This story has been around for a while (it appeared last year here in The Independent!) so its appearance in today’s Guardian is a little puzzling. Much more puzzling is the total absence in these reports and Computer Aid International’s Annual Report of any mention of software.
… says the headline of this piece in The Noblesville Ledger; does this local newspaper in Indiana know something we don’t? Unhappily not; for the good folk of Hamilton County, NHS is the TLA for Noblesville High School so only a small victory for open source.
Warming to the theme of open source in education, […]
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 […]
… 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] — […]
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.
According to a piece in Desktop Linux
Adobe Systems Inc. on Jan. 29 announced that it has released the full PDF (Portable Document Format) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management. AIIM, in turn, will start working on making PDF an ISO standard.
There are a couple of dozen posts on this story […]
PC Pro has this piece on the fast tracking at ISO of the Microsoft-inspired Office XML formats mentioned here on several previous occasions (here and here) .
With thanks to Alain Williams, UKUUG Chairman, this is what you need to know and do before Friday in order to register an objection to the fast tracking:
Summary
The document […]
Should we be relieved or alarmed by the news, in a press release here and a pieces in Info World and others, that
The Web site, openLiberty.org, will have tools and open-source libraries that developers need for applications using federation and Web services standards endorsed by the Liberty Alliance and its openLiberty Project.
The project will […]
That is the date by which national standards bodies must submit any objections to fast-track processing of the Microsoft Office Open XML specification by the ISO/IEC international standards body. Only qualified “P” member bodies of the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (”JTC-1″) have legal standing to submit such objections.
This long and detailed […]
Unlike our previous post with a similar heading , this piece from Information Week, and similar stories from other outlets, is serious.
NASA is nervous about its software, and it’s got a right to be. Its James Webb space telescope is scheduled to be launched in 2013 and it is being built by NASA, Canadian […]
The story we reported last week is appearing all round the world, including the BBC, in New Zealand, in the USA courtesy of ZDNet and, not surpringly, Brussels.
Answered here, (in the affirmative.) There are >100 stories on the net - here is O’Reilly Radar’s take and here is what the BBC has to say - after
Linden Labs announced the open source release of Second Life. It’s released under the GPL, with an additional permission granted allowing the code to […]
Readers who are citizens of the European Union may want to follow up this item on Slashdot:
The Council of the EU has a streaming service so that we can watch its meetings — but the service can only be accessed by Mac or MS Windows users. This is because they employ WMV format for the […]
Financial matters are not our usual fare but Red Hat’s third quarter results give some indication of the impact on open source of the turmoil of the last few months - Oracle possibly threating Red Hat, Novell apparently teaming up with Microsoft, … .
Red Hat’s own announcement is here, an up-beat analysis from the Times […]
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 […]
This is just a fascinating read:
These are some pretty raw notes from Negroponte’s presentation at NetEvents, Hong Kong, as it happens. He’s showing off the first “production laptop” - although it’s not the finished electronics. An ASIC - to run the camera, the flash memory and other functions - isn’t fitted, and it’s not possible […]
was how we headed a recent post. According to this item in Linux-Watch not everyone in the FLOSS world is heeding Benjamin Franklin’s advice.
On a more positive note, this item alerted us that this week is UbuntuOpenWeek.
Could this be a story about the French parliament’s reported move to Linux desktops?