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FSF releases User Liberation video

Steve Woods International Events, International IT News, Open Source News January 5, 2015 Comments Off

Most people interact with free software every day, but many of those people don’t know what free software is or why they should go out of their way to use it. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) wants to remedy that so it commissioned a short video that makes free software easy for everyone to understand.

FSF worked with Urchin Studios to make the animated introduction to free software featured above. Urchin made the video using free software. For 30 years the FSF has been educating people about and promoting free software.

Ubuntu and Asimo

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News January 5, 2015 Comments Off

Honda’s Asimo, the world’s most advanced humanoid robot, is apparently programmed using Ubuntu Linux, according a report on IT news website Softpedia.

Asimo walking downstairs — Asimo tackles stairs. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

A sharp-eyed Softpedia reader pointed out that the Ubuntu OS has been spotted in a YouTube video on recent advances in robotics. The Linux terminal and the characteristic Ubuntu Gnome terminal maximise, minimise and close buttons in the top right-hand corner of the terminal window can be clearly seen in the screenshot below.

screenshot showing Gnome terminal

Softpedia speculates that the Ubuntu version in use might be quite old – most likely Ubuntu 10.04 LTS or Ubuntu 10.10 – and remarks that Honda uses various operating systems in its robotics laboratory.

WiFi coming to French TGV trains soon?

Steve Woods International IT News January 5, 2015 Comments Off

After years testing, the French state railway operator SNCF is going to launch an invitation to tender to equip its TGV (high-speed train) rolling stock with WiFi, Le Monde Informatique reports. There’s light at the end of the tunnel for the French travelling public.

On Friday’s France Inter breakfast programme, Axelle Lemaire, the French Secretary of State for Digital Affairs encouraged SNCF to deploy WiFi quickly on the French railway network’s TGV lines. An invitation to tender to provide internet access will be launched very shortly under the aegis of SNCF’s digital strategy. The railway company has been testing a service using a flat satellite antenna on the roof of some carriages for several years. In June 2007, SNCF was reported to be working together with Colubris Networks. In December 2007, the firm was testing a WiFi service on TGV services serving eastern France. There have since been lots of public relations exercises, but nothing definite for passengers.

TGV train in Rennes station. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

If passengers are growing impatient waiting for the arrival of WiFi on TGV services, this is also because WiFi has already been available for many years on Thalys and EuroStar trains providing international services to and from France. SNCF’s immobility is being blamed on the cost of deployment: €350,000 would be needed to equip one TGV carriage. Asked whether the service would be free for passengers, the Secretary of State stonewalled expertly hoping “that the recent increase in SNCF’s fares will include the costs of deploying WiFi”, adding to this her wish that “using the WiFi would be without additional charge for passengers”.

This is a revised version of a post originally appearing on the author’s own blog.

China trials free WiFi service on train

Steve Woods International IT News November 28, 2014 Comments Off

glassy wifi symbol Passengers on board Train No. T809 from Guangzhou, China’s third largest city, to Hong Kong enjoyed free wireless network access today (Friday), according to ChinaDaily Europe, marking the inauguration of the first WiFi access service on the Chinese railway network.

The other 23 trains serving the route will also be fitted with the equipment to provide the service soon. After installation there will be a trial service period of three months before the service is launched officially.

The equipment on the train is able to provide WiFi for up to 1,000 passengers at a time.

It is not known whether there will be a charge for the service once it is officially launched.

Software licensing practices questioned in Dutch parliament

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News November 28, 2014 Comments Off

photo of Astrid Oosenbrug The licensing practices of proprietary software companies such as Microsoft have been questioned this week in the lower house (Tweede Kamer) of the Dutch parliament.

The questions were triggered by the case of the Municipality of Arnhem, which wanted to switch from the ubiquitous MS Office suite to a free and open source alternative such as Apache OpenOffice or LibreOffice. After being penalised to the tune of €600,000, Arnhem has now dropped its plans to make the switch to an alternative productivity suite.

Taking the example of Arnhem, Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) MP Astrid Oosenbrug (pictured), her party’s spokesperson on ICT and privacy matters, has submitted the written questions below to the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations:

2014Z21841

Questions from member Oosenbrug (Labour) to the Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations about closed source software manufacturers keeping a grip on local authorities (submitted 27th November 2014).

