The Open Knowledge Foundation is doing marvellous work in the fields of open data and open content. The Foundation has just published version 2 of its Open Definition. This definition is released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence and is reproduced verbatim below (complete with US spellings and punctuation throughout. Ed.). Open Definition Version 2.0 […]
A strategic deal has been announced between Chinese technology manufacturer Inspur and the open sourcerers of Red Hat to combine the latter’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system with Inspur’s x86 platform products, according to the China Tech News website. Inspur and Red Hat will become OEM partners under the agreement. As the first […]
Asus have kindly lent Bristol Wireless a ChromeBox for evaluation and I’ve had a chance to put it through its paces. On opening the box I was surprised by its compact form; it’s about the size of a CD case and an inch high. The boot time’s impressive, taking only a few seconds to launch […]
It’s under a week to Software Freedom Day (SFD) 2014, which is being held this year on Saturday, 20th September. SFD is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The organisers’ goal in this celebration is to educate the public all over the world about the benefits of using high quality FOSS […]
Earlier today the foundation was announced of LibreItalia, which has been founded by Italian members of The Document Foundation and has the objective of bringing together all the Italian users of the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite to speed up the adoption and promotion of the suite that is meant to be a […]
According to the official Xinhua news agency, China is hoping to launch a sovereign operating system in October in order to “wean” itself off operating systems developed abroad such as Windows, Le Monde Informatique reports. The Chinese OS, which still has no official name according to Xinhua, will be offered initially for desktop PCs, before […]
Via its blog, The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3; this is the 8th major release of the free and open source office suite since the birth of the project in September 2010. LibreOffice 4.3 offers a large number of improvements and new features, including: Document interoperability: support for MS’ OOXML Strict, […]
Writing yesterday on the Free Software Foundation (FSF) blog, Libby Reinish states that UK citizens will soon be able to fill out government paperwork with their freedoms intact. The British government announced last week (news passim) that Open Document Format (ODF), HTML and PDF will be the official file formats used by all government agencies. […]
Great news for all lovers of open standards! It’s goodbye to the ubiquitous use of MS Office formats in Whitehall; and what’s more, the government has decided not to sanction the use of Microsoft’s OOXML ‘standard’ despite lobbying by the US software giant and its supporters. The open standards selected for sharing and viewing government […]
The European Commission has recently renewed its commitment to a proprietary desktop and secret file formats, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) writes. The Commission is refusing to make a serious effort to break free from vendor lock-in and is ignoring all available alternatives. In doing so, the EU’s civil service fails to practice what […]
In response to Mozilla’s announcement that it is reluctantly adopting DRM in its Firefox Web browser, Free Software Foundation executive director John Sullivan made the following statement: “Only a week after the International Day Against DRM, Mozilla has announced that it will partner with proprietary software company Adobe to implement support for Web-based Digital Restrictions […]
On Friday evening the Open Rights Group organised one of a series of nationwide European Digital Rights hustings at St Werburgh’s Community Centre in Bristol. This was a chance for local people to quiz MEP candidates from the South West about their views on digital rights and ask them to sign up to the 10 […]
Today is Document Freedom Day (DFD) 2014. DFD is an annual celebration of and opportunity to promote the use of open formats and standards for digital documents and takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year. Document freedom means documents that are free can be used in any way that the author intends. […]
The Gnome Outreach Program for Women (OPW) helps women get involved in free and open source software and has just announced the opening of a new round of internship applications. Women can apply for an internship to contribute to an open source project from May to August; and OPW is not just asking for applications […]
It’s Friday, so it’s Pi day! 😉 Bristol Wireless volunteer Michal has currently got a Raspberry Pi – the credit-card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK – up and running as an LTSP thin client. Could this be the future of cheap computing devices?
With about an hour to go before the shutters came down on Friday afternoon, Bristol Wireless responded to the Cabinet Office’s consultation on file formats for sharing and collaborating on documents with government. Our response is reproduced below. Background: we are a volunteer-run IT co-operative which has been active in the west of England for […]
Our friends over the road at Bristol Hackspace are having a beginners’ Arduino session tonight, according to their Twitter feed. interested in #arduino and you're a beginner? Come along tonight at the hackspace! 7pm till 9pm. led by @will_price_94 #BristolCity — Bristol Hackspace (@bristolhackspc) February 19, 2014 According to the manufacturers, the Arduino is an […]
Malta’s new open data website is running on open source software, according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site. The site, which is run by the Maltese Local Councils Association, uses Centos Linux as its underlying operating system, the MySQL database management system, the Nginx web server and WordPress as its content […]
This Friday 14th will be – as it is every year – St Valentine’s Day and the whiff of romance is in the air as restaurants, the greetings cards business and florists gird their loins and reinforce their tills for increased turnover. On 14th February, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is asking all free […]
On Wednesday last week, the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) held an event called Sprint 14, in which it invited Ministers, civil servants, suppliers and the media along to showcase some major new digital public services for the first time. Among the speakers was Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude, who in his speech made some […]