Unicef promotes open source in fight against poverty
Unicef has a total of US $ 9 mn. to promote start-ups whose technology can improve young peoples’ lives. However, these must involve open source projects.
Category Archives: International IT News
News from around the world
MEPs for more public sector open source use
The European Parliament adopted its report “Towards a Digital Single Market” in response to the European Commission’s Digital Single Market strategy in mid-January, the Free Software Foundation Europe FSFE) reports. The FSFE is pleased the Parliament took an affirmative attitude towards the increased use of free software and its importance to digital single market. In […]
Joint effort to produce first 100% open source, enterprise-grade cloud office suite
Kolab Systems, creators of Kolab, the leading open source groupware and collaboration framework, today announced a partnership with Collabora Productivity, the architects behind LibreOffice Online, the cloud-based office productivity suite. The first version of Kolab with integrated CloudSuite functionality is due to appear around the middle of 2016. Collabora’s CloudSuite web-based document product will be […]
France: draft Digital Law overwhelmingly adopted by deputies
The draft Digital Republic Law presented to the French Council of Ministers by Axelle Lemaire last December has been adopted by 356 votes for and only 1 against.
Bristol open networking solutions company receives major investment
Zeetta Networks, which focuses on the design, development and marketing of open networking solutions, has received funding of £1.25 million to commercialise Bristol University’s software-defined networking technology to smart enterprises and Internet of Things (IoT).
The future of the internet – at the speed light
New research has found a scientific solution that enables future internet infrastructure to become completely open and programmable while carrying internet traffic at the speed of light.
Bristol academic – working quantum computing system a reality by 2020
Professor O’Brien, Director of the Centre for Quantum Photonics at the University of Bristol and Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, is giving a talk today (Thursday) at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, at which he’ll announce that a working quantum computing system is expected to be developed by 2020. Professor O’Brien is […]
EU broadband prices down, but speeds still lagging
The European Commission has just published three broadband studies examining speed, price and coverage. The first study, on broadband quality, concludes that subscribers are getting 75% of advertised download speeds. The second study, on prices, shows that broadband access has continued to become more affordable, whilst the third report, on broadband coverage, confirms substantial deployments […]
Ubuntu to withdraw sponsored search
Ubuntu signed an agreement with Amazon for sponsored searches within the distribution. When it was signed in 2012, Richard Stallman labelled it “spyware“ and polemics became inevitable. Ubuntu now seems to be backtracking. It’s official. This functionality will be dropped from the next version of Ubuntu – 16.04 LTS – which will be released in […]
Belgian government relaunches open data portal
Fedict – the Belgian Federal Public Service for Information and Communication Technology – and the office of Theo Francken, the Secretary of State for Administrative Simplification relaunched the federal open data portal – http://data.gov.be/ – last Tuesday, Belgian news site Datanews reports. Fedict launched the first version of the open data portal in Belgium in […]
AT&T chooses Ubuntu instead of Windows
It’s been announced that American multinational telecommunications corporation AT&T Inc. of Dallas, Texas, has selected Ubuntu Linux for its cloud and enterprise applications. AT&T is the second largest provider of mobile telephone and the largest provider of fixed telephone in the United States, in addition to which it also provides broadband subscription television services. Canonical, […]
France: government rejects encryption backdoors
It’s rare to find a politician that really “gets” IT. Who can forget Stephen Timms MP? He was the Minister for the Digital Economy in the last Labour government who’s on record for mistakenly stating that the IP in IP address was an abbreviation for Intellectual Property (Doh! Ed.). More recently, British Home Secretary Theresa […]
First Ubuntu Day announced
In a blog post Marcin Kierdelewicz of Ubuntu has announced the first ever Ubuntu Day. Ubuntu Day will be a local event organised with the distro’s partners to support awareness and adoption of Ubuntu technologies in local markets. It will be an opportunity for people to learn about Ubuntu Cloud products directly from the experts […]
Happy 15th birthday, Wikipedia
This week, Wikipedia reaches its fifteenth birthday. These days the free online encyclopaedia is the world’s seventh most popular website and now includes more than 38 million articles in 289 languages, all maintained by an army of volunteer editors and contributors. Andy Mabbett, one of that army of editors and contributors, has been musing on […]
CiviCRM 4.7 to be released later this month
Bristol Wireless has been using the free and open source CiviCRM customer relationship management software to manage its contacts for years. So we were very pleased to hear that CiviCRM’s Core Team is pleased to announce that CiviCRM version 4.7 will be released on 27th January. According to the developers, version 4.7 is packed with […]
HTTP status code proposed to report legal obstacles
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has as its mission “to make the internet work better by producing high quality, relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet“. As part of this work, the IETF develops and promotes voluntary Internet standards, in particular the standards that comprise the Internet […]
French public sector free software list approved for 2016
The inter-ministerial free software list – known in France by its acronym SILL – has had its 2016 version approved and now includes the Android ecosystem, LeMagIT reports. The Android operating system and the LibreOffice 5 office suite are included in the 2016 version of the SILL which was officially approved on 11th December by […]
Taiwan replaces UK at top of open data league table
According to information released by the Open Knowledge Foundation, Taiwan has surprisingly topped the Open Data countries league for 2015, displacing the United Kingdom which has dropped to 2nd place. The Top 10 open data countries are shown below. Taiwan’s ascent and replacement of the UK in the top position is down to a number […]
Can technology help with the UK’s rising healthcare costs?
From diabetes to dementia, from depression to AIDS, large segments of the UK’s population are living with conditions that cannot be cured, but must be managed outside of the hospital environment. How technology could transform the future of healthcare has been discussed by Professor Ian Craddock from the University of Bristol at the IEEE World Forum on the Internet of Things (WF-IoT) in Milan, Italy.
Collabora & ownCloud announce partnership & release CODE for LibreOffice Online developers
Collabora, the architects of LibreOffice Online, have announced a the formation of a partnership and the release of CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition), a distribution of LibreOffice Online and ownCloud Server. The purpose of CODE is to give interested developers from any field an easy way to get early access to the very latest untested […]