Linux.ie :: Free Maps! (updated)

Steve Coast will be giving a talk about OpenStreetMap in the HEAnet offices, in the IFSC, Dublin on Thursday the 22nd of November at 7pm.
All are welcome.

Battle for Wi-Fi Space

Battle for free wi-fi

SiliconRepublic.com: Can open source sweeten the customer experience?

SiliconRepublic.com: Can open source sweeten the customer experience?

Technology Review: Skype Goes Mobile

Technology Review: Skype Goes Mobile: "reate a 'new product to make Skype completely mobile,' while 3 Mobile entirely declined to comment. A top executive for iSkoot, a partner company providing some of the networking technology supporting the phone, confirmed that it is in development but declined to provide specifics. A recent BusinessWeek report describes a customized cell phone with a button automatically activating the Skype application. Putting this cost-cutting voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) service at cell-phone subscribers' fingertips could be an attractive way to hold on to customers, particularly 3 Mobile's core demographic of young, Net-s"

Social Responsibility Advocates Demand Open Source Action From Oracle - Seeking Alpha

Social Responsibility Advocates Demand Open Source Action From Oracle - Seeking Alpha: "because boards always oppose proxy proposals that they didn’t propose. But on the face of it (and I still believe there is more to this under the covers), the OSS movement should oppose the whole idea as poorly t"

Lack of license fee draws UK firms to open source - Computer Business Review

Lack of license fee draws UK firms to open source - Computer Business Review

Solar Power Rocks Graph of war spending versus energy spending

Solar Power Rocks Graph of war spending versus energy spending

MuniWireless - Honolulu's Chinatown goes wireless with Meraki

MuniWireless - Honolulu's Chinatown goes wireless with Meraki

MuniWireless - Sanford, Florida deploys downtown wireless hotzone

MuniWireless - Sanford, Florida deploys downtown wireless hotzone

Open Source Business Models: Collaborative Software Initiative just launched | Commercial Open Source Software

Open Source Business Models: Collaborative Software Initiative just launched | Commercial Open Source Software

Scott McNealy's five reasons that free, open source software is good for Sun and our customers : Jim Laurent's Weblog

Scott McNealy's five reasons that free, open source software is good for Sun and our customers : Jim Laurent's Weblog

Free nationwide WiFi in the UK courtesy of FON and BT - Boing Boing

Free nationwide WiFi in the UK courtesy of FON and BT - Boing Boing

European Design Engineer : Applying open-source principles

European Design Engineer : Applying open-source principles

Misunderstanding Innovation

The commonest error is the failure to recognise that innovation it is an innately incremental and collaborative process. Technological progress, like almost any human endeavour, is a social activity. The greatest philosophers and innovators have always recognised that they were standing on the shoulders of giants.

The current IP-obsessed culture inhibits collaboration, and hampers the natural process of innovation in society.

Fortunately, initiatives like the Free Software movement have shown that innovation can thrive without creating artificial monopolies.

Police Act Review Wiki | Main / Home Page

Police Act Review Wiki | Main / Home Page

Freedom more important than price or cost... | Open Source Initiative

Freedom more important than price or cost... | Open Source Initiative: "CIOs and CTOs: the freedom of source enables innovation that's otherwise impossible, modular architectures based on transparent, open standards provide greater efficiency and robustness, and competitive vendor offerings that are based on service rather than lock-in deliver competitive value in both time-to-market and quality of implementation. In short, the win-win-win of open source is no longer mere theory, but in evidence throughout the enterprise and around the world. And, to the extent that IT buyers can exercise choice (when they a"

Computerworld - Open source to help quell ICT trade deficit: Waugh

Computerworld - Open source to help quell ICT trade deficit: Waugh

Technology Review: Opening Up the Patent Process

Technology Review: Opening Up the Patent Process

Open Source Is the Big Disruptor

Gartner declared open-source software the biggest disruptor the software industry has ever seen and postulated it will eventually result in cheaper software and new business models.

More...

CNews: Russian OS to be installed in every school

CNews: Russian OS to be installed in every school

Russia is latest country to move towards OpenDocument format and open standards - ITRPortal.com

Russia is latest country to move towards OpenDocument format and open standards - ITRPortal.com

GotzeBlogged � Blog Archive � Netherlands Picks ODF

On behalf of the Dutch government, Frank Heemskerk, Minister of Economic Affairs, announced today that ODF will be the standard for reading, publishing and the exchange of information for all governmental organisations. The deadline is January 2009. Heemskerk’s announcement is just one of several initiatives about the use of open standards and open source software in Dutch government.

