News from around the world
Although the favourite tipple (outside working hours of course! Ed.) of our regular volunteers is cider, we do have a couple – notably Messrs Treasurer and Secretary – who are fond of beer and real ale in particular. Consequently we were intrigued when Phoronix reported that beer and open source are being combined in GBeers […]
The contribution of open source to the economies of EU Member States is estimated to be worth some € 450 bn. annually according to a report of the first Open Forum Academy conference, which took place in Brussels on 24 September. This figure is made up of some €374 bn. in savings from the re-use […]
The Portuguese local authority of Vieira do Minho in the far north of the country would appear to be an exemplar for the use of open source software for small local authorities everywhere, according to a report posted yesterday on the EU’s open source news website, Joinup. Vieira do Minho has been using open source […]
The Münchner IT-Blog, the IT blog of Munich city council in Germany, reports that its fellow council in Leipzig started a migration to the free open source office suite OpenOffice earlier this year. OpenOffice has since been installed on 3,900 of Leipzig’s 4,200 PC workstations and is now used as the standard office program within […]
Today, Monday 8th October, is the last day for registration for the LibreOffice Conference 2012, which, following a public poll, will be held in Berlin from 17th – 19th October 2012. The conference venue will be the Conference Centre of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. The conference programme reflects the broad engagement and […]
While Linux is running your phone (if it’s an Android. Ed.), tweets, financial trades, cash machines and much, much more, most people don’t know how it’s actually built. This short video from the Linux Foundation takes you inside the process by which the largest collaborative development project in the history of computing is organised. It’s […]
On 14th October, Belgium goes to the polls for local council and provincial elections. Joinup, the EU’s open source news website, reports that 278 election candidates have so far pledged their support for free and open source software. The pledges were garnered in a grass roots campaign comprising just 2 people who have been contacting […]
EU open source news website Joinup reports that the Administration the Italian region of Umbria has started a project to migrate an initial group of 5,000 users to LibreOffice. Osvaldo Gervasi, president of Umbria’s Open Source Competence Centre – CCOS – states that getting rid of IT vendor lock-in is one of the main motives […]
Earlier this month, the government of Kenya announced that in the next three years it will move its IT operations to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), a move that will reduce its IT costs by more than 50%, according to a report on the Kenyan news website Standard Digital. Needless to say, the announcement […]
One of the greatest benefits of using free and open source software is that it can be shared with others and reused by them. In these cash-strapped, austere times this is one aspect which public sector IT departments are discovering – in some places anyway. One hundred and fifty local authorities in the Walloon (French-speaking) […]
French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has just distributed a circular on “Use of free software in the administration” (in French, PDF) to all government ministries, according to a report from Linuxfr.org. This circular marks a major advance for free software in the French State’s IT systems. It lists past successes and the most appropriate case […]
Last month the Italian Parliament approved an update to the country’s Digital Administration Code, making free and open source the default option for public sector organisations looking for new software solutions, Joinup reports. With effect from 12th August this year, Italy’s public sector bodies looking for new software solutions may either decide to develop their […]
A study by Prof. Jim Norton recommends that CIOs looking to replace legacy systems should consider open source options over proprietary software or public cloud services, according to a report published today by Australia’s ITNews. The report was commissioned by travel business giant Amadeus, assessed the role of open source software in critical transaction systems […]
Today, 15th September, is Software Freedom Day, an annual worldwide event to promote the role that free and open source technology can play in the modern world, where our everyday lives are increasingly dependent upon technology. At the time of writing, there are over 200 teams in 60 countries putting on events of which the […]
We learn from GNU Solidario, a voluntary organisation that has been delivering health and education with free software since 2005, that the Argentine capital Buenos Aires will be turning into the “technological capital” of Latin America between September and October due to four events covering different aspects of ICT technologies. As this article goes to […]
The Free Software Foundation Europe FSFE) is asking whether lawsuits like Apple vs Samsung will soon take place in Europe if proposals currently on the table for reform of the patent system are adopted. The European Parliament is about to set the future course for Europe’s patent system. On 17th and 18th September, the Legal […]
For years, Bristol Wireless has been opposed to software patents. Firstly, they stifle innovation and cripple competition. To date they haven’t been too much of a problem in the UK. However, one only has to look across the Atlantic to see the kind of mess that can occur due to software patents: companies making more […]
On August 16, the Debian community will celebrate that epic Linux distro’s 19th birthday since Ian Murdock’s original founding announcement. As is tradition, the Debian communities all around the world will be celebrating it with Debian Birthday parties. A Debian Birthday party is a fun event, globally marking the appreciation and the joy of being […]
Casas Bahia is a major domestic electrical appliances retailer in Brazil with 53,000 employees and over 500 stores. For the last 5 years it’s been successfully running SuSE Linux on its mainframes and point-of-sale systems with zero downtime as the following video explains (with helpful subtitles in English for non-Portuguese speakers).
Unlike their colleagues in the city of Helsinki’s IT department, who think open source office suites cost too much (news passim), the Finnish city of Tampere is to trail the free and open source OpenOffice productivity suite alongside its regular proprietary suite (probably the one with the annoying paperclip. Ed.), Joinup reports. The pilot follows […]