1
Have you taken note of the report “Licence fine forces town to drop move to alternative office tools” 1), which states that the Municipality of Arnhem was being forced to buy a licence for €600,000 by way of penalty for the unlicensed use of office software?

2
Is it true that the Municipality of Arnhem has had to pay this amount to avoid further legal action arising from unauthorised use in the past and thus has a licence for the relevant software package for years to come? If not, what is the actual situation?

3
Do you agree that this method from the software’s supplier results in forced custom because the local authority is forced to buy new licences for the current software and switching to open source software becomes unprofitable? If not, why don’t you share that opinion?

4
Do you recognise the picture that local authorities announcing their desire to move to open source come under additional pressure from their current providers of closed source software? Do you want to draw up an inventory of how many local authorities are faced with this?

5
Do you believe that this is a commercial practice which is undesirable? If not, why not? If so, what can local authorities or you do about it?

6
Do you agree that local authorities must have perfect freedom to be able to choose between closed and open source software? If so, how will you help local authorities reduce the threat of fines for unauthorised use to reasonable levels so that they do not affect the future choice of software?

1) https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/licence-fine-forces-town-drop-move-alternative-office-tools

Bristol academics give data security advice

Steve Woods International IT News, Local IT News November 26, 2014 Comments Off

Monitor and padlock Bristol University announced yesterday that two reports edited by Professor Nigel Smart, its Professor of Cryptology, have now been published by ENISA. The 2 reports are as follows:

The Algorithms, key size and parameters report 2014 is a reference document providing a set of guidelines for decision makers, in particular specialists designing and implementing cryptographic solutions for commercial online services.
The Study on cryptographic protocols provides an implementation perspective, covering guidelines regarding protocols required to protect commercial online communications containing personal data.

The reports give guidance to companies, EU member states and the wider community about current best scientific practice in the rapidly advancing field of cryptography.

The first report provides a set of proposals in an easy to use form, with a focus on commercial online services that collect, store and process the personal data of EU citizens.

The second report focuses on the current status in cryptographic protocols and encourages further research. A quick overview is presented on protocols which are used in relatively restricted application areas, such as wireless, mobile communications or banking (Bluetooth, WPA/WEP, UMTS/LTE, ZigBee, EMV) and specific environments focusing on Cloud computing.

The reports, which also had input from a number of members from the Cryptography Research group in the University’s Computer Science Department, provide an update to the 2013 cryptographic guidelines report on security measures required to protect personal data in online systems.

FreeBSD round-up

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News November 19, 2014 Comments Off

FreeBSD logo Since the free and open source operating systems field tends to be dominated by GNU/Linux in its various forms and distributions, it’s easy to forget that others are available.

One of these – FreeBSD – is having a newsworthy week at present. FreeBSD is one of the most popular Unix derivatives based upon the 4.4BSDLite2 free version of Unix.

To begin with, the release of FreeBSD 10.1 was announced.

On x86-64 systems, this new release of FreeBSD can now also boot via UEFI, which new hardware typically uses to boot operating systems. However, UEFI support is not included in the standard download, but requires its own disk image.

Secondly, the FreeBSD Foundation, which exists to support FreeBSD, has announced a very generous donation indeed.

The Foundation has received a $1,000,000 donation from Jan Koum, CEO and Co-Founder of WhatsApp. This marks the largest single donation to the Foundation since its inception almost 15 years ago and, in the Foundation’s words, “serves as another example of someone using FreeBSD to great success and then giving back to the community.” The Foundation is also assembling a team to decide how best to spend this donation, which has matched its funding target for the year in one fell swoop.

Jan Koum himself issued the following statement with regard to his donation:

Last week, I donated one million dollars to the FreeBSD Foundation, which supports the open source operating system that has helped millions of programmers pursue their passions and bring their ideas to life.

I’m actually one of those people. I started using FreeBSD in the late 90s, when I didn’t have much money and was living in government housing. In a way, FreeBSD helped lift me out of poverty – one of the main reasons I got a job at Yahoo! is because they were using FreeBSD, and it was my operating system of choice. Years later, when Brian and I set out to build WhatsApp, we used FreeBSD to keep our servers running. We still do.