More...

Government to boost use of free software

The government is to make more use of free and open source software in order to cut costs and make it less dependent on powerful single suppliers such as Microsoft, news agency ANP reports.

Government departments will only be able to deviate from open source software if they have a good reason to do so, junior economic affairs minister Frank Heemskerk is reported as saying. The plan, which has full cabinet backing, will be sent to MPs on Monday, ANP says.

More...

Government backsliding on open source

Lib Dem Treasury spokesperson Julia Goldsworthy said: “The government's performance on open source is shocking. It has reports from 2001 indicating the benefits and yet it has failed to follow its own recommendations and continues to engage in proprietary lock in with major corporations."

Advert

"The government announced and re-announced these plans years ago to great fanfare. The sad fact both for open source industry and the taxpayer is that the plans have not been fully implemented.”

Goldsworthy is set to challenge Cabinet Office minister Ed Miliband on the use of open source software across government – and its potential to produce efficiency savings – in the forthcoming parliamentary session.

Earlier this year, the Conservatives also attacked the government over open source when shadow chancellor George Osborne argued that greater use of open source software in the public sector could save £600m a year.

More...

Revenue based on maintenance, not licenses

Forrester predicts that for SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft, maintenance revenue will remain at more than 40 percent of overall sales for the foreseeable future.


More...

Tuttle SVC: Analyst Anticipates Eight-fold Increase in K-12 Open Source by 2011

Open source is gaining importance for schools. The growth rate is a healthy 70% per year. Beyond Linux and the well-known Indiana open-source initiative, a number of other states and districts are considering open source. Moodle, a curriculum delivery platform, is an example of a popular open-source program. Widespread open-source usage will grow eight-fold from 2006 to 2011.

More...

In-Flight Open Source

I had erroneously believed that use of Open Source as a competitive advantage was no longer possible. I thought that the agility and cost benefits had spread across all industries in the same way it has taken over Wall Street.

It was surprising to me to hear that Open Source technologies and a modern service-oriented architecture drastically lowers costs for Virgin and increases the speed of innovation.

More...

New report sees open source move 'out of the basement and into the boardroom'

The
acquisition and deployment of open source software is now a strategic
imperative for UK business, according to research released by Ingres Corporation. The Managing 21st Century Business Information survey
questioned IT professionals from the UK's largest public sector and
enterprise organisations on a host of open source and information
management issues.

The report found that the versatility and
adaptability of the open source model is allowing companies to
eliminate historic vendor lock-in, reduce database management costs and
rapidly develop critical business applications, including Business
Intelligence, Data Warehousing and CRM solutions.

More...

Powered by ScribeFire.

Misys gambles on open source revolution

British software group Misys is expected to announce a major strategic gamble this week - giving its products away for free.

Under new American management, the company is planning to embrace the "open source" movement, releasing a software code that can be copied or modified by other programmers.

More...

Asia's first ever open source summit

Co-executive producer of the Open Source Summit, Winston Damarillo, said Asia is set to become the largest consumer of open source technologies. According to research from the Evans Data Corporation, the number of developers using open source software in Asia has jumped by 40 percent over the past three years.

More...

SiliconRepublic.com: Free wireless for Dublin City?

30.01.2007 - Dublin City looks likely to be blanketed with free wireless internet access in the tradition of cities like San Francisco if a proposed plan by Dublin City Council gets the go-ahead.

More...

Open source investment up 33% in Q2 - CBRonline.com

The level of funding in free and open source-related vendors rose over 33% in the second quarter compared to the same period last year, following a decline in the first quarter.

According to figures collected by Computer Business Review, investment in open source vendors rose 33.1% from $73.95m in the second quarter of 2006 to $98.45m between the beginning of April and the end of June this year.

More...

Malaysia to manufacture world's first Wi-Fi centric mobile phone

Malaysia's Comintel corporation Bhd signed an agreement with Gupp Technologies Incorporated to manufacture the world's first Linux-based dual mode Wi-Fi centric mobile phone on Wednesday.

The smart phone, which can be used over Voice Over Wi-Fi (VoWi- Fi) and GSM networks, will enable users to transfer calls between cellular and Wi-Fi networks, Comintel said in a statement.

More...

Venezuela launches open source PCs

Following up on their support for open source software and technological independence, the Venezuelan government launched the "Bolivarian Computer" earlier this month. Built locally, the computers come in four different models all of which run on Linux.

