A month or so ago we mentioned an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons. A vigorous campaign by the UK FLOSS community and the increasing number of signatories (97 at the time of writing) keeps it in the news (here and here).
… asks The Guardian here; not a “free” v. “proprietary” story but rather £ v. $.
Is the concerned citizen right in feeling there is at least the appearance of a conflict of interest here?
Free information on a wide range of intellectual property matters - from patents, trademarks, new designs legislation, commercial and mediation services - will be available at the Patent Office Intellectual Property Awareness Day at the Microsoft Campus, […]
… here. More technically oriented pieces can be found here and here and here and in lots of other places. The Inq’s inimitable take is here and Mozilla’s own account is here.
says this piece; unhappily for UK readers, it is celebrating Kerala’s commitment to open source.
How about this as a measure of UK insularity: looking into the background an innocent-looking post we came upon this from Valencia:
Regional Council for Infrastructures and Transportation (CIT) put out to public tender the development and implementation of a new software application for the management of geographic information (GIS). Some of its most outstanding features […]
… is the somewhat faintly praising title of this piece on the legalities of open source licencing viewed from within the English legal system.
Last Saturday was the centenary of the birth of Grace Hopper; but for Builder UK we might have missed this entirely.
Now that “SCO is toast”, you may need another reason to read the amazing Groklaw. Well this may be it, with thanks to FFII for highlighting the case for European readers.
We post from England and Wales so need to be circumspect in our comments about goings-on in Scotland. However, this annoying piece caught our eye; looking further into it only increased the annoyance:
The Government Leaders’ Forum Europe is one of Microsoft’s flagship events for government, parliamentarians, education and business leaders across the continent and […]
This story - about Microsoft and OLPC - has been picked up in the UK; apparently the Green Party have put out a hostile press release but it is not on their website yet.
We have nothing to add to this post from the amazing Groklaw.
This is a big story - 126 posts at the time of writing according to Google News - reported fairly dispassionately here.
Microsoft’s own press release is here and that from the hither-to deeply obscure ECMA is here.
Despite the hype, Open XML is not yet achieved the holy grail, becoming an ISO Standard, […]
Somebody in this company has been reading “Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There”:
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.’
Of UK interest is a claim in this story of penetration of the UK government market by […]
So says Victor Keegan in this piece in today’s Technology Guardian extolling the virtues of the Open Rights Group, PledgeBank, writetothem.com, http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/, and the all-round general good guys at MySociety.
A timely example of this impact comes in the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property which
recommends introducing a strictly limited ‘private copying’ exception to enable […]
Read here why
ECMA’s approval will help Microsoft in its effort to claim it is serious about providing interoperability for its enormous user base worldwide.
We will keep an eye open for more on this story, especially on how ISO intends to handle the proposed XML standard and what UK readers can do to try […]
To quote from a piece in The Scotsman
“We believe that about half of all IT jobs created in the UK over the next year will be as a result of Vista,” O’Hare claims. Microsoft anticipates about 30,000 new IT jobs in the UK next year simply around the upgrade to Vista.
Raymond O’Hare is director of […]
the document format battle is coming to the forefront, with this press release from Novell beginning
Novell today announced that the Novell® edition of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite will now support the Office Open XML format, increasing interoperability between OpenOffice.org and the next generation of Microsoft Office. Novell is cooperating with Microsoft and others on […]
Here and here are a couple of articles suggesting that Microsoft Office is being given a run for its money, by Open Office and online offerings from Google and others, such as Zoho and ThinkFree.
There are passing mentions of continuing battle over document formats - go here if you are not familiar with […]
Here is our wackiest story yet!
WHAT: Members of Oregon State University’s Linux Users Group have a history of paying homage to Firefox, a free Internet browser produced by Mozilla. OSU’s open source lab stores the servers for Firefox. In August, the student group created a crop circle near Amity to commemorate Firefox’s 200 millionth download. […]