UK Open Source Media Watch

Martin Brampton, over at Silicon.com, has called on the UK government to embrace more enthusiastically not only the fruits of the open source community, but also the ideas driving it.

Dell has been lifting its skirt to the OSS community, after welching on its mooted plan to ship Linux-powered PCs with a sloppy, nobody’s happy compromise, by starting to advertise workstations that come with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 installed.

The spookily named SARS (South African Revenue Service - their Inland Revenue) has been sounding […]

Redmond seems unwilling to allow its EU anti-trust fight (there’s a good introduction at The Grauniad if you’re not up to speed) to play out in the courts so appears to be trying to win the case in the media. As a case in point, the company famously held a press conference to share details […]

The GNOME desktop is due for a new iteration (2.14) come the 15th of March, boasting “noticeable speedups” and better administrator control. The release is aimed squarely at the corporate desktop, with facilities that make it easier for admins working with large numbers of users to control their privileges.

They’ve also teamed up with KDE, […]

Gervase Markham has an amusing column on Times online today detailing his attempts to convince the UK’s anti-piracy people that anyone can sell copies of Firefox and that he’s not just a banana merchant.

In a really interesting story, The Guardian got it’s Watchdog on when faced with companies charging for copies of free software on […]

South Korea announced last week plans to create a “Linux showcase city” and University. The central government plans to pay a city - they haven’t announced which one yet but we should know by the end of March - to roll out Linux across its servers and desktops. The University will have a […]

UN inspector Dominique Ouédraogo has revealed in a speech that the United Nations has chosen to recommend its members utilise open source software, especially in the areas of health, education and internatioanl commerce, according to TMCNet. Two reports by the organisation, upon which the advice was based, concluded that OSS was the “most appropriate vehicle […]

All eyes are on the database business at the moment as big fish Oracle snaps up a few more businesses. This week the company swallowed up Sleepycat, home of open source database Berkley DB, and HotSip, a Swedish VoIP developer. The boss of the former has warned that the giant has “a lot to learn” […]

Novell have announced an update for OpenGL and that improved interoperability with MS Office and OOo for its Linux Desktop 10. The companies CTO was spoke to Desktop Linux about the prospects for Linux on the desktop.

Red Hat also have plans afoot, aiming to beef up its desktop security with improved authentication and identity […]

An OSDL-funded independent survey - cheekily entitled “Get the Truth” - looking at the use of OSS by IT organisations has concluded that Linux is both cheaper and easier to deploy and maintain than Microsoft software. EMA, who conducted the survey, contacted thousands of organisations using OSS and mixed solutions to interview their CIOs and […]

Gervase Markham is in the Times again with some thoughts on the announcement from AOL and Yahoo of their new pay-per-message, spam-blocker-busting email service. Of course, Markham is not the only one to express concern over the creation of a two-teir system; the Beeb carried an essay critical of the move by internet law expert […]

Two more major commercial names have now got open source competitors with which to tussle.

Songbird, from Californian startup Pioneers of the Inevitable, is aiming to break Apple iTunes’ dominance by becoming “the Firefox of MP3s”. There’s more on them at CNet and PC World’s blogs.

Gnash is a GNU Flash player developed at the behest of […]

LXer has an article looking at the use of FOSS in Austria’s new national healthcare network. Each medical practise in the country has been equipped with a small Linux-powered box called GINA which allows for easy connections between practises, even those without existing IT facilities.

While we’re on the subject the rather specific US magazine Government […]

Skype and Google have chucked a large quantity of readies at Spanish tech startup Fon Technology SL, a kind of wi-fi Napster keen on revolutionary imagery (check out the design on their site) who have adopted the quasi-Bolivarian name “foneros” for those subscribing to their service.

This introduction is courtesy of The Mobile Weblog…

If you […]

… and he’s been telling everyone who’ll listen. ZDNet’s in-house Microsoft contrarian John Caroll, on the other hand, had some very bad words for the new license, and for Richard Stallman in particular, that were just a hair’s breadth from the c-word*.

* “communism”

CIO India has an interesting article about the different aims of the IT strategies from the two French police forces - one is aiming for an intergrated monoculture, the other for virus-proof heterogeneity - which intersect in their use of open source software.

The subheadline contains a curious assertion - “the Gendarmerie may eliminate Microsoft software […]

The Sunday Times carried an article yesterday that opened with an idea that’s been around for years - that Linux is only difficult to learn for people who are already used to Windows - but has, for some reason, failed to embed itself in peoples’ minds.

Danny and Linda Lee, who are both in their mid-50s, […]

Speaking in the Phillipines, Ubuntu’s founder has been calling on governments around the world to promote the use of open source software not just to corporations but to their populations at large, according to local news outlet Inq 7.

Surprise, surprise - what with the unparallelled cleanliness and general sportsmanship of the American body politic, it’s shocking to read that some people at Capitol Hill have been vandalising the Wikipedia. There have been so many incidents that the Wikipedia has, amusingly, barred all IPs originating on the hill for a week. Acts of vandalism […]

Financial services firm E-Trade Financial are lucky enough to have Lee Thompson as their architecture manager. In an interview at eWeek he explains how his company now saves millions of dollars annually after switching from Sun Solaris-based servers to IBM Linux systems. Steven Vaughan Nicholls, also at eWeek asks what we can learn - particularly […]