More...

More than half of all German companies use Open Source

German companies are world leaders in the use of Open Source software. In a survey of IT procurement officers from Germany, Great Britain, and the US/Canada, 59 percent of those in Germany said that they use OSS in their companies. The figures were far lower in Great Britain and the US/Canada at 48 and 38 percent, respectively.

More...

Virtual Open Source Center for Nordic Countries

Open source centers in five Nordic Countries, Finnish COSS, Swedish SKL, Norwegian IKT-Norge, Icelandic IS and Danish OSL, has decided to join forces and found a virtual open source center. The initiative was confirmed during the Norwegian IT-minister Heidi Grande Røys' visit in Finland.

More...

Open-Source Government

The Constitution is the operating system of America. The very reason America is great is because it has largely been free and open. It has, in effect, been an open-source government. And when it is transparent, as all good open source environments are, checks and balances work. The bad stuff is burned away, stopped dead in its tracks, or impeached.

More...

Red Hat Doffs its Open Source Cap to the Kerala Government

The Kerala government in India is going out of its way to demonstrate that open source software is a critical component to the future of democratic information. And toward that noble end, Red Hat has decided to help out.

More...

Open-source bites into Microsoft share in Bengal e-gov

Having tried out Microsoft for a few years, the West Bengal government’s information technology department is now opting for open-source operating systems in new purchases of PCs for its ambitious e-governance programme.

The state recently chose to install Lenovo PCs loaded with Red Hat Linux for an e-governance programme involving 277 panchayats in Burdwan district.

The state’s IT minister, Debesh Das, said he is not looking for a confrontation with Microsoft, but is clearing the purchase of open-source by any department that wants it. Dr Das, a professor of computer science, is himself a votary of open-source and the free software movement.

More...

Wireless energy promise powers up

US researchers have successfully tested an experimental system to deliver power to devices without the need for wires.

The setup, reported in the journal Science, made a 60W light bulb glow from a distance of 2m (7ft).

More...

Photosynth and Collective Intelligence

Blaise Aguera y Arcas makes clear in his comments during the demo how photosynth is not just a graphics application but an application that gets better the more people use it, and in which the value of each contribution is enhanced by others. We're just at the beginning of understanding how collective intelligence can transform applications. We're going to see more and more breakthroughs like photosynth that don't look like web applications but nonetheless draw from the same deep trends.

More...

Meraki's Solar WiFi Repeater

Later this summer Meraki is releasing an outdoor WiFI repeater. They are also releasing a solar accessory kit that will enable to the repeater to hum along without being hooked up to an electric outlet. Cool.

The repeater will send out WiFi signals 700 ft. The repeater and solar kit combo will cost just under $150.

More...

World tidal energy first for NI

The world's first turbine to create commercial amounts of electricity from tidal energy is to be installed in Northern Ireland.

Marine Current Turbines (MCT) said the installation of its SeaGen commercial energy system at the mouth of Strangford Lough would begin in August.

The lough has one of the fastest tidal flows in the world.

SeaGen will produce electricity for about 1,000 homes. It is the biggest turbine of its kind in the world.

More...

BMW and Audi Are Using Linux

BMW and Audi car makers rely on Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Edition Server (SLED) for maintaining their data center. BMW Group combined SuSE's Linux with the Xen virtualisation software on its servers equipped with Intel x86 dual-core processors.

More...

Department of the Navy releases OSS Policy

"The objective of the Department of Defense (DoD) goal of achieving an interoperable net-centric environment is to improve the warfighter’s effectiveness through seamless access to critical information. A key piece in supporting the DoD goal is the ability to utilize OSS as part of the Department of the Navy’s (DON) Information Technology (IT) portfolio.”

More...

For Business Critical Applications, It's Got To Be Open Source

A study conducted by Forrester Consulting revealed that customers use open source for mission-critical applications, but showed concern about the availability of services to unlock the full value of open source solutions.

More than half of the respondents—58 percent in North America and 51 percent in the UK and Continental Europe—stated that they use open source software for mission-critical applications.

More than 79 percent report using open source in the application infrastructure—in databases, Web servers and application servers. In fact, 77 percent of the study respondents called open source important or very important for improving IT efficiency and delivering more with less.

More...

IDC: Open source revenues to reach US$5.8 billion by 2011

The market for standalone open source software (OSS) is in a significant growth stage, according to the IDC. Adoption of OSS will accelerate over the period of 2007 through 2011 as barriers to adoption get knocked down. Growth in revenues, however, will lag behind the growth in distribution of open source software.

