft killed off by Portuguese court

On 27th April the administrative court of Almada, Portugal, declared a €550,000 contract between Microsoft and the Municipality of Almada to be illegal. The technical specifications of the competition launched by the municipality prevented any company other than Microsoft and their partners from submitting a bid. This ruling is especially significant as it clarifies that […]

CERN resurrects first ever website

In honour of the 20th anniversary of the release of libwww into the public domain (news passim), CERN has resurrected the first ever website at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html As screenshot of the front page of this historic site is shown below, as seen by the text-based lynx web browser. This very first website at CERN – and […]

We write to Sir Tim Berners-Lee

As reported yesterday, Bristol Wireless is a signatory of the letter below that was submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on 24th April 2013 (news passim). Dear Sir Berners-Lee [sic], We write to implore the World Wide Web Consortium and its member organizations to reject the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) proposal. As prominent […]

Bundestag: “Stop granting software patents”

Germany’s Bundestag (Parliament) has adopted a joint motion against software patents, urging the German government to take steps to limit the granting of patents on computer programs. In the resolution (German, PDF), the Parliament says software patents restrict developers from exercising their copyright privileges, including the right to distribute their programs as free software. Patents […]

National Library of Scotland seeks Wikipedian in residence

Are you looking for a temporary job? Do you enjoy editing Wikipedia and can you teach others to do it too? If the answer to these questions is yes, a current vacancy at the National Library of Scotland may interest you. The National Library of Scotland and Wikimedia UK are joining forces to support and […]

Open source career taster days for women

In conjunction with both Fossbox and Flossie, BCSWomen, the British Computer Society’s specialist women’s group, is organising 3 open source career taster days for women in London next month. The days involved are 13th, 20th and 28th May and the sessions will run from 10.00 am to 5.00pm. All the taster days will be held […]

Croatia: government creates open source and open standards working group

Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website, reports that the Croatian government is establishing open source and open standards working group. The working group will provide advice to government ministries and other public sector organisations wishing to adopt open source software and open file formats. The group will offer guidance for the procurement […]