I’m announcing this donation to shine a light on the good work being done by the FreeBSD Foundation, with the hope that others will also help move this project forward. We’ll all benefit if FreeBSD can continue to give people the same opportunity it gave me – if it can lift more immigrant kids out of poverty, and help more startups build something successful, and even transformative.

Groupon abandons its Gnome trademark applications

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News November 12, 2014 Comments Off

Yesterday we reported on the threat to the GNOME Foundation’s GNOME trademark from Gnome trademark applications made by Groupon (news passim).

Groupon has now withdrawn its Gnome trademark applications and issued the following statement.

Groupon is a strong and consistent supporter of the open source community, and our developers are active contributors to a number of open source projects. We’ve been communicating with the Foundation for months to try to come to a mutually satisfactory resolution, including alternative branding options, and we’re happy to continue those conversations. Our relationship with the open source community is more important to us than a product name. And if we can’t come up with a mutually acceptable solution, we’ll be glad to look for another name.

UPDATE: After additional conversations with the open source community and the Gnome Foundation, we have decided to abandon our pending trademark applications for “Gnome.” We will choose a new name for our product going forward.

Introducing the Pi-Top

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News November 11, 2014 Comments Off

A group of developers has developed a DIY laptop kit, heise reports. All components can be assembled in a way that’s friendly for beginners and without soldering. With the Pi-Top you’ll be learning DIY both for hardware and software.

Jesse Lonzano and Ryan Dunwoody had the idea of developing the Raspberry Pi-based Pi-Top DIY laptop at the start of this year. The pair of British developers want to promote the Maker culture. “We think hardware is great, but we know that complex obstacles must be overcome before you can really start to build things yourself. With the Pi-Top we wanted to make it easier to learn this complex knowledge”, they state.

Until one minute to midnight on 13th November you can support the project and purchase a Pi-Top Kit for US $285. The Indiegogo campaign has already achieved 159% of its target funding, so the production of the DIY laptops is ensured. The Pi-Top team is expecting to ship the kits in May 2015.

In addition to the complete kit, consisting amongst other things of a 3D-printed casing, a Model A Raspberry Pi, a display, a keyboard and a wifi adapter, the kit also contains pre-installed learning software. This comprises various training modules which teach the basics for hardware and software projects. This package will also be available free of charge in the future.

Help the GNOME Foundation defend the GNOME trademark against Groupon!

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News November 11, 2014 1 Comment »

The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organisation promoting the goals of the GNOME Project, helping it to create a free software computing platform for the general public that is designed to be elegant, efficient and easy to use.

image of Groupon's Gnome offering The Foundation is currently facing a threat to its GNOME trademark from global deal-of-the-day website merchants Groupon, who have recently announced a product that’s also called Gnome. Groupon’s Gnome comes in the form of a tablet-based point-of-sale “operating system for merchants to run their entire operation.” It therefore has little to do with creating an elegant, efficient, easy to use free software platform for the general public, but more with liberating cash from the wallets and purses of the general public. The Groupon offering is shown on the left.

As a result of this threat from Groupon, the GNOME Foundation has released the following statement and appeal for funds.

“GNOME” has been a familiar name in software for the past 17 years, and a registered trademark since 2006. The GNOME project has been a staple desktop for GNU/Linux and BSD desktops. It was the default desktop for Sun Microsystems workstation class machines, continues to be the default desktop for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server distributions, and it is the default desktop of Fedora and Debian. SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service solution for the retail industry is based on GNOME. GNOME technology can be found in TVs, tablets, phones, consumer devices, and in common software everywhere.

Recently Groupon announced a product with the same product name as GNOME. Groupon’s product is a tablet based point of sale “operating system for merchants to run their entire operation.” The GNOME community was shocked that Groupon would use our mark for a product so closely related to the GNOME desktop and technology. It was almost inconceivable to us that Groupon, with over $2.5 billion in annual revenue, a full legal team and a huge engineering staff would not have heard of the GNOME project, found our trademark registration using a casual search, or even found our website, but we nevertheless got in touch with them and asked them to pick another name. Not only did Groupon refuse, but it has now filed even more trademark applications (the full list of applications they filed can be found here, here and here). To use the GNOME name for a proprietary software product that is antithetical to the fundamental ideas of the GNOME community, the free software community and the GNU project is outrageous. Please help us fight this huge company as they try to trade on our goodwill and hard earned reputation.

