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.

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: