News from around the world
Today event registration opens for Document Freedom Day 2013 which will be held on Wednesday, 27th March. Local event teams can add details of their activities to the Document Freedom website and have them marked on the global campaign map. Last week 50 promotional packs were dispatched to hackerspaces to kick start event preparations. They […]
If you run a Linux system using the RPM-based package management system, you might like to give your system a security check following news from the Internet Storm Center (ISC) of a SSHD rootkit affecting such distributions. To quote from the ISC article: The rootkit is actually a trojanized library that links with SSHD and […]
The use of the term Python for free and open source software is at risk in the EU due to a Community trade mark application by a UK company, as is explained in the post below from the Python Software Foundation News blog. There is a company in the UK that is trying to trademark […]
The City of Munich has responded on its IT blog to a report commissioned from HP by Microsoft alleging that migrating to open source had cost the city millions of Euro more than opting for proprietary software. The following paragraphs are a translation of the relevant blog post. The City has only had a short […]
From France’s Gendarmerie Nationale (news passim) to an Irishman with 6 machines, using free and open source operating systems and software is saving businesses of all sizes money. The Irishman appears in a report in today’s Meath Chronicle of how an 11 year-old boy saved him €3,000. Sean Mullen’s 3 laptops and 3 desktop computers […]
The whiff of romance is in the air as restaurants, the cards business and florist gird their loins for Valentine’s Day on February 14th. The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is asking all free software romantics to do something different on Valentine’s Day: use the day as an opportunity to say “thank you” to one […]
One of the major developments of recent years has been the growth in mobile internet-capable devices and a new mobile traffic forecast update by Cisco now predicts that the human population of planet Earth will be outnumbered by internet-connected mobile devices – smartphones, laptops and tablets – by the end of the current year. That […]
Online tech news website The H reports that the developers of LibreOffice, whose version 4.0 is due for release within days (posts passim), are also planning to release the “Impress Android Remote” application that will enable the office suite’s presentations to be controlled from Android smartphones. Communication between the phone and the presentation rendering system […]
“What has the EU ever done for us?” is a popular question raised by the right-wing print media in the UK. Well, in addition to the exhaustive list supplied by Simon Sweeney of the University of York in a recent letter to The Guardian, the EU has in recent years developed the EUPL – European […]
Over the years, MySociety, an e-democracy project of the charity UK Citizens Online Democracy, whose aim is to build “socially focused tools with offline impacts”, has designed some great online tools. By way of an example, these include: TheyWorkForYou to enable electors to track the work of their constituency MPs; WriteToThem to help electors write […]
After a delay of 14 years since it was first released for proprietary operating systems, the first version of Half Life, one of the most popular and influential first person shooter games of recent times, has now been released for the Linux platform, according to Softpedia. Half Life is based on a heavily modified Quake […]
While the UK government is content with ensuring UK ‘broadband’ customers are guaranteed a modest 2 MB/s over their domestic connections, news arrives of blistering data transmission rates being achieved in Germany. IT news site Heise Online reports today that the Chinese network technology group Huawei and the ISP Vodafone have been able to transmit […]
George Georgiadis, head of IT at the Greek municipality of Kalamarià, has commented that the almost ubiquitous use of MS Office in the Greek public sector is hindering the adoption of open source alternatives, according to a report on Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. Kalamarià is drawing to the close of […]
Spanish IT services company ElkarMedia S.L. reports (Spanish) that the municipality of Azpeitia in Spain’s Basque Country will be avoiding the maintenance costs involved in using Microsoft Office and saving up to €30,000-40,000 in 3-4 years since the company installed the free and open source LibreOffice office suite on the council’s computers. In addition, ElkarMedia […]
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) blog reports that the GNU/Linux Inside sticker pack is now being sold. The stickers are high-quality and durable; they won’t fade away or scratch off your computer, making it the ideal way to advocate your use of free software! They are perfect for replacing those *other* stickers that may come […]
Next Wednesday, 23rd January, has been designated CiviDay 2013 and 2 meet-ups have been arranged in London and Bristol respectively for users of CiviCRM, the open source CRM package, as used by Bristol Wireless. The meet-ups are described as a great way to: network with the CiviCRM community; find out about how people are making […]
The free and open source advocacy organisation GreekLUG reports that the Municipality of Kalamarià near Thessaloniki in northern Greece is in the process of installing the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite on all of the council’s 170 workstations. According to GreekLUG’s press release (PDF), some 120 installations have been done to date. It […]
According to our site statistics, nearly 41% of you out there are reading this article on some flavour of Microsoft Windows. In addition, 22% are using various versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. And it’s to you, our IE users, to whom this message is addressed: use a better browser, preferably an open source […]
A group of technology activists gathered in front of the Cabinet office in Cairo on Sunday 30th December to protest an Egyptian governmental deal with software giant Microsoft to buy software for the public sector, the English language Egypt Independent news site reports. On 26 December, the official Facebook page of Hesham Qandil, the Egyptian […]
Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that a survey to measure the popularity of open source amongst Maltese residents took place in early December. The poll was organised by MITA, the Maltese government’s Information Technology Agency. It was launched during the most recent meeting of Government of Malta Open Source End […]