According to IDC, worldwide revenues from standalone open source software reached US$1.8 billion in 2006. The revenues will reach US$5.8 billion in 2011, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26% from 2006 to 2011.

More...

EU OK's Welsh Assembly Wi-Fi

The EU has ruled that Wi-Fi deployments in Wales and Prague do not constitute state aid, as neither will compete with commercial hotspot deployments.

The Welsh Assembly's deployment is only intended for use by public sector organisations, so hardly something The Cloud or their ilk have to be concerned about. The intention is really to aggregate orders for Wi-Fi infrastructure to reduce costs, but the Assembly reported itself to the EU just to make sure.

The Prague deployment was to have been more all-encompassing, and was investigated after complaints from unnamed commercial operators. So the proposal has been modified to include only public sector employees - anyone else connecting will be limited to accessing government websites.

Municipal Wi-Fi projects have to tread very carefully to avoid being accused of being state aid, and the EU isn't backward in investigating complaints of such behaviour.

As EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes commented: "Investment in broadband networks is primarily a matter for private companies. State subsidies for such networks are only acceptable if they address a well-defined market failure or cohesion problem."

More...

Open Source DOD

When someone brings up the current state of national intelligence, “open” is hardly the first word that comes to mind. Surprising, then, that “open sourcing” was the buzzword at this week’s Department of Defense Intelligence Information System conference, titled Leveraging Technology to Enable the Warfighter, held in Chicago.

More...

China adds 50 engineers to OpenOffice

Sun Microsystems, Inc. , the OpenOffice.org community and Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Co., Ltd., today announced a joint development effort that will focus on integrating new features in the Chinese localization of OpenOffice.org, as well as quality assurance and work on the core applications. Additionally, Redflag Chinese 2000 made public its commitment to the global OpenOffice.org community stating it would strengthen its support of the development of the world's leading free and open source productivity suite.

Under the provisions of the agreement, Beijing Redflag Chinese 2000, which produces the popular OpenOffice.org-based RedOffice, will add to the open source project approximately 50 engineers, some of whom have been working on the OpenOffice.org project since the second half of 2006.

More...

Open source's CAGR five times greater than proprietary software

In a February 2007 report, Gartner Dataquest found that the compound annual growth rate of open-source software (43%) between 2006 and 2011 will more than quintuple that of proprietary software (8%). The firm projects open-source software sales to reach $4.23 billion in 2007, swelling to $13.10 billion in 2010.

More...

Open Source Drug Safety?

Both houses of Congress are expected to pass laws that tweak the way the FDA monitors the safety of new medicines after they are approved. Many of the most radical changes, like a proposal to restrict TV ads and a push from Grassley to set up a separate FDA division to monitor side effects, didn't make it into the Senate version. But the bill would compel drug firms to make all of their data available on public Web sites. That, in turn, would let academic watchdogs like Nissen troll for side effects more easily.

It's an open source approach to drug safety.

More...

Open Source Salaries

"Open Source Salary was created by Wade Willett, co-founder of Learn Without Limits, when he realized found there was no easy way to determine salaries of programmers he was hiring in Belarus and Pakistan. But more importantly, imbuing the ideals of open source into salaries seemed like an idea wanting to be born."

More...

Sun steps up efforts on open-source chip - ZDNet UK

Sun's open-source chip plan is bearing some early fruit, but the server and software company hopes to increase further involvement by sharing the designs of its forthcoming "Niagara 2" processor.

More...

West Bengal open source center of excellence

The West Bengal government has said that they are going to establish a center of excellence for developing open source applications.

They are currently in talks with US based tech giants IBM and Red Hat Linux on the proposed centre of excellence.

This would be the first such project of its kind involving a state government in India.

More...

Japan looks to go open source

The Japanese government wants to go open source, as a way to rely less on a single vendor IT software infrastructure. And plenty of vendors are lining up to help make this happen.

Oracle, NEC, IBM, HP, Hitachi and Dell are among 10 IT equipment and software vendors that are forming a consortium to develop and sell Linux-based servers and computers for the Japanese market. The move by the vendors to collaborate on Linux in Japan comes from a edict from the country's government to make Linux and open source a priority for all IT procurements, starting this July.

More...

Tories Plan for Open Source

A Tory strategy to make more use of open source software in the public sector is likely to tackle the culture of secrecy in government procurement, according to early details released to The Register.