We want to show that our brand matters and that you care. Of the 28 trademark applications Groupon filed, we have to file formal proceedings to oppose 10 of them by December 3, 2014. Help us raise the funds to fight back and most of all call public attention to this terrible behavior by Groupon. Help us make sure that when people hear about GNOME software they learn about freedom and not proprietary software. Our counsel has advised us that we will need $80,000 to oppose the registration of the first set of 10 applications. If we are able to defend the mark without spending this amount, we will use the remaining funds to bolster and improve GNOME. Please help us raise the money to protect GNOME’s trademark and strengthen Free Software!

GNOME will gratefully accept donations to fight this trademark dispute to preserve free software.

vCard and iCalendar are now UK government open standards

Steve Woods National IT News, Open Source News November 4, 2014 Comments Off

Whilst the present government’s record may be regarded by some as controversial, to say the least, there’s one area where some real progress has been made; and that’s the adoption of open standards by central government.

In July this year, there was the adoption of Open Document Format (ODF), PDF and PDF/A and HTML (news passim), with ODF for collaborating on and sharing government documents and the other 3 standards for viewing government documents.

Yesterday, the Open Standards Board announced that RFC 5545 (iCalendar) and RFC 6350 (vCard) have now been adopted as open standards for government for exchanging calendar events and contact details respectively.

This means both vCard and iCalendar are now in the implementation phase and Sir Humphrey and his colleagues are encouraged to report problems with adopted standards on the Standards Hub.

The vCard and iCalendar formats have both been in widespread use for more than 10 years. The versions selected by the Board are specified and maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force who ratify a number of commonly used extensions. The versions are largely backwards compatible with previous versions produced and consumed by a very wide range of applications.

Well done Whitehall. When is this adoption of open standards and formats going to start spreading to the UK’s town halls. If it already has, tell us in the comments below.

Open Source and the Cloud coming to Hove

Steve Woods National Events, Open Source News, Training October 31, 2014 Comments Off

Our friends at Omnis Systems in Brighton are organising an event – Open Source, the Cloud and your Business – at Sussex County Cricket Club, Hove, BN3 3AN (map) on Tuesday 18th November.

Banner for event

Many organisations in the private, public, voluntary and community sectors are now starting to look seriously or are in part using “the Cloud” and Open Source technology. However, there is still some as to the business benefits that can be realised by using these tools.

Those who worry are not alone. Very often even IT resellers and consultants find it difficult to understand if they are offering the best solutions to their customers as they have limited visibility on what is available apart from the offerings from their standard vendors.

This seminar will be examining what Cloud and Open source technology actually are, how public and private sector organisations are using them and what business opportunities they offer. The seminar will also explore a few of the common myths that surround those technologies and get into some real life case studies on how organisations can benefit.

