News from around the world
It’s just been announced by Wikimedia UK, the UK charity that supports the work of Wikipedia, that the English language version of Wikipedia has today passed through the barrier of 4 million articles: The English @Wikipedia now has over 4 million articles! Congratulations to its 100,000+ editors that have made this possible! — Wikimedia UK […]
According to the IT department city of Helsinki in Finland, migrating to an open source office suite like OpenOffice or LibreOffice will cost the city council some €21 mn., according to a news piece carried by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). Back on 10th of April 2012, FSFE filed a Freedom of Information request, […]
LeggiOggi.it reports (in Italian) that the Puglia region has passed Italy’s first regional law that combines free software with open data. On Wednesday this week all 48 members of the regional council voted in favour of a new law promoting the use of free software and granting citizens access to all the information and services […]
After the leap second problems reported earlier this week (news passim), Techworld features some more positive news – that Linux was central to the discovery of the Higgs boson by CERN. Techworld quotes a post by a Reddit user called d3pd, which we reproduce below. I don’t see any CERN related things here, so I […]
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has two internship positions available from August 2012. FSFE is looking for bright, motivated people who want to make a real difference for a free information society. Applications would be welcomed from those with a background in politics, law, computer science or other fields. The internships are for between […]
The BBC is reporting that the leap second change and poor weather on both sides of the Atlantic last weekend caused chaos, knocking out the likes of Reddit, Foursquare and Amazon Web Services‘ cloud computing servers. Besides, internet and IT giants, the bug also affected many other businesses, such as Quantas, whose check-in system crashed. […]
We learn from Joinup that Yadifa, the DNS server developed to administer the .eu top level domain (TLD), has been released as open source by Eurid, the not-for-profit organisation which manages the .eu domain registry. Eurid uses Yadifa alongside Bind, one of two other commonly used open source DNS systems. Yafida was published officially on […]
Our friends at Bristol 24/7 recently reported that open source software supplier ForgeRock was moving its UK headquarters to Bristol’s historic Queen Square. Even more recently, Connecting Bristol alerted us that ForgeRock is recruiting staff for its Bristol office. Connecting Bristol’s post also indicates that successful candidates for ForgeRock’s jobs in Bristol will also have […]
A couple of days ago, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) announced it had started an initiative to promote fair public procurement in Finland. The initiative concentrates on IT-related procurement notices that require specific brands instead of defining the functionalities required by the purchaser. To date FSFE has scrutinised over 300 procurement notices, and of […]
The Belgian Province of Luxembourg (yes, there is such a beast! Ed. ) was for a long time a user of VoIP telephony services based on proprietary technology supplied by Cisco (Call Manager + SCCP protocol), Joinup reports. A few months ago and following a public tender, the Province decided to rid itself of vendor-lock-in […]
The dust has now settled over the launch of Monmouthpedia on Saturday, when Monmouth was officially launched as the world’s first Wikipedia town (news passim). Monmouth, an historic town close to the border between England and Wales, is now sell covered in QR codes, enabling visitors with smart phones (e.g. Android, Jesusphone) to scan them […]
World launch for Wikipedia town paves way for global roll out across local communities. Innovative collaborative project puts Monmouth on the world map and provides access to almost half a billion people.
In the opinion of Christian Nähle, an employee of Dortmund City administration in Germany, Dortmund should prioritise open source software over its proprietary equivalents. According to Joinup, Nähle has written an open source proposal for Dortmund, which is currently being reviewed by the city’s IT department. The strategy paper’s explanatory statement has also been posted […]
Disturbing news from Slovakia reaches the lab via the FSFE. The east European state recently introduced legislation to help cut red tape by mandating the use of electronic filing of monthly VAT returns by businesses. However, the Slovakian state’s web application failed to observe interoperability guidelines and only works in Internet Explorer on Windows. EURA […]
Yes, our world these days is littered with three letter acronyms and days. Today’s target is DRM or Digital Rights Management, aka Digital Restrictions Management. DRM is applied to media by media companies and vendors to restrict their portability and reuse. While DRM has largely been defeated in downloaded music, it is a growing problem […]
A couple of weeks ago, we reported on Bristol’s (ultimately unsuccessful) bid to host the annual Wikimania convention in 2013 (news passim). James Forrester, Moderator of the Wikimania 2013 Jury, has sent the following email to the Wikimania mailing list announcing the 2013 winning bid as Hong Kong. On behalf of the Wikimania 2013 selection […]
Joinup reports that the Greek municipality of Pilea-Hortiatis, just east of Thessaloniki, is migrating all of its PCs to LibreOffice with the assistance of Greeklug, the Greek Linux User Group. Greeklug explains in a statement (in Greek) published at the end of March that it has completed the migration of 91 PCs from a proprietary […]
We learn from Joinup that Hungary’s government is investing some €1.23 million in a three-year project to improve applications which use Open Document Format (ODF). The funds are being split between the University of Szeged’s Software Engineering Department and Multiracio, an open source IT specialist developing EuroOffice office applications based on the LibreOffice and OpenOffice […]
Bristol’s bid to host Wikimania in 2013 (news passim) has been unsuccessful.The following email was posted to the Wikimania mailing list yesterday: Dear all, It is my pleasure to announce that the jury has been able to come up with an intermediate result – and I would like to share with you the fact that […]
Joinup reports that figures provided by Munich’s Mayor, Christian Ude, reveal that switching to a Linux-based open source desktop reduces costs and results in fewer calls to help desks, and that replacing the current pool of almost 10,000 open source desktops with a proprietary system would increase costs by some 25%. Moreover, the latter would […]