The Daily Record has this piece
It has emerged that Cuba and Venezuela want to break ties with the capitalist machine that is Microsoft.
Both governments are trying to wean state agencies from Microsoft’s Windows to the open source Linux operating system.
Linux is developed by a global community who share their code, and is as politically right-on […]
… is a question we passed on a couple of weeks ago. The answer, at least for some, is “Yes” so the Open Solutions Alliance went public last week aiming to
help customers put open source solutions to work by enabling application integration, certifying quality solutions, and promoting cooperation among […]
… reviewed in a long piece from from PC Advisor.
The first £50 OLPC laptops could ship to children in emerging economies within months. PC Advisor speaks to the people behind the project to see how they made the impossible possible. When plans to build and distribute a £50 laptop to schoolchildren in emerging economies […]
Earlier this year the European Union published a very upbeat landmark assessment of the economic impact of FLOSS in Europe despite heavy pressure from you-know-who. How heavy is described here:
according to its lead author Rishab Ghosh.
“There were critical comments from CompTIA. There were others: Microsoft, the software alliance [The Initiative for Software Choice] — […]
In a strongly-worded press release
The UK’s Open Source trade association has criticised the BBC’s plans to limit access to their on-demand television services to Microsoft Windows. The Open Source Consortium (OSC) believes the plans are anti-competitive and will use public money to lock viewers into the technologies of a repeatedly convicted monopolist.
Here is the back […]
In an email the House of Lords Judicial Office confirms that
The petition for leave to appeal in the case of Macrossan (Petitioner) v Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks (Respondent) and one other action was refused on 05 February 2007.
The importance of this case in the ongoing struggle over software patents in the […]
According to this piece in the Indy
Major music companies look set to put pressure on the iPod maker Apple to make its proprietary anti-piracy system compatible with music players manufactured by other companies.
While Mr Jobs has called on the music majors - Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music - to abandon DRM altogether, the […]
Of our beaten track, but a couple of great pictures in this piece showing the to-ing and fro-ing in a Linux server running Apache compared with a Windows server running IIS. Thanks to Andrew Macpherson for the link.
According to this on the amazing Groklaw, the campaign to halt the fast tracking of Microsft’s Open XML has succeeded. We will try to keep up with what happens now; reading between the lines written by some in the know, this is uncharted territory.
We were cautious but pretty negative about the prospect of the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum being held in the Scottish Parliament when it first emerged in the media; here is The Scotsman being underwhelmed by the event itself.
… asks this piece on Linux.com by Robin ‘Roblimo’ Miller. It all seems a bit mysterious or, maybe, disorganised.
Hard on the heels of French car maker Peugeot’s open source deal, comes news that
French authorities will give out 175,000 USB memory sticks loaded with open-source software to Parisian high school students at the start of the next school year.
Mozilla Europe President Tristan Nitot hailed the news as “an excellent surprise.”
Trying to keeping our […]
The new Web site Me.dium.com is built to change something that most of us probably take for granted: the fact that cruising the Internet is a pretty solitary activity.
Me.dium is based on the opposite idea - that people should be able to check out sites together, much as people get cues from one another and […]
Aside from the intrinsic importance of the subject, this piece from the Free Software Magazine is worth a read for its wit and range:
How could Gutenberg and Caxton have known that the invention of the printing press would be a massive force for the democratisation of knowledge and central to the transformation of a feudal […]
If you are not an academic or somehow involved in higher education, the row about Blackboard’s patent on ‘Internet-based education support systems and methods’ may have passed you by - here is an understated reaction to the news shortly after it broke, here (surprisingly) is a more combative piece, here is a typical reaction and […]
Two pieces in Information Week ruminate about THAT DEAL. The first, syndicated from Reuters, highlights the continuing enraged reaction of the Free Software Foundation, the second, an op-ed piece, reviews the controversial tie-up three months on, without adding anything much.
Surprisingly perhaps, news of Novell’s huge deal with Peugeot doesn’t mention anything about the […]
An item on the BBC website about its plans for on-demand TV includes some high-level recognition for FLOSS:
The [BBC] Trust also recommends that the BBC adopts a more platform-agnostic approach to the digital rights management framework which protects the programmes offered for download.
The DRM framework currently relies on Microsoft technology but, the Trust says, […]