Time	Description	Speakers
09:00 / 09:30	Registration & event presentation
09:30 / 10:00	Cloud, Open Source or both? Understanding what “Cloud” really is. The definition, the services, the good, the bad and the ugly. There are very useful aspects of the Cloud to consider but there are also some issues that have security, economical and ethical impacts you may have not considered.	Paolo Vecchi Omnis Systems
10:00 / 10:30	How you could help the Public Sector in being more efficient by offering your services through G-Cloud and how we can help you getting there faster.	Chris Farthing Advice Cloud
10:30 / 11:00	Providing “Cloud” services since before it was cool. Moving bits for UK businesses.	Joe Kerr FastNet
11:00 / 11:30	Coffee break & time for networking/questions
11:30 / 12:00	Securing your Cloud identity with Single Sign-On and strong authentication	Giuseppe Paternò SecurePass
12:00 / 12:30	Local Government representative from London talking about their experience with Open Source and Open Alliances that could be formed between organisations to share code and experiences (Awaiting confirmation and full speech description)	TBA
12:30 / 13:30	Lunch break and networking
13:30 / 14:00	Technology Choices for Business Strategy Businesses compete fiercely in a market changing ever faster. Public bodies too must deliver better for less. Their strategic response is to focus on users, iterate products, drive down costs, design for easy change, share knowledge and experience, and widen access to more kinds of suppliers and innovation. Find out how your technology choices can support business aims. Tariq Rashid, speaking in a personal capacity, previously leading on open source for the Cabinet Office.	Tariq Rashid
14:00 / 14:30	Open what? Does Open Source matter to my business? It may matter as, like it or not, you are using a lot of it but your suppliers don’t want to tell you. We will also look at examples of how IT resellers let down their customers by selling them the wrong solutions for the job and how Councils spend (badly?) our money… … and at a few tools, including Collax V-Cube & Business Server, that businesses can adopt to consolidate their IT infrastructure, simplify its management and reduce costs.	Paolo Vecchi Omnis Systems
14:30 / 15:00	Zarafa Communication Platform a safer & cost-effective way to communicate Zarafa has always been the best drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange but now is taking its ambitions further. With the inclusion of telephony, video conferencing, file & document sharing and many other features Zarafa is now ready to take on Office365 and GoogleApps. What’s the point? You can control your data & your privacy, integrate your applications and at the same time spend even less than by using general purpose Cloud applications. Zarafa Communication Platform can be installed on Linux distributions like RedHat, Ubuntu and Debian. In this presentation it will be shown running on Univention Corporate Server which allows you to manage your Linux based infrastructure using a professionally designed web interface.	Marco Welter Zarafa
15:00 / 15:30	LibreOffice-from-Collabora provides an enterprise hardened and supported build of the world’s most popular Open Source ‘Office’ software LibreOffice. Large Corporate and Public Sector organisations now have a secure and long term supported alternative to proprietary Office software.	Tim Eyles Collabora
15:30 / 16:00	Coffee break, networking, QA
16:00 / 16:30	Reducing costs and complexity. Open Source based solutions for Windows and Linux desktop virtualisation	Mike Trevor Cutter Project
16:30 / 17:00	Entando, the most agile way to share informations and connect to the “Internet of Things”	Rinaldo Bonazzo Entando
17:00 / 17:30	How Linux and Open Source platforms allow us manage millions of emails and contacts on our mailing and CRM solutions	Andrew Mann Synchromedia
17:30 / 18:30	QA, networking, beers, wine.

Full details are available on the Omnis Systems website.

Your correspondent will be attending and will report back after the event.

Poor take-up prompts revamp of broadband voucher scheme

Steve Woods Bristol Wireless News, Local IT News, National IT News October 21, 2014 Comments Off

image of fibre-optic cable The current hard copy of Networking magazine (to which Bristol Wireless subscribes. Ed.) reports on its front page that on account of poor take-up of the broadband connection voucher scheme (of which we’re part. Ed.), the government is revamping its offer of £3,000 to get businesses on high-speed broadband connections in 22 cities. Apparently fewer than 3,000 companies have claimed a mere £7.5 mn. of the £150 mn. pot.

According to the Networking report, the voucher no longer covers just the direct capital cost of providing the connection, but also the running costs and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport has said that suppliers are now free to use the cash to create a free or discounted product.

In addition, a £2 mn. advertising campaign has been implemented to give the scheme a boost, whilst the DCMS attempted to put more impetus into the scheme in a press release dated 22nd September.

One wonders whether the Department’s revamping of the scheme (not its first, either. Ed.) is prompted by an urge to spend as much of the total £150 mn. before the scheme ends in March 2015.

According to the scheme’s administrators the take-up of vouchers by city as at 17th September 2014 was as follows:

Aberdeen: 10
Belfast: 297
Birmingham: 120
Brighton: 28
Bristol: 20
Cambridge: 38
Cardiff: 156
Coventry: 90
Derby: 23
Derry/Londonderry: 25
Edinburgh: 86
Leeds & Bradford: 464
London: 981
Manchester & Salford: 468
Newcastle on Tyne: 48
Newport (South Wales): 17
Oxford: 18
Perth: 1
Portsmouth: 9
York: 38

That’s a grand total of 2,937 businesses.

To find out if you’re a business* eligible for a connection voucher, visit the Connection Vouchers website.

* = This includes sole traders, social enterprises and small businesses.

Hamburg’s Greens want city to get rid of Microsoft

Steve Woods International Events, International IT News, Open Source News October 21, 2014 Comments Off

Tux holding Hamburg coat of arms Hamburg’s Green want to wean the city off its Microsoft dependency and are pointing to Munich’s use of Linux, German IT news website heise reports.

