UK Open Source Media Watch

This jargon-free piece in the highly prestigious MIT Technology Review is just the thing to show your boss, partner, MP, … or anyone important who thinks FLOSS is just for geeks.

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] — […]

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 […]

In what may prove to be the most important FLOSS story we have blogged since starting in May 2005:

The European Commission (Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry) has published a research study prepared by Rishab Gosh and his team at UNU-MERIT.

Study on the: Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of […]

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 […]

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 […]

This item in Ars Technica highlights an essay by Rufus Pollock with the same title. We post ourselves, without added value or irony, to urge our readers to read Rufus’s essay (available here, free registration required).

This is the title of the Early Day Motion which John Pugh MP has tabled in the House of Commons. Media reaction is moving up the food chain.

In case you have not seen it, this message is in circulation within the UK FLOSS community:

Dear FLOSS supporter

John Pugh MP has tabled an Early Day Motion […]

UK-based OpenStreetMap.org is appearing increasingly on the news feeds; here and here for instance and here with pictures. The Guardian’s “Free Our Data” campaign has had a lot to say about
Ordnance Survey’s transition from a directly funded government body to a “trading fund”, run as a quasi-business

A very important topic, but a disappointing piece.

Last month the EU hosted a workshop on the impact of FLOSS on the competitiveness of the ICT sector in Europe. You can read what happened next here and the somewhat hyperactive outcome reported earlier this week by TechWorld :
A leaked letter to the European Commission has revealed the extent of lobbying by proprietary […]

Down under, something very big has happened very quietly. Kennards Hire, a major machinery rental company, engaged in a massive migration to desktop Linux, the biggest the country has yet seen, with nary a peep from the national media. Steven Deare of ZDNet Australia noticed this and decided to investigate:

[ZDNet] tried to cover the rollout […]

Gervase Markham of Mozilla used his regular column in The Times this week to flag the issue of UK citizens paying twice, once as taxpayers, once as consumers, for data gathered by the UK government.

I was travelling on Virgin Trains over the bank holiday, and thought I’d left my return ticket on the outward train. […]

We’re a couple of days late, but it was Software Freedom Day on Saturday 16th September. South Africa was particularly active in celebrating this auspicious occasion, where they are lucky enough to have a government sufficiently engaged to take note of the date:

“South Africa needs to achieve true transformation that will see all sectors of […]

We recently blogged a piece from The FT on the behavioural economics of risk (people take less than they should, apparently).

Hope then, that not too many people catch this piece from Silicon.com on the subject of the risks OSS adoption poses to companies.

Matt Asay at InfoWorld took umbrage at some of the assertions […]

Forbes Magazine, the self-proclaimed “tool of captalism”, has been taking a look at the role of OSS in creating a “cheap revolution” - note that it won’t be free, one has to make money after all - and focusing on the potential for disruption and threats to established companies.

There are articles on the threat to […]

IBM launched a new Research and Development Management consultancy practise this week which aims to help companies innovate using techniques cribbed from the open source model.

Mel Weems, global practice leader for the new R&D Management practice, told internetnews.com that companies can “create a new game-changing play in the market by bringing together operational innovation, business […]

From Silicon.com:

Speaking on the final day of Red Hat’s annual user summit in Nashville, [Nicholas] Negroponte[, head of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project,] told an audience of Linux enthusiasts and technology professionals that the OLPC project will lead to mass adoption of the operating system, if the software that powers it is efficient […]

*update* - the post originally linked to the wrong article on The Guardian’s site; it’s since been corrected. Apologies.

The Guardian today reports on the results of a series of case studies conducted by the Open Source Academy on the deployment of open source software in the local government sector . Although grandly claiming that “the […]

As the Ubuntu community gears up for next month’s release of Dapper Drake, founder Mark Shuttleworth’s for-profit open source company, Canonical Ltd., is preparing up to offer commercial support for the distro. The company already offers certification and Desktop Linux questions whether they have what it takes to position Ubuntu as a serious player in […]