UK Open Source Media Watch

Boston’s Christian Science Monitor has an interesting profile of Portland, Oregon, home to the likes of Linus Torvalds and the OSDL, which it considers the home of open source in the USA.

Network Magazine from over in India has a nice little piece on the ability of Linux to solve certain problems on the corporate desktop, and Linux Insider has some discussion on the acceptance of desktop Linux.

MadPenguin.org has a review of “Point and Click Linux”, a book which may help the more timid of […]

Heise.de and ZDNet both have articles on the extraordinary revelation that an Austrian Microsoft representative had references to open source software deleted from a UN document presented to the WSIS on the grounds that free software is anti-commercial.

The original text read…

Increasingly, revenue is generated not by selling content and digital works, as they can be […]

Australian educators don’t trust open source software, considering it unstable, lacking support and costly, but over 80% of further and higher ed establishments plan on using it.

South African local government, on the other hand, apparently does and, after putting in an unexpected appearance EuroOSCON, is planning on deploying knowledge gleaned from the conference in bringing […]

From ZDNet:

Open source communities really do help coders reduce the turnaround time for bug fixes, according to Evans Data

Open source developers can use developer communities to track down bugs and fix them in a surprisingly short time — less than four business hours, in many cases, according to the latest survey from Evans Data.

The findings […]

You probably remember reason #973 not to use Windows - you might find yourself getting rootkitted by Sony - and the seven kinds of trouble the music giant is in over their invasive anti-piracy software. Now it emerges that the company may also have violated the Lesser GPL guarding the LAME project:

[Sony’s] software, developed by […]

Newsforge and ComputerWorld seem to think so, with the only major story involving open source to emerge being that of Nicholas Negroponte / MIT’s lime green low-cost Linux laptop. Richard Stallman had this to say:

“I don’t know why I’m here, frankly, […]Maybe because I was asked to speak.”

“Everything was decided at the first summit in […]

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (our bosses here at MediaWatch) has launched the UK government’s first public wiki as part of the e-innovations program.

This is from BBC News…

A US-based project is tapping into the collaborative nature of the web to provide online content that is relevant and valuable to developing nations.

The Wikimedia Foundation has set itself the ambitious aim of providing knowledge to people in their own language.

The goal is to tackle on one of the recurring issues […]

Microsoft has finally come up with a response to Massachusetts’ engagement with ODF, with an announcement that it will submit standards used in the next version of its Office suite.

Amongst those suspicious of the move (and there are many - the entire open source community, for example) are Sun, who have cautioned the state […]

Paris has announced details of a test migration to Linux as part of its push to use more open source software. This is from the Tech World article linked above:

Earlier this year, volunteers among the city’s 46,000 staff were invited to download and install open-source software, including the Firefox browser and Open Office.org. Now, the […]

O3 (I can only assume the name is a pun on “o(pen)zone”), an open source enterprise data and networking magazine, has been launched. Subscription to the site is free, and should you wish to write an article for them, submissions are open now.

Their very attractive site has been designed exclusively by open source tools such […]

The BBC has a story about some of the organisations on the fringes of the WSIS trumpeting their use of open source software in the developing world. Also in the article are Freedom Toasters - portable machines used to burn and disseminate CDs containing some of the more mature, stable and useful open source apps […]

eWeek is reporting that Microsoft is asking the US government to weigh in on its side against the EU over the anti-trust suit, on the grounds that it could have implications for other companies attempting to keep trade secrets out of view of the public.

“Open Source Media” - a conglomeration of blogs and traditional journalism - launched yesterday. Am I just stupid or does this have little - very little - to do with open source?

If it’s the former, how does this diverge from the model of, say, Slate.com? If the latter, then does that mean open source cool […]

From eGov Monitor:

It is often said that open source software begins and ends with the licence. That may be true. But with more than 50 Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved licences that meet the 10 criteria of the open source definition, how do you decide which licence to use?

Rowan Wilson of OSS Watch might be […]

Photo noodler David Sidwell - via The Sydney Morning Herald - has some lovely things to say about the GNU Image Manipulation Programme (that’s the GIMP to you). By coincidence The Telegraph also namechecked the programme - although less enthusiastically, warning that readers should give it a go if they “fancy a challenge”.

InfoWorld’s blogs have […]

…read about it at LXer. Also, the state governor had something or other to say (it’s good news on both counts).

The perfect christmas present for the geek in your life; the GP2X hand-held console, powered by Linux and with a powerful application development kit included with every unit.

Read about it at JoyStiq or you can buy one over at their website.

Birimingham City Council’s forty libraries are due to have all of their computers moved to Linux and will be equipped with the GNOME desktop environment, Firefox and OpenOffice.org, amongst other software. GNOME was settled upon above KDE, Mac and Windows after a survey of users determined that it was the preferred environment for users. Hopefully […]