Debian, the base Linux distribution for lots of other distros (including the highly popular Ubuntu), announced today that the backports service for the next stable release of Debian (version 7, codenamed “Wheezy”) will be part of the main archive. Backports are packages mostly from the testing distribution (and in few cases from unstable too, e.g. […]
The Python Software Foundation blog announced yesterday that an amicable settlement had been reached in the dispute over the Python trade mark in Europe (news passim) between the Foundation and PO Box Hosting Limited, which trades as Veber. The dispute centred around Veber’s use of the Python name for its cloud hosting services and its […]
Here’s something that’s bound to appeal to our friends at Bristol Hackspace and Dorkbot Bristol: 20th April has been announced as the date for Hardware Freedom Day 2013. Hardware Freedom Day (HFD) is an annual celebration of Open Hardware. Open Hardware Day was initiated in 2012 by the Digital Freedom Foundation, the organisation responsible for […]
The words free (as in freedom. Ed.) and open are quite commonly associated with academia and education: free thought, open access to knowledge and such like. Indeed, these concepts are actually embodied in the names of some academic institutions, such as the UK’s Open University and Germany’s Free University of Berlin. However, there are signs […]
A report on Joinup, the EU’s open source public sector news website, suggests that the government of Spain’s autonomous region of Galicia is considering a switch to open source office productivity tools. Galicia’s Agency for Technological Innovation and Agasol, the Galician Association for Free Software Enterprises, announced last week that they have started assessing the […]
Some years ago, computer retailer Dell made an abortive, half-hearted effort to offer a limited range of machines – one entry level desktop system and a couple of laptops – running Ubuntu Linux (news passim). It’s now back with another Ubuntu offering in the UK and Germany, according to a report in the H Online. […]
If you’re in the Manchester area in mid-March, this event may be of interest to you. A panel discussion on the aspects of an the future of open data will be held at MadLab, 36-40 Edge Street, Manchester M4 1HN (map) on Tuesday, 19th March 2013 from 6.30 pm to 8.30 pm. Over the past […]
The LibreOffice project has been offered a project weekend from Friday 22nd March to Sunday 24th March at Dresden Technical University which will focus specifically on Impress, LibreOffice’s presentation tool (an open source alternative to death by PowerPoint. Ed.). The main aims of the weekend will be to: get into the code that is on […]
Today event registration opens for Document Freedom Day 2013 which will be held on Wednesday, 27th March. Local event teams can add details of their activities to the Document Freedom website and have them marked on the global campaign map. Last week 50 promotional packs were dispatched to hackerspaces to kick start event preparations. They […]
An Open Data Insitute blog post of the first ever survey* into civil servants’ awareness of open data reveals an astonishing level of ignorance. Among the survey’s main findings were the following: 78% of civil servants do not know about government plans for open data and the benefits that follow; 75% say they don’t know […]
If you run a Linux system using the RPM-based package management system, you might like to give your system a security check following news from the Internet Storm Center (ISC) of a SSHD rootkit affecting such distributions. To quote from the ISC article: The rootkit is actually a trojanized library that links with SSHD and […]
The email below has been received from CiviCRMInfo for a meet-up in London next week. The venue is Gamesys, 10 Piccadilly, 4th Floor Reception, London, W1J 0DD (map) and the event will be held on Wednesday 27th February from 6.00 pm to 8.30 pm. Hi UK CiviCRM folks, I thought you might be interested in […]
Richard Stallman, aka rms, the Founder and President of the Free Software Foundation, will be giving at talk entitled “Copyright vs Community” at 6.00 pm on Thursday 21st March at the University of Bath as part of this year’s Bath Digital Festival. Admission is free, but booking is essential. More details are available on the […]
The use of the term Python for free and open source software is at risk in the EU due to a Community trade mark application by a UK company, as is explained in the post below from the Python Software Foundation News blog. There is a company in the UK that is trying to trademark […]
The City of Munich has responded on its IT blog to a report commissioned from HP by Microsoft alleging that migrating to open source had cost the city millions of Euro more than opting for proprietary software. The following paragraphs are a translation of the relevant blog post. The City has only had a short […]
From France’s Gendarmerie Nationale (news passim) to an Irishman with 6 machines, using free and open source operating systems and software is saving businesses of all sizes money. The Irishman appears in a report in today’s Meath Chronicle of how an 11 year-old boy saved him €3,000. Sean Mullen’s 3 laptops and 3 desktop computers […]
The whiff of romance is in the air as restaurants, the cards business and florist gird their loins for Valentine’s Day on February 14th. The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is asking all free software romantics to do something different on Valentine’s Day: use the day as an opportunity to say “thank you” to one […]
Online tech news website The H reports that the developers of LibreOffice, whose version 4.0 is due for release within days (posts passim), are also planning to release the “Impress Android Remote” application that will enable the office suite’s presentations to be controlled from Android smartphones. Communication between the phone and the presentation rendering system […]
“What has the EU ever done for us?” is a popular question raised by the right-wing print media in the UK. Well, in addition to the exhaustive list supplied by Simon Sweeney of the University of York in a recent letter to The Guardian, the EU has in recent years developed the EUPL – European […]
Over the years, MySociety, an e-democracy project of the charity UK Citizens Online Democracy, whose aim is to build “socially focused tools with offline impacts”, has designed some great online tools. By way of an example, these include: TheyWorkForYou to enable electors to track the work of their constituency MPs; WriteToThem to help electors write […]