FLOSS News

With the recent news of Microsoft being told to stop selling MS Word in the US due to it’s infringement of a patent owned by i4i I am really hopeful that perhaps, just perhaps, someone will start to realise just how MAD this all is.

It seems, unfortunately, as though my experience with Amazon was not common place.

Neil Wilson left a comment this morning explaining that his request to Amazon did not meet with the same response as my own…

We are not in a position to offer a partial refund for this product. You can of course return the laptop to us for a full refund if you wish

Wow!

Get this, there’s a new web site that looks to have been built using the Open Source Drupal CMS (At least the blog portion did when I looked at the XHTML) as the front-end which lets anyone see a “dashboard” of spending on Government IT projects:

It has been an exciting time since we launched the IT Dashboard. There have been more than 20 million hits so far…

20 Million hits? I hadn’t heard about this. Had you? It gets even better.

For anybody just joining us, the “IT Dashboard” is a new, one-stop clearing house of information that allows anyone with a web browser to track … IT initiatives and hold the government accountable for progress and results.

This is really quite interesting. It seems as though the UK government are starting, finally, to get the whole “Commons” thing.

There is this Government Department/Quango(?) called the Office of Public Sector Information (OSPI for short). Yep, I’ve never heard of them either. Not until I saw this tweet from Glyn Moody last night at any rate. The OSPI’s remit is (according to their website) as follows:

Remember when, back in late February, the Cabinet Office released their “Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan”? Myself and many other FOSS commentators were obviously heartily encouraged and have talked about it and examined the policy in some detail.

As anyone interested in the politics and wider adoption of FOSS will know by now, the Government recently released an updated policy statement regarding “Open Source and Open Standards”. I made a brief comment on it when the news broke, but have now had more time to consider the document and air my thoughts on it.

Firstly, It’s quite minor but nevertheless a shame that the pdf document was issued using Arial and Times New Roman embedded fonts that are not available on a free license. This leads me nicely to my second general point.

How’s this for an interesting statement from our beloved Government:

The Government considers that in order to deliver its key objectives a programme of positive action is now needed to ensure that there is an effective ‘level playing field’ between open source and proprietary software and to realise the potential contribution open source software can make to wider aims of re–use and open standards. This programme needs to consist both of a more detailed statement of policies and of practical actions by government and its suppliers. The key objectives will be to:

The title says it all, but just in case:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Make the primary operating system used in state schools free and open source.

Here’s the link: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/nonMSschools/

This is possibly a huge story for the whole world.

The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technologies and products.

The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley’s most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration.

“It’s intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software,” he said.

After having a bit of lay-in this morning (but not as long as I’d hoped for), I thought I should mention what we got up to at BETT last week.

Along with our friends at the OpenForum Europe and helpers from a few other Free Software or Open Source related organisations, we exhibited much of what it is best about FOSS to the international education community.

I found this on my Google News reader this morning.

Australia’s open source community leaders have written an open letter to Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard calling for consideration of free and open source software in the implementation of the Digital Education Revolution for the National Secondary School Computer Fund.

The letter, signed by 10 local open source professionals, calls for greater use of free and open source software in schools, particularly with the election promise of $1000 to fund a computer for every secondary student in the country.

I know this isn’t exactly “new” news, (it’s 2 days old and has appeared on /. I understand) but to me it is really important and should be shouted from the rooftops.

VietNamNet Bridge – The Ministry of Information and Communications has issued an instruction on using open source software products at state agencies.

Accordingly, by June 30, 2009, 100% of servers of IT divisions of government agencies must be installed with open source software; 100% of staffs at these IT divisions must be trained in the use of these software products and at least 50% use them proficiently.

Next week, we’ll be exhibiting at BETT, “the world’s largest educational technology event” in Olympia, London from the 14th to the 17th January.

On our stand (SW104) “The Open Source Precinct” with our friends at the OpenForum Europe we will be:

WOW!

Early on Sunday morning, the OpenOffice.org Community passed the ten million downloads mark for the latest version of its software, just four weeks after the launch on October 13th. The week also marked the first time the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference has been held outside Europe.

And this is only from the OOo servers. This doesn’t include mirrors and installs from distribution packages.

Glyn Moody (See blogroll) has an absolutely cracking post on his Open Enterprise blog regarding a recent announcement from Russia. The really interesting bit for me is not the article itself so much, although it is indeed great news and very inspirational, but the comments that follow.

Firstly, the main story. It is that Russia has had such a successful time using Open Source software in some School pilots that the government have decided to roll it out across ALL schools in Russia.