On the occasion of the impending 2014 Open IT Summit Hamburg’s Greens demanded the liberation of the city council from dependency on Microsoft. For Green Party Hamburg Parliament member Farid Müller it’s a matter of examining “if and how Hamburg can disengage itself from the US giant Microsoft”. The city must become independent of Microsoft the monopolist. By doing so it could also save millions in licensing costs. In this context Müller refers to the LiMux project in Munich, where the city council’s use of Linux and free and open source software is currently under discussion.

The 2014 Open IT Summit, whose emphasis is on open source and data security, is taking place today (Tuesday) as an alternative event to the IT summit with German Chancellor Angela Merkel taking place in Hamburg. The range of topics extends from the Heartbleed bug via cloud computing up to a Microsoft exit strategy for Hamburg. a podium discussion will sound out whether a migration to free software is realistic for Hamburg.

Reposted from the author’s blog.

“Women deserve to be part of the IT crowd,” comments Bristol 24/7

Steve Woods International Events, International IT News, Local Events, Local IT News October 21, 2014 Comments Off

Women Who Code logo Ada Lovelace Day, that annual celebration of women in science, technology, engineering and medicine, may be gone for another year (news passim), but that doesn’t mean it’s forgotten.

Earlier today local news site Bristol 24/7 carried a comment piece by Ujima Radio presenter Cheryl Morgan entitled “Women deserve to be part of the IT crowd“.

Starting with Ada’s work with Babbage, the piece moves forward through the significant and changing role of women in IT:

Grace Hopper, an admiral in the US Navy, first taught computers to understand human-like language. She invented the compiler, a tool that can convert the programming languages we are familiar with today into instructions more easily understood by machines. She also invented the Cobol programming language.

It also highlights the problems that women can face in what are seen as “male” professions:

However, when an industry becomes male-dominated, it is hard for women to survive in it. I’m reminded of a cartoon in which a group of businessmen tell their sole woman colleague: “You are the only person who thinks this organization is sexist.”

Cheryl’s piece leaves its best piece till last: a branch of Women Who Code has now been established in Bristol. This is the organisation’s third city group after Belfast and London.

The Bristol Women Who Code group will be holding its inaugural meeting on Thursday 23rd October at the Engine Shed at Temple Meads (map). This will be a hack event entitled Coding in the Cloud. At the time of writing, only 4 places were left, so if you want to attend, hurry up!

Munich sticks with LiMux and free software

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News October 16, 2014 1 Comment »

Limux icon On Tuesday, Munich’s first mayor finally responded to an inquiry by the Green Party (PDF, German) about rumours regarding a possible reversion to a Windows-based desktop environment from its current Linux-based LiMux system (news passim). The response shows that there is no factual basis for the claims made by first mayor and second mayor. An evaluation of the IT infrastructure and processes is in progress.

In recent months, statements by the newly appointed mayors Reiter and Schmid (Munich has 3 mayors. Ed.) have stirred up confusion about the future IT strategy of Munich. Contrary to third mayor Christine Strobl, the first and second mayors have hinted in recent months a possible end to the use of free software within the city. However, facts were hard to obtain. The answer to the inquiry has now shed some light on the matter.

No factual basis for criticism

The mayor now admits that the often-cited waiting time needed to obtain official work mobile phone is unrelated to the LiMux operating system, but was instead caused by the fact that he was the first to demand the implementation of Apple’s iOS in the city’s IT infrastructure.

As regards the missing unified mail and calendar application criticised by Schmid, it became clear that the relevant Kolab free software solution is currently being implemented. This only started in early 2014 and is expected to be in use early in 2015.

Broad support for free software in Munich

The city’s IT department, the city council and third mayor Christine Strobl all support the current IT strategy and thus distance themselves from the criticisms of the first and second mayors. Ms Strobl emphasises that “upon careful checking” she still considers the move to free software was the right thing to do.

There’s a sound economic basis for this view: the city was able to save €11 mn. just in reduced licensing costs. The hardware costs alone of switching to Windows 7 would have amounted to €3.15 mn., with a move to Windows 8 being even more expensive, according to the city’s IT department. Furthermore, a switch would incur additional costs and mean the loss of achievements in supporting open standards.

FSFE makes vendor independence and interoperability plea

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is calling on Munich’s city council to include both vendor independence and interoperability as factors in the investigation, since they were major reasons for Munich switching to free software in the first place.

