Last week, the lab was pleased to receive a visit from BW member John Palfrey. For those who don’t know him, John is the owner of the Linux Lounge (news passim), an old double-decker bus which he’s refurbished and kitted out as a mobile IT centre, using all open source software, of course! Anyway, to […]
So far in 2011 Wikipedians have written and translated 1,200 new articles to allow the Derby Museum & Art Gallery’s collection to be read in over a dozen languages using QRpedia codes. Derby Museum using multilingual QR codes on Vimeo. This has resulted in high search rankings for the museum and greater public engagement. Well […]
The desktop IT systems of many public sector organisation in Belgium are ‘completely locked-in by one proprietary office suite’, public IT administrators said at an open source conference, which took place recently in Schoten (sounds familiar doesn’t it? Ed.), according to OSOR. Belgian local authorities depend on a handful of IT suppliers that have all […]
Once again the UK’s public sector looks like being left behind as news arrives from OSOR that the administration of Miskolc, Hungary’s fourth largest city, is moving to Ubuntu to become less dependent on a single proprietary vendor and to reduce costs. Sixty per cent of the city’s staff already use the open source OpenOffice […]
Portugal’s Agency for Administrative Modernisation (AMA) is currently asking citizens to comment on several open standards, including document formats PDF, ODF, interoperability standards, plus standards for geographic information systems and electronic invoicing. Comments will be accepted until the end of October. The consultation is part of the country’s open standards law adopted in April. This […]
The Linux Foundation, the non-profit organisation dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, announced today (26th October) it is hosting a new project created by its Consumer Electronics (CE) workgroup. The new project, the Long Term Support Initiative (LTSI), provides for both an annual release of a Linux kernel suitable for supporting the lifespan of […]
A couple of days ago, Bristol24/7 reported that Bristol is entering the race to be Europe’s top green city in 2014, so it’s perhaps appropriate to have a look at what Bristol Wireless can do as regards green IT (although, of course, we’re not the only people doing stuff like this in Bristol. Ed.). The […]
At Bristol Wireless, we’re keen on comparing and contrasting the hesitant steps (prevarication surely? Ed.) of the British public sector towards open source software with the full-blooded embrace to which the public sector abroad subjects it. This has once again clearly illustrated this week. Courtesy of Guardian Government Computing, we learn that Whitehall’s plans for […]
In an effort to get more women involved in Free Software, the GNOME project is sponsoring several internships for women from 12th December 2011 to 12th March 2012. These dates are aimed at women students from the Southern Hemisphere who will have a summer break during this time, but any woman available for a full […]
The government of Paraguay has embarked on an ambitious project aimed at implementing open source software (OSS) exclusively in all government agencies in 2012. Nicolás Caballero, IT Coordinator for the Office of the President of the Republic of Paraguay was quoted by a local newspaper as saying: “The first and most evident aim is to […]
Flossie, the network of women who are interested in, use, advocate and/or develop Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), has just announced its unconference for next spring. Queen Mary at University of London (QMUL) has offered to host the Flossie unconference which will be on 25/26 May 2011 at QMUL’s Mile End Campus. Flossie will […]
Waldemar Pawlak, Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy, saluted Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) as the “greatest success of the 20th century” in a conference talk on 27 September 2011, according to OSOR. He added that FLOSS is based on very sound principles and can provide solutions to some of the problems […]
Following on from recent news about the revival of Bristol City Council’s open source project (news passim), the council has now issued the following statement. Bristol City Council Leader Barbara Janke said: “Bristol is leading the way on promoting open source solutions and supporting our strong creative media and digital sector. We held a very […]
A couple of years ago, we reported on Mr Treasurer’s eeePC (news passim). Regular readers will be pleased to hear it’s still performing well, as evidenced by the following (slightly edited for greater legibility – although the hashtags have been left in! Ed.) tweets from a conversation between Mr Treasurer and the chief scribe on […]
It’s easy to be critical of Bristol City Council; any long-term resident will vouch for that. However, amongst British local authorities it has been a pioneer for its willingness to dip its toes into the waters of open source, although even here it has not had an easy time (news passim). News emerges today on […]
Via the CiviCRM blog, the CiviCRM team has recently announced the release of 3.4.6 and 4.0.6. This point release includes several exciting new “Make-it-Happen” features, along with 170+ bug fixes and minor improvements. The new features include: Membership Price Sets – Does your organization have national, regional and local chapter memberships? Now you can offer […]
On Friday your humble correspondent was avoiding doing paid work and discussing online the glacial pace of the UK public sector’s deployment of open source (news passim) with Mark Taylor of Sirius IT and IT journalist and writer Glyn Moody. During the discourse, Mark came up with the term ‘OSS Please!’. Glyn then picked it […]
Linus Torvalds, the creator and maintainer in chief of the Linux kernel, is also well known for his hobby of scuba diving and – as The H-online reports – he’s has just released subsurface, a dive-tracking program he wrote after discovering that no dive log software worked for him. Subsurface runs on Linux and uses […]
Yesterday the lab received a visit from Jon Roberts, a journalist from Future Publishing‘s Linux Format magazine. Linux Format’s strapline is ‘The #1 source for Linux’ and is also known as LXF. According to the latest ABC figures, LXF has a circulation 25,000 copies per issue. After a round of introductions and a cup of […]
Germany’s Linux-Magazin reports that Swiss politicians at both local and national level have been questioned on their attitude to open source by the Zurich Group of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). The individual questions and answers plus a summary, can be found on a FSFE Zurich Group wiki page (in German).