10.24.13
Posted in Europe, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 3:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The NSA-friendly back doors chosen politically, barring technical considerations and assessment
Summary: Forced disclosure of administrative documents in France reveals a secret Microsoft deal which is purely political and not technical
FOLLOWING our coverage of Microsoft and spooks collaborating (two months before the NSA leaks began), APRIL (software freedom advocacy group in France) sent us what it called a “[f]ollowup on “Open Bar” contract between Microsoft and French ministry of Defence,” stating:
you wrote a few months ago an article about the “Open Bar” contract
between Microsoft and French ministry of Defence
http://techrights.org/2013/04/21/nato-and-microsoft/.
FYI We published last weeks news documents. These documents show that
choosing an Open Bar contract was indeed the result of a political
decision which clearly was made before the feasibility and risks studies
were being performed.
Read on :
http://www.april.org/en/open-bar-contract-between-microsoft-and-french-ministry-defence-new-documents-support-political-game
This page says: “This framework contract, which was signed without any open call for tender or competitive procedure, granted right of use on some Microsoft products and associated services for the duration of the contract, i.e. four years. It was signed in complete secrecy, despite numerous negative opinions, and was the subject of several leaks to the press.”
“Taking advantage of this information, we made two successive requests for administrative documents. The first one obtained a partially usable response. We are now publishing the released documents resulting from the second one.”
This is very fascinating and it can give clues as to what happens in other countries. France is generally considered one of the most FOSS-friendly countries in the world when it comes to the public sector (based on Europe-wide assessment from professional assessors it was ranked first). Microsoft's assault on standards, which include ODF, was very interesting in France because then too it involved political corruption and involvement by Nicolas Sarkozy, who was close to Microsoft executives. This led to OOXML apologism and adoption [1, 2],
It is clear that Microsoft is intimidated (poor Microsoft!) if not deeply shocked to find the French police moving to GNU/Linux. Other proprietary software vendors are becoming “legacy vendors” as some call them [1] and as proprietary systems show massive failures in the British public sector, e.g. [2], we are likely to see more nations embracing Free/libre software (new example in [3,4]), with ODF leading the way in many cases (LibreOffice gets more support [5,6] and development effort [7]). Speaking of the UK, things change here for the better and just yesterday the UK Home Office became a client of the company I work for. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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It’s clear that open source is shaking up the technology industry. What isn’t yet clear is how this impacts legacy vendors.
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Richard Bacon, a Conservative member of the committee, said the report was further evidence of a “systemic failure” in the government’s ability to draw up and manage large IT contracts. “This saga is one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in the history of the public sector.
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A recently unveiled search engine for accessing the collections of Finland’s archives, libraries and museums was built on open source, announces the country’s National Library. “The advantage of open source is that it enables organisations to work together to develop a system without limits, contracts or procedures.” The engine itself is also made publicly available.
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The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that Studio Storti is now a member of its Advisory Board. Studio Storti is the largest provider of open source solutions to the Italian Public Administration, and is launching a LibreOffice Division to support migrations from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Red Hat at 3:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about Free/Open Source software in education
Red Hat has had some promotion of Free software (which it falsely labeled Open Source) in education [1,2,3] and it covered some important points. Children can only be taught “computing” if they are taught how to deal with code and in order for knowledge to pass between people a model of sharing needs to be encouraged. Fortunately, as we are constantly reminded by the “Open Access” (free as in freedom access) movement, more people are starting to really ‘get’ it. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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How do you make money from something that is free? Borrow some moves from the commercial open source playbook.
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This is a website where kids can play little games (available in 40 languages) and then click the ‘See inside’ button to see the code behind the game in a kid friendly way. It’s a great way to get kids to see code and learn not just programming, but the concepts of open source.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Free Software/Open Source
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Have you been looking for a job, or perhaps some work on the side? If so, and you have Linux or other open source skills, the news is good. Demand for Linux and open source workers continues to rise. We’ve covered this trend as reported by careers sites such as Dice.com, and by The Linux Foundation, but one of the most detailed breakdowns appears at LinuxCareer.com, through its IT Skills Watch report. In addition to reporting on demand for Linux skills, it breaks down how the demand looks for workers with skills in other areas ranging from PHP to Apache Tomcat.
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Indian enterprises are increasingly moving to open-source software, recognising the cost benefits and flexibility it offers over proprietary software. A falling rupee, which increases licensing costs, is likely to hasten the shift from softwares made by companies like SAP, IBM and Oracle.
The government has already embraced open-source in a big way — the Aadhaar project is a case in point. Now, companies like Hungama Digital Entertainment, Uttam Energy, Bilcare, payment processor Euronet, insurer Star Union Dai-chi and IT outsourcer iGate — have also started using open-source software. And the list is growing.
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To prevent disruptions and scale up its service while keeping costs down, Twitter has had to drastically change its core infrastructure, taking up open source tools while doing so.
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Unesco, the educational, scientific and cultural organisation of the United Nations, is promoting the development and use of open source solutions for water resource management. At the end of June, in Paris the UN officially launched a network of experts ‘Hydro Open-source software Platform of Experts’ (HOPE), to “contributes to the dissemination of innovative practices”.
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Oldenbourg Verlag just published a special issue on open source that I edited. Titled “the unstoppable rise of open source” it provides a five-article overview of open source past, present, and future.
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In all my writing work, I use only Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to get the job done. I’ve been questioned about this a number of times, and the best answer I can give people is: It’s complicated. There are lots of reasons I use FOSS over all other options, and I think I’m ready to put them all out there for y’all to see.
