News from around the world
The Swiss Parliament’s control committee for the Federal Court is allowing the publication of Open Justitia, a document management system (DMS) developed in-house by the court as open source software, according to OSOR. The software will be made available under the GPLv3 licence soon. The parliament’s committee discussed Open Justitia last Thursday following complaints by […]
As of the start of the new school year, all secondary schools in the Languedoc-Rousillon region of France will be equipped with laptops, according to local site Tout Montpellier. What’s more, the machines will be running free software. The 32,000 pupils who’ll be going back to school in September 2011 will receive a laptop linked […]
The Department of Defence has stepped up its push for open source software to reduce its A$100 million annual software licensing bill, IT News reports. Last week, it joined five other Australian government agencies in forming the Open Technology Foundation, which is aimed at facilitating collaboration and interoperable technology in the public sector. In January […]
Kerala IT News writes that, as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in India, the Technopark, Trivandrum-based International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) recently held a consultation on ‘Future Directions of FOSS in India’ at Technopark, to establish future directions for use and promotion of […]
What happened on 25th August 1991? Well, it wasn’t when Sgt Pepper taught the band to play! 😀 Nope. definitely not. However, something very significant in the world of computing occurred on this very day 20 years ago. A young student in Helsinki named Linus Torvalds sent the following email to the Minix newsgroup: Hello […]
The H-Online reports that The GIMP, (in longhand, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Ed.) the most widely used open source, cross-platform graphics program, is to gain a fully-functional single window mode with effect from the latest update to version 2.7.3. The news emerges from a news item from the program’s development team. In the single-window […]
OSOR reports that Experts on procurement involving open source software doubt the validity of a tender published by the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MAI) in July, which excluded solutions based on open source licences (news passim). The ministry’s justification of the ban “seems to be odd and not convincing and that makes me wonder […]
Saturday 17th September 2011 is Software Freedom Day (SFD). SFD is an event with hundreds of teams from all around the world running local events to help their communities understand Software Freedom. SFD is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The aim of SFD is to educate the general public about […]
According to the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MAI), domestic Romanian and European interoperability requirements are forcing it to ban the use of open source software in building a criminal records management system. The explicit ban of software available under an open source licence is one of the requirements made by the ministry in the […]
According to Computerworld Denmark, hospitals in Denmark’s Copenhagen region are switching from Microsoft Office to the open source LibreOffice suite. The switch will involve some 25,000 desktops. Savings costs in the first year are estimated at DK 40 mn., equivalent to 5.3 mn. EUR or some £5 mn. In addition to the costs savings, the […]
Yesterday, 12th August, marked the 30th anniversary of the birth of the personal computer (PC). On 12th August 1981, IBM announced the launch of its 5150, subsequently called the IBM PC. The 5150 was originally released with a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 CPU, 16 KB of RAM, 2 x 5¼ floppy drives and a 80 […]
OSOR reports that the Brazilian Government signed a letter of intent last month to work with both The Document Foundation and the Apache OpenOffice.org community to develop the office suites maintained by both communities. The letter states that the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) standard is already a guarantee of interoperability within the […]
According to the Raspberry Pi blog, the alpha boards for this ARM-chipped Linux device are now in production. This board is intended to be identical to the final device, with the resulting units being used to validate the schematic design and serving as Raspberry Pi’s interim software development platform. Key differences between the alpha and […]
France Telecom is planning to shut down its Minitel service on 30th June 2012. Minitel is a Videotex online service accessible through the telephone lines, and is considered one of the world’s most successful pre-World Wide Web online services. It was started in 1982 by PTT, the publicly-owned forerunner of France Telecom. At the time […]
Our friend Sean Kenny of Circle Interactive has contacted us today to let us know that CiviCon London is taking place on Monday August 22nd at SkillsMatter, 116-120 Goswell Road, London, EC1V 7DP (map). CiviCon is the international meeting of CiviCRM users, implementers and developers to share knowledge, experience and to discuss the future of […]
Here at Bristol Wireless we’re keen advocates on green ICT and have many times experienced the delights of providing off-mains event ICT powered by renewables (news passim), so were overjoyed to hear of a recent development in India. India’s Simmtronics Semiconductors recently announced the launch of a solar-powered desktop. What’s more, it’s running Linux, making […]
Earlier this year we reported that Linux is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year (news passim). As part of the celebrations, the Linux Foundation invited video submissions to mark this milestone. A birthday greetings video from Microsoft has now been received by the Foundation. We hope you enjoy this submission from the ‘Beast of Redmond’ […]
Question: when talking about Linux recently, who said the following? “Linux gives us the flexibility and technology maturity we require to evolve… and… to address the expectations of our customers.” The answer: Kenichi Murata, a project general manager with Toyota, upon Toyota’s joining The Linux Foundation. Murata continued: “The Linux Foundation provides us with a […]
Version 2 of the ‘Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies’ has become available following an online public consultation on the draft document which was initiated by the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), according to OSOR. In March 2011 Glenn Archer, AGIMO first assistant secretary, requested feedback via the dedicated blog on […]
OSOR reports that the Canary Islands are using open source software to forecast and manage forest fires. Capaware is an open source 3D geographical multilayer framework which produces realistic images of land and enables virtual navigation to a given area. Based on the environmental conditions of the area (including, inter alia, humidity, vegetation and wind), […]