Planned for publication next month and stemming from shadow chancellor George Osborne's adoption of a West Coast attitude, the plans are also likely to encourage the adoption of open standards and promote an indigenous open source industry.

Mark Thompson, a Cambridge University IT lecturer and businessman who is drawing up Osborne's request to make Britain the "open source leader of Europe", said that procurement - including the notoriously secretive gateway process - might be opened up so that it was easier for smaller firms to pay homage to the public purse.

More...

Open source Body Parts

Prosthetics isn't a big enough market to spur innovation for profit, so one amputee Iraq veteran is adapting the open source concept by reverse-engineering expired patents and posting them online.

More...

Asia and Open Source: Poised for an Explosion

... In a world of open source development around a free software commons, much of the money paid for value stays in the local economy, developing skills in the workforce and growing local businesses with globally applicable skills. That's why Asia has seen a 40% increase in FOSS developers in the last three years - it's catalysed by all that use of open source by the governments (and by business in places like Singapore where they give tax breaks for using open source). That's why OpenSolaris is on the curriculum in over 100 universities in India (even without a formal pro-FOSS policy from the government). That, sadly, is why the greatest number of FOSS developers per capita is now in India and China and not in Australia (where it used to be).

More...

China's Open Source Software Contest

Cosoft started the contest last June with the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) to promote open source software in China. The organization set up nine districts comprising government, companies, and academies. Organizers used the contest as a chance to publicize open source. For example, organizer in the northeast districts held public lectures in schools in Haerbin cities, attracting students and teachers to learn about the open source industry.

More...

Open Source, Standards Get A Boost In China

Open-source software is receiving a rapid uptake in key developing countries and users, local industries and governments say it offers them market opening, flexibility and lower costs. China, perhaps the biggest potential market, showed last week how much open source is part of its plans.

More...

Michael Dell uses Ubuntu at home

Click here for more info:

Michael S. Dell - Chairman of the Board

Startup to nurture open source apps

While CSI's application development model borrows heavily from the open source model, the company is a for-profit venture that will develop applications collaboratively with groups of companies and then offer code maintenance and support.

Cohen plans to develop non-competitive applications that all companies in a particular vertical industry would need to support their business and then provide the code to those businesses and publish it as open source.

More...

Red Hat tries spreading open-source idea

Red Hat is taking a second crack at trying to spread its open-source philosophy beyond the realm of software development.

On Wednesday, the Raleigh, N.C.-based Linux seller announced a partnership with the nearby University of North Carolina to try to encourage use of the open, collaborative model in the fields of health care research, biotechnology, bioinformatics and public policy.

More...

Irish music industry goes open source

Irish-based SonikDub, the first open source record label of its kind, will open its doors to unsigned artists next month.

Although many open source labels already exist, SonikDub are the only to provide chart ranking. All sales are reported and sent daily to the OCC and Chart Track.

The purpose of open source labels is to allow artists to retain copyright over their material rather than sign it over to a major label in a record deal.

More...

Fab@Home: 3D objects from your printer for under $2,500:

When your master's thesis consists of building soccer-playing robots, what do you do for a Ph.D.? For Evan Malone, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Cornell University, the answer is clear: you design a three-dimensional fabrication machine capable of building complete robots—power supply, electronics, body, and motors—that can walk right out of the machine when complete.

More...

Can open source techniques be used to design a car?

OScar is taking shape using a single principle as its guiding light: it's an open source car. The open source idea is borrowed from the software industry that makes its code freely available under licence; the Firefox web browser and the Linux operating system being the most famous examples.

In the hard, metallic world of car design this means that instead of protecting OScar designs by use of restrictive patents, as is the norm, the design is effectively open to anyone willing to contribute. And that does mean anyone. Like a much more complicated version of Wikipedia, OScar is being argued over by volunteer car designers, 60% of whom are moonlighting from within the car industry.

More...

Innovation Without IP in the Fashion Industry

The legal motivation for patents and copyright is written into the United States Constitution: to promote the progress of science and useful arts. By granting innovators an exclusive right to their writings and discoveries, Congress provided a strong incentive to engage in innovation. As Abraham Lincoln put it, the patent system added “the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.”

But intellectual property law is not the only way to provide such incentives. Ideas, for example, cannot be patented. Yet university professors churn out hundreds of thousands of publications each year that are full of ideas, both good and bad. The social norms in academia, among them citation requirements and plagiarism taboos, seem to work pretty well.

