A Raspberry Pi is a low-priced base for IoT projects. However, with these computers attackers also find systems that are easy to capture for botnets. An update for Raspbian should make attacks more difficult in future.
Russia’s legislators have drafted a bill (PDF – in Russian) that will boost free software on many levels within the country’s public sector. The draft, approved by the Duma (lower house of parliament) in mid-October, requires the public sector to prioritise free software over proprietary alternatives, gives priority to local IT businesses offering free software […]
MTL Group company NfP Services are hosting a free CiviCRM seminar at their offices at 340 Gray’s Inn Road London, WC1X 8BG (map). The seminar will also include refreshments and lunch and will run from 10.00 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. During this session the organisers will be demonstrating CiviCRM’s amazing functionality and flexibility and explaining […]
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has announced that Alessandro Rubini has stepped down as Vice-president of the FSFE. Alessandro, an electronic engineer with Ph. D. in a computer science, brought invaluable insight to the internal discussions within the FSFE and has worked tirelessly to push the Free Software envelope in Italy and the rest […]
Today Collabora announced that Pydio 7, the latest release of the popular open source synchronisation & sharing platform, includes LibreOffice Online functionality created by Collabora Productivity. Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud, providing a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. It’s a leading contributor to the […]
Microsoft announced “important changes for customers buying enterprise software and cloud services in British pound [sic]” in a blog post yesterday. However, private individuals buying MS products will not be affected as these pricing changes will not apply to consumer software or consumer cloud services. Furthermore, these changes will not affect business customers existing orders […]
Next week, demonstrators will gather at a meeting of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in Lisbon, Portugal to make the same demand as was made at the last major W3C meeting in March: stop streaming companies from inserting DRM into the HTML standard on which the Web is based. The protest is being organised […]
Speculation about the demise of Apache OpenOffice may be premature (news passim). German IT news site heise reports that a mailing list for new developers has been set up. By establishing this new list, the OpenOffice team wants to make entry to the open source project easier for programmers. After recent discussion of a possible […]
Billed as “Europe’s biggest event for the leading third sector CRM“, it’s now less than a month until CiviCRM’s Civicon 2016 in London, which is being held on 6th and 7th October. CiviCRM is the leading open source CRM for the voluntary and community sectors. CiviCon is now in its sixth year and the event […]
Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda ended this year’s QtCon, free software community conference with a keynote speech on, inter alia, free software in the European public sector. Ms Reda explained how proprietary software has often left regulators in the dark, becoming a liability for (and often a threat to) citizens’ health and well-being. As an […]
When your ‘umble scribe first started using the GNU/Linux operating system over a decade ago, the default office suite for most Linux distributions was OpenOffice. However, it now looks as if OpenOffice just could be heading towards the software graveyard if other members of the development team concur with an email from the chairman of […]
Web Africa reports that Uganda’s ICT Ministry has recently developed a free and open source software (FOSS) policy. The aim of the policy is to regulate the deployment of open source software and use of open standards to accelerate innovation and develop local content. Commenting on the use of FOSS, Frank Tumwebaze, Uganda’s Minister of […]
Twenty-five years ago today, 25th August, an unknown Finnish computer science student called Linus Torvalds wrote the following email to the comp.os.minix mailing list. Hello everybody out there using minix – I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing […]
There’s a lot of formal collaboration going on out there in the world of free and open source software. Hard on the heels of news of the link-up between The Document Foundation and the Free Software Foundation Europe (news passim), comes the announcement that Canonical, the company behind the very popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has […]
This year the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) celebrates its 15th birthday (timeline here) and has released a short video to mark this milestone. Learn more about the FSFE’s campaigning work over the years.
It’s been announced today that the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is joining the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation, the body behind the very successful free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite. At the same time, The Document Foundation is becoming an associate of the FSFE. The FSFE’s aim is to help people control […]
VMware is to be using some parts of the Linux kernel code in its ESXi hypervisor and will therefore be infringing the GPL. A kernel developer has brought an action against this. However, the Hamburg District Court is not dealing with the content of the action.
Two days ago, Tony Scott, the U.S. Chief Information Officer, wrote on the White House blog that the Federal government was releasing the Federal Source Code policy (PDF) to support improved access to custom-developed Federal source code. The policy, which incorporates feedback from the public, requires any new custom-developed source code developed specifically by or […]
Free software advocates from all over Europe will be meeting in Berlin from the 2nd to the 4th of September at the FSFE Summit 2016. Apart from working on furthering the adoption of free software in Europe, the event will also be celebrating the FSFE’s 15th anniversary. One of the main missions of the free […]
Thanks to a partnership between Nextcloud and Collabora there is now a great solution for self-hosting Online Office. Nextcloud has worked with Collabora to provide an easy-to-use Online Office solution for the first time for home users which is easily integrated into Nextcloud. At the same time, Nextcloud and Collabora have announced the of enterprise […]