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 […]
George Georgiadis, head of IT at the Greek municipality of Kalamarià, has commented that the almost ubiquitous use of MS Office in the Greek public sector is hindering the adoption of open source alternatives, according to a report on Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. Kalamarià is drawing to the close of […]
Spanish IT services company ElkarMedia S.L. reports (Spanish) that the municipality of Azpeitia in Spain’s Basque Country will be avoiding the maintenance costs involved in using Microsoft Office and saving up to €30,000-40,000 in 3-4 years since the company installed the free and open source LibreOffice office suite on the council’s computers. In addition, ElkarMedia […]
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) blog reports that the GNU/Linux Inside sticker pack is now being sold. The stickers are high-quality and durable; they won’t fade away or scratch off your computer, making it the ideal way to advocate your use of free software! They are perfect for replacing those *other* stickers that may come […]
OSS Watch, a service for higher and further education institutions in the UK, has this week published a list of open source alternatives to proprietary software for schools, according to a report posted today on Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. “Where possible, we’ve included real-world examples of their usage,” said OSS […]
Next Wednesday, 23rd January, has been designated CiviDay 2013 and 2 meet-ups have been arranged in London and Bristol respectively for users of CiviCRM, the open source CRM package, as used by Bristol Wireless. The meet-ups are described as a great way to: network with the CiviCRM community; find out about how people are making […]
The free and open source advocacy organisation GreekLUG reports that the Municipality of Kalamarià near Thessaloniki in northern Greece is in the process of installing the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite on all of the council’s 170 workstations. According to GreekLUG’s press release (PDF), some 120 installations have been done to date. It […]
Wikimedia UK, the UK charity which supports the work of the Wikimedia Foundation (a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world and whose best known project is Wikipedia. Ed.), is looking to recruit some additional staff and has this week published the following post on its blog: In order […]
A group of technology activists gathered in front of the Cabinet office in Cairo on Sunday 30th December to protest an Egyptian governmental deal with software giant Microsoft to buy software for the public sector, the English language Egypt Independent news site reports. On 26 December, the official Facebook page of Hesham Qandil, the Egyptian […]
Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that a survey to measure the popularity of open source amongst Maltese residents took place in early December. The poll was organised by MITA, the Maltese government’s Information Technology Agency. It was launched during the most recent meeting of Government of Malta Open Source End […]
Just before Christmas, Slashdot reported that E17 – the latest version of the Enlightenment desktop environment – had just been released. The previous release of Enlightenment took place in 2000 – 12 years ago! The release announcement is very sparse (apart from a list of the E17 developers): E17 has been in development for a […]
Last Friday the government of Basque Country, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, unveiled its repository of open source software, openapps.euskadi.net, according to a report on Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. Making its software solutions publicly available should encourage other public sector organisations to re-use them and collaborate on development. The site […]
Ever heard of vendor lock-in? Here’s a definition from Wikipedia: In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs. One of the techniques used to achieve vendor lock-in is offering certain customers […]
Courtesy of a news report today on governmental lists of open source alternatives to proprietary software on EU public sector open source news website Joinup, the chief scribe duly downloaded and read the Open Source Software Options for Government publication (pdf), which forms the basis for a Joinup case study. A quick glance through the […]
One of the common complaints of novice editors of Wikipedia is the awkwardness of learning wiki mark-up combined with the lack of a visual (WYSIWYG) editor. This has now been remedied with the launch of the VisualEditor on the English-language version of Wikipedia (and other sites using MediaWiki, the software upon which Wikipedia runs). However, […]
IT news site The Register reports today that Linux kernel overlord Linus Torvalds has announced the Linux kernel no longer supports Intel’s 80386 processors, which were first introduced back in 1985 and pottered along at a top speed of 33 mHZ. Torvalds announced the demise of Linux on 386 in a post entitled “Merge branch […]