Another industry that seems to get along well without intellectual property protection is the fashion industry. Brand names and logos are protected by trademark, but the design of clothing is generally not protected in the United States.

More...

Linux To Grow Rapidly In Mobile Phone Market

The use of Linux in mobile phones could grow rapidly over the next few years as carriers look for the lowest-priced smart phones, a market researcher said.

By 2011, the number of advanced cell phones running Linux, as opposed to commercial operating systems, is expect to increase to 127 million from 8.1 million this year, according to ABI Research.

More...

Open Access Medical Journal Launched

The editors who were fired or resigned over the editorial-independence controversy at the Canadian Medical Association Journal have reunited to start their own free, online medical journal.

Open Medicine will be a peer-reviewed, independent open-access journal that does not accept advertising from pharmaceutical or medical-device companies. It is published only at www.openmedicine.ca. The launch date of the first issue is April 17.

More...

First Open-Source Car Unveiled

The world’s first open-source car was unveiled this week at the AutoRAI show in Amsterdam. The c,mm,n (or “common”) was developed by three Dutch technical universities: Delft, Eindhoven and Enschede.

More...

US 'no longer technology king'

The US has lost its position as the world's primary engine of technology innovation, according to a report by the World Economic Forum.

The top spot went for the first time to Denmark, followed by Sweden.

More...

40% Of Developers Use MySQL

Data released Thursday from an Evans Data Group survey of database usage among developers shows MySQL use increased from 32 percent in 2004 to 40 percent last year. The survey tallied real production use in corporate environments, not just tire-kicking or pilot projects, Evans spokesman Jon Broenen said.

"We continue to see the maturation of open-source databases reflected by the continually increasing levels of adoption," said Evans Data President John Andrews in a statement. "In an increasing number of our ratings categories, we're seeing open-source databases meeting or exceeding proprietary databases."

More...

Open source... hardware?

Open-source, object-oriented development, personalization, even hacking, are presaging and inspiring new manufacturing methods that will overhaul today’s plodding techniques born during the Industrial Revolution, according to panelists speaking Monday at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

"We’re seeing hardware become more like software, and rapid development become a competitive advantage," according to John Hagel, a business consultant and author.

More..

QualiPSo: Europe, Brazil and China Unite to Foster OSS

Six Competence Centres - running the collaborative platforms, tools and process developed in this project - will be set up to support the development, deployment and adoption of OSS by private and public Information Systems Departments, large companies, SMEs, end users and ISVs. Of these Competence Centres, four will be based in Europe (in Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Rome), one in China and one in Brazil (Sao Paulo).

More...

If You're Going To Steal Software, Steal From Us: Microsoft

Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes estimates that between 20% and 25% of all software used in the United States is pirated, but said some pirates end up becoming paying customers.

More...

The value of non-paying customers

What's the value of a customer who doesn't pay you anything? If you're running a hot dog stand, the answer is probably "zero." But if you're running a two-sided market - a market, like eBay or Monster.com or AdWords or YouTube or Digg or even Second Life, that needs to attract both buyers and sellers (or content generators and content consumers) - the answer may be "a lot."

More...

Interpreting recent open source IPO buzz

Open source IPS maker Sourcefire is now a publicly-traded company, with its IPO last week on the Nasdaq. Meanwhile, reports say that open source database company MySQL is thinking about a similar move.

More...

Linux Starts to Find Home on Desktops - WSJ.com

The much-hyped notion that Linux would be viable software to run desktop and notebook PCs seemed dead on arrival a few years ago. But the idea is showing some new vital signs.

More...

Shadow Chancellor calls for Open Source Politics

"Just as companies all over the world are changing the way that they do business, so too must we evolve.

In short, I believe that we need to recast the political settlement for the digital age. We need open source politics."

More...

Open Source is Greener

A new report from the U.K. Office of Government Commerce about Open Source Software Trials in Government, has found that servers running Linux could combat the rising problem of e-waste because they last up to twice as long as machines running Windows.

More...

Open Source Architecture

Nonprofit Architecture for Humanity is convincing the building industry to share -- be it blueprints, engineering specs or construction tips -- through its latest project, the Open Architecture Network.

The open source site, which goes into beta today, is a one-stop spot for anyone involved with innovative and sustainable buildings (think: architects, engineers, community leaders, nonprofit groups, government agencies and technology companies).

Loaded with projects and concepts, the site is built so people can upload info, comment on and, in some