Overseas events and events that attract international attendances
Last Saturday, Orly airport‘s air traffic was severely disrupted, leaving thousands of passengers stranded on the ground, Le Monde Informatique reports. The cause: a computer failure of the weather data management system running on Microsoft’s antediluvian Windows NT 3.1 operating system. Computer system failures in the aeronautical world are nothing exceptional, but always have a […]
GUADEC – the GNOME User and Developer European Conference – 2016 will be held in Karlsruhe in Germany, the GNOME Foundation has announced. GUADEC brings together hundreds of users and developers every year to further the GNOME project. It is anticipated that GUADEC 2016 will take place around July-August and the definitive dates will be […]
Earlier this week academics from the University of Bristol presented new breakthroughs on two fundamental problems in computer science. These results were presented at the 56th annual IEEE symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2015) in California earlier this week, the University reports. One of the most challenging questions in computer science is whether […]
Writing on The Document Foundation blog, Italo Vignoli has announced that a bug hunting session will take place from 30th October to 1st November for LibreOffice 5.1, the next planned major release of this popular open source office productivity suite. Over those 3 days, volunteers and members of the LibreOffice community will check the first […]
The weekend just gone saw another anniversary that ought not be forgotten: the Free Software Foundation (FSF) passed the 30 years milestone. German IT news website heise reports that the FSF was founded by Richard Stallman (aka rms. Ed.) on 4th October 1985. At that time the organisation’s goal was fully consistent with the then […]
Although Linus Torvalds, the originator of the Linux kernel, announced his initial work on the kernel on 25th August 1991, it was not until 5th October 1991 that Linus actually released his code: Linux kernel 0.01. With this October anniversary in mind, it’s worth taking a bit of time to review what’s changed to the […]
To underline the importance of the event for the community, The Document Foundation (TDF) yesterday announced the release of LibreOffice 5.0.2 during the opening session of the 2015 LibreOffice Conference in Aarhus, which runs until Friday 25th September. LibreOffice 5.0.2 is the second minor release of the LibreOffice 5.0 family, with a large number of […]
Ooh aargh me hearties! Besides being International Talk Like a Pirate Day (hat tip: Rich), 19th September 2015 is also a date for the diaries of people advocating free and open source software; it’s Software Freedom Day 2015. The idea of Software Freedom Day (SFD) is for everyone without a vested interest in proprietary software […]
Safecast is a global project to map radiation data from around the world and release this information openly. When the project had just started, they used modified hardware, together with their own custom software and a few clever tweaks, to allow anyone to participate in the project. This kind of ingenuity, the ability to re-purpose […]
If you work in public sector ICT procurement and can be in Brussels from 10.00 a.m. onwards on Friday 12th June this year, then there’s a forthcoming event that may be of interest to you. It’s entitled Open Standards for ICT Procurement: Saving While Reducing ICT Lock-In and is being organised by DG Connect, otherwise […]
With Debian 8, codenamed ‘jessie’, currently frozen and due for release as the next stable release at the end of April (news passim), many may have been wondering what the next Debian testing stable release will be. However, this particular question has now been answered. Writing on reddit, user dimitrifromparis has revealed the next character […]
On Wednesday, May 6th, 2015, activists across the world will come together to say no to Digital Rights Restrictions Management (DRM). In the last year, DRM has spread to more types of products; developments include Mozilla giving in to DRM in its Firefox web browser and the sycophantic media fawning over Apple’s DRM-laden “smart” watch. […]
An app designed by Computer Science students at the University of Bristol has won a top prize, University Business reports today. The European Space Agency App Camp was held in Barcelona from 25th February to 4th March, attracting more than 170 participants from 30 countries. The camp’s purpose was to find innovative ways to use […]
Microsoft, purveyor of insecure proprietary operating systems and annoying, overpriced office suites, has not always had an easy relationship with the concept of open source. Indeed, its first forays into the field were taken reluctantly since it was ordered by the European Commission to disclose interoperability information to third parties under an unfair competition ruling […]
Google Docs and Microsoft’s Office 365 could soon face proper open source and open standards opposition to cloud-based office productivity services according to the post below from yesterday from the chief scribe’s own blog. LibreOffice, the best free and open source office suite produced, is set to become the cornerstone of the world’s first global […]
Today is Document Freedom Day, an annual international celebration of open formats and open standards and an opportunity to promote their use. The use of open standards is definitely gaining ground, particularly where it matters, such as in dealings with government bodies. This was amply illustrated last year by the UK Cabinet Office’s announcement of […]
It’s been announced that the City of Munich has joined the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation (TDF) the non-profit foundation steering the development of LibreOffice, the leading free and open source office productivity suite. On the TDF’s Advisory Board, Munich’s city council will be represented by Florian Haftmann. Back in 2003, the city of […]
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. […]
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 […]
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“. […]