“Other European Countries such as Great Britain, France, Italy, and Sweden have made free software and Open Standards a central part of their IT strategies for the public sector in the past years. In Germany, the public sector is lagging behind. Germany’s federal and state governments finally need to take coherent action so that public institutions here, too, can enjoy the benefits of Free Software,” says FSFE President Karsten Gerloff.

Nominations open for Women in Open Source award

Steve Woods International Events, International IT News, Open Source News October 16, 2014 Comments Off

Opensource.com reports that Linux purveyor Red Hat is now accepting nominations for the Women in Open Source Award. Created to highlight the achievements women making major contributions to an open source project, to the open source community or through the use of open source methodology, this award is the first of its kind.

The award celebrates all different kinds of contributions to open source, including:

Code and programming;
Quality assurance, bug triage and other quality-related contributions;
Involvement in open hardware;
System administration and infrastructure contributions;
Design, artwork, user experience (UX) and marketing;
Documentation, tutorials and other forms of communication;
Translation and other internationalisation contributions;
Open content;
Community advocacy and management;
Intellectual property advocacy and legal reform;
Open source methodology.

Nominees can qualify for one of two tracks:

Academic award: open to women enrolled in college or university; and
Community award: open to all other women.

The Women in Open Source Academic Award winner will receive:

$2,500 stipend, with a suggested use of supporting an open source project or efforts; and
A feature article on Opensource.com.

The Women in Open Source Community Award winner will receive:

Ticket, flight and hotel accommodation for the Red Hat Summit to be held in Boston, Massachusetts on 23rd-26th June 2015;
$2,500 stipend, with a suggested use of supporting an open source project or efforts;
A feature article on Opensource.com; and
Speaking opportunity at a future Red Hat Women’s Leadership Community event.

Nominations are open until 21st November. Judges from Red Hat will whittle down the nominees to a subset of finalists for both the Academic and Community awards, from whom the public will decide the winners. The winners will be announced in June during an awards ceremony at the 2015 Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts.

Introducing the anonabox

Steve Woods International IT News October 15, 2014 2 Comments »

Crowdfunding site Kickstarter has announced that August Germar is currently raising funds for anonabox, a Tor hardware router that will re-route data through the Tor network for security and anonymity.

The anonabox is an open source internet networking device designed to run alongside a current home router or modem. Small enough to fit in a jacket or trouser pocket, the device directs all of a user’s internet traffic via wifi or an Ethernet cable to Tor, where his or her original IP address is hidden from prying eyes, an important privacy consideration since Edward Snowden revealed the scope of surveillance routinely carried out by the NSA in the USA and GCHQ in the UK.

August was originally seeking a total of $7,000 to take the project further, but has already raised 10 times that amount, according to Computerworld. At the time of writing the total had risen to $501,872 and the appeal for funds still had 27 days to run.

August has produced a small video to introduce the anonabox and how it works.

Kickstarter backers can reportedly secure an Anonabox for $45, a few dollars cheaper than what it will allegedly be sold for.

Free public lecture at Bristol Uni for Ada Lovelace Day

Steve Woods International IT News, Local Events October 13, 2014 1 Comment »

Tomorrow, 14th October, is Ada Lovelace Day, an annual an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths.

As part of the celebrations, Bristol University is organising a free public lecture focussing on Ada Lovelace’s life and pioneering work.

Ada Lovelace – the first programmer’ by Professor Philipp Welch from the School of Mathematics, starts at 1.00 pm on Tuesday 14th October in the Merchant Venturers Building.

In addition, Bristol University’s Computer Sciences Society is holding a special event on Wednesday 15th October with talks from seven speakers to showcase the careers of women in computing and engineering and discuss the challenges women have to overcome. The Computer Sciences Society’s showcase begins at 1.00 pm on Wednesday 15th October in the Merchant Venturers Building.

Both events are free to attend and no booking is required. For more information visit the University’s Ada Lovelace events page.

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know‘ Lord Byron and died in 1852. Her work with Charles Babbage on the ‘Analytical Engine‘ makes her an important figure in the early development of computer technology.

Ada’s mathematical notes include what is widely accepted as the first algorithm intended to be executed by a machine. Babbage was so impressed with her talents that he called her the ‘Enchantress of Numbers’.

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