News from around the world
As the council in our home city moves away from its previous open source office suite (Star Office) to the dark side (aka Microsoft Office. Ed. ), news reaches the blogmeister’s inbox via the Free Software Foundation Europe reporting on the experience of Helsinki City Council. City officials in Helsinki, Finland, are overwhelmingly satisfied after […]
Are you in the public sector and do you use or contribute to free and open-source software for e-Government? If so, Joinup asks you to take this survey. The survey is enquiring about the policies for sharing and reusing free and open-source software (F/OSS) in public sector organisations and the regions and countries of the […]
The Internet Archive, the place where – inter alia – old websites go when they die (and a damned fine resource it is too!. Ed.), has launched an appeal for donations. Brewster, the Founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, posted the following on the organisation’s blog yesterday: Dear Supporters of the Archive, In […]
In the dispute between the companies AVM and Cybits the written reasoning for the decision of the Regional Court of Berlin is now available. The court confirmed FSFE‘s view that users of software licensed under the GNU General Public License are allowed to modify and install it even if it is shipped as a part […]
The regional assembly of the Italian island of Sicily is to consider a law encouraging the public sector to use of free and open source software, OSOR reports. The bill was presented last month by Democratic Party member Massimo Ferrara. According to Blog Sicilia (in Italian), this is a “legislative initiative that reduces the digital […]
The YaCy project is releasing version 1.0 of its peer-to-peer Free Software search engine, according to a news report posted today by the Free Software Foundation Europe. The software takes a radically new approach to search. YaCy does not use a central server, but compiles its search results from a network of independent peers, which […]
The H Online reports that developers at Leuven Catholic University in Belgium have released AccessODF, an open source extension for the LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org Writer word processing application. With the extension, Writer users can evaluate and repair accessibility issues in documents, including the open source OpenDocument (ODF) and proprietary DOC and Office Open XML (DOCX) […]
To answer the question in brief, it’s a codename. Codenames are a common fact of life in information technology; everyone large and small uses them. For instance, the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution names its releases after animals preceded by an adjective (see list), whilst the venerable Debian, from which many distros take their inspiration (and […]
The H Open Source reports today that Texas-based video games development company id Software has released the source code of Doom 3, a first-person shooter (FPS) originally released in August 2004. The game’s code is available under version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3). However, no game data such as textures, sounds and […]
The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to publish more of its software under open source licences. It is considering to use a source code tracking system to help untangle code that can be made available as open source and programs that cannot for whatever reason. ESA’s plans for open source are the topic of a […]
As of this week, Asus Eee PC 1215P netbooks preloaded with Ubuntu Linux are available in the shops – as long as you do your shopping in Portugal. 😉 The Canonical blog reports that the ASUS Ubuntu netbooks can be bought in 100 Vobis and Worten stores across the country. The Eee PC has a […]
Desura, a community-driven digital distribution service for gamers, announced the release yesterday of a Linux client. After a 2 month beta period, Desura a digital distribution client which supports the installation and patching of games on any Linux distribution has launched. With this release Desura is the only client which works on both Windows and […]
European universities and employment agencies are increasingly making use of a Europass Curriculum Vitae, an open standard for creating and managing CVs (that’s a résumé for our readers on the other side of the Atlantic. Ed.), according to OSOR. Also increasingly popular is the European Union’s web service to create such CVs: this year the […]
Yes, you did read the headline correctly. However, the government in question is not Her Majesty’s but that of la belle France, which has just issued an invitation to tender for free and open source software support to the amount of €2 million, according to Le Monde Informatique. The Information Systems and Communication Directorate of […]
Despite our best efforts over the last 10 years (and those of others all over the world. Ed.), Linux still accounts for a small percentage of desktop users – a couple of per cent at most. However, there’s one area where Linux is dominant – and that’s supercomputers. The latest list of the world’s top […]
Erik Josefsson is the winner of the Nordic Free Software Award 2011. With the award, the Swedish Foundation for Free Culture and Free Software (FFKP) honours Josefsson for his achievements as a campaigner for freedom in the information society. “We are proud to honour Erik for the tremendously important work he has done over the […]
Once more the public sector overseas is showing the way on how to use open source software in its areas of competence. Last week, software combining geographic information systems (GIS) with zoning regulations and other country-wide sources of land use information and offered online as an interactive map, was made available as open source software […]
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organisation whose mission is to lead the Web to its full potential, is holding its first ever developer conference. Entitled W3Conf: Practical Standards for Web Professionals, it takes place next week on 15-16 November in Redmond, Washington, USA. For anyone interested in attending, registration is still open. For those […]
On 8th November the Berlin Regional Court issued its decision in the case AVM Computersysteme Vertriebs GmbH (AVM) v. Cybits AG (Cybits) (news passim). In this case, AVM was essentially trying to stop Cybits from modifying GNU GPL licensed free software inside of their AVM Fritz!Box products. Yesterday, the court dismissed this principal claim. Thus, […]
Today Linux.com reminds us that there’s another anniversary to celebrate this year. In addition to the 20th birthday of Linux (news passim), the venerable Vim text editor has also reached the same age. Vim is, of course, a contraction of Vi Improved. In other words, Vim is actually a take on the even-older vi, the […]