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).
Last week Mark Turner, CEO of Sirius IT and the lead for the Cabinet Office’s ‘New Suppliers to Government’ Workgroup expressed his frustration with the slow pace of implementing changes to the UK Government’s IT and embracing more open source (allegedly to go along with open standards and open data. Ed.) as follows via Twitter: […]
VolvoIT, the IT division of the major car manufacturer, is testing an open source workstation based on Ubuntu amongst its Chinese users, according to ZDnet.fr. The workstations have 80% of the functionality of the proprietary workstations they are replacing but cost only one-fifth (20%) as much. Volvo IT is a standalone organisation within Volvo, employs […]
Yes, that’s right; today lovers of free software all over the world celebrate Software Freedom Day, a global outbreak of gratitude for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Its goal is to educate the worldwide public about the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home and in business; in short, […]
FiksGataMi, an open source-based service to report local street problems to Norwegian local authorities, launched an upgraded version of its website on 12 September 2011, OSOR reports. The new version – FiksGataMi v2.0 – is easier for both citizens and local authorities to use. FiksGataMi is a nationwide service to report faults and problems, including […]
Will wonders never cease? The chief scribe’s jaw dropped wide open when he heard the latest open source news from the depths of Whitehall, particularly as its content runs counter to the usual UK public sector open source news theme. Read on… According to OSOR, the UK’s Department for Transport (DfT) has signed a new […]
The Scriba eBook Maker, an open source tool to create documents for e-readers, is helping to cut down on waste paper in the Italian Parliament, according to OSOR. Senators are increasingly combining smart phones and tablet devices with the Scriba e-document service, offering them a practical access to all kinds of documents. Scriba eBook Maker […]
The Swiss Parliament’s control committee for the Federal Court is allowing the publication of Open Justitia, a document management system (DMS) developed in-house by the court as open source software, according to OSOR. The software will be made available under the GPLv3 licence soon. The parliament’s committee discussed Open Justitia last Thursday following complaints by […]
Along with our friends over the road at Bristol Hackspace, Bristol Wireless gets an honourable mention in the latest Tuxradar podcast, brought to the world by Linux Format magazine. The podcast is available as both a high quality ogg or a low quality mp3. The total length of the podcast is 53:18. What’s more, we’re […]
The Department of Defence has stepped up its push for open source software to reduce its A$100 million annual software licensing bill, IT News reports. Last week, it joined five other Australian government agencies in forming the Open Technology Foundation, which is aimed at facilitating collaboration and interoperable technology in the public sector. In January […]
The chief scribe had just been examining our website statistics, as provided by the excellent open source AWstats package (a contraction of Advanced Web statistics. Ed.), and thought readers may be interested in their revelations. For the first time since switching to a new host and a new platform (running the whole site on WordPress, […]
Kerala IT News writes that, as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in India, the Technopark, Trivandrum-based International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) recently held a consultation on ‘Future Directions of FOSS in India’ at Technopark, to establish future directions for use and promotion of […]