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I am happy to inform my readers that finally SOS Open Source will soon be released in open source!
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I vividly remember my first experience using the Internet in 2000. The amount of information I was hit with by typing my first search term, university, was far beyond my wildest imaginations. This plethora of knowledge filled my mind with wonder, excitement, and enlightenment. I suddenly had the power to read, analyze, and learn about anything and anyone. The knowledge created by some of the greatest minds in the history of mankind was at my disposal, free of cost and just one single click away. I felt empowered.
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Marten Mickos is one of the most respected leaders in open source. Here’s why.
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You can’t run a business—even a small one—without technology. You need computers, smartphones, file storage, a website, and a whole host of other tech assets. So how do you afford it all with a budget that’s tighter than a hipster’s jeans?
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Just days after a brand new cloud operating system was released, IBM is out with a new operating system of its own. FusedOS is IBM’s new research project that’s now an open-source general purpose OS.
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Open source is all about collaboration. When you write some code and put it out there for others to read, use, and build upon, you’re giving a gift to the world. With the instant global communication the Internet provides us today, countless developers around the world can (maybe even anonymously) collaborate, giving and taking code, sharing knowledge with each other, and advancing our collective corpus of work.
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There was a slight compensation when the German city of Munich reportedly were planning to distribute free CDs of Ubuntu 12.04 to its residents. That’s a step forward but certainly not good enough. Why I say it’s not good enough is because they can do more – a lot more than what they are currently doing.
Since these organizations will more than likely have their own support team and not rely on purchasing support contracts, the only reasonable source of revenue via clients buying support contracts for Open Source software gets blocked.
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DokuWiki is a simple but versatile wiki. Find out how to install, configure, and begin using DokuWiki.
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Where is Free & Open Source Software headed to? On the one hand, there is a trend that seems to veer it towards a more professional field, with new analysis and tracking tools that aim at improving not just the quality of code but its legal compliance as well. More and more large companies adopt FOSS either as users or as developers, or both, and that’s a good thing too. But does this announce the upcoming end of copyleft licences and that more structured approaches will ultimately kill the wild and spontaneous bunch that FOSS “once” was? No it won’t. First, the FOSS adoption among enterprise field does not depend on one license only. There’s also a lot of enterprise software released under GPL, by the way. But perhaps we have to accept and embrace Free and Open Source Software for what it is: an undefinable field that is at the same time a state of the art, a set of business models around software and services, a demand for our digital freedoms and a set of best practices on digital innovation alongside an extremely effective way to license software. And yet I’m not even sure I’ve covered it all. Today FOSS is growing not just in the enterprise: it’s at the core of the Makers’ movement and the 3D Printing revolution; it has inspired the Open Hardware movement, the Open Knowledge and countless other initiatives. Very few of these have reached a maturity stage and even inside the realms of FOSS development, things continue to be the same: at the beginning, a developer has an itch to sratch, and code to share with the world….
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Most students at Carnegie Mellon have used, or at least heard of, open-source software. Examples of such software include the browser Firefox and the mobile operating system Android. Open-source software, in most basic terms, makes its code publicly available for modification and distribution by users. Proponents believe that creating an open community of programmers who modify software for their own uses provides the best possible experience for users, allowing them to customize according to their own needs.
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Open source products have very uneven penetration into the world of business technology. If you look at content management systems or languages, open source rules. But if you look at the market for ERP software or for storage systems, open source hasn’t made much of a dent.
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Events
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The dates of October 23-24 have been circled on my calendar for a while. Why? Because All Things Open is coming to Raleigh, NC. It’s the first open source-focused conference of it’s kind to come to the capital of North Carolina. I’m also excited because having the conference come to Raleigh fulfills one of the five pillars in my definition of an open source city.
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It was really great to be able to attend LinuxCon in New Orleans in September. I’d like to thank again HP’s OSPO team and in particular Eileen Evans, VP leading it, to sponsor my travel there. HP is also a Platinum sponsor of both the Linux Foundation, CloudOpen & LinuxCon events.
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When IT-oLogy opens the doors to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh on October 23, the focus will be on open source in the enterprise. That’s only fitting, given the fact that Raleigh is Red Hat’s playground–and Red Hat practically wrote the book on enterprise level open source.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Version 4.0 of GNU Make, the widely-used software that’s relied upon extensively by developers and those building their software from sources, is now available. GNU Make 4.0 does bring with it a handful of new features and capabilities.
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People trickled and and were greeted by the friendly face of FSF operations assistant, Chrissie Himes.
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Hey all. Things are busy here in MediaGoblin-land, but we’re making great progress. Since our last update several things have happened, including Natalie Foust’s branch being merged! So administrative tools have officially hit git master. That’s great news!
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Programming
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Use OpenCL with very little code — and test it from the Python console.
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It’s results like this that convince Jessica that when open source communities invest in diversity outreach, everyone benefits. Since implementing a beginner series, intermediate workshops, and open source sprints, the Boston Python user group has over quintupled in size, from 700 members to 4000+. They are now the largest Python user group in the world. That type of growth is something all open source communities should aspire to.
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The shell is the most basic of environments for working with your Linux system. Whatever you may think of working in a text environment, I guarantee that once you have fully experienced the power of simple text, you will be forever convinced. Text is compact. Text is fast. System administration over a network is best experienced at the shell level. Those forced to resort to graphical tools over a slow Internet connection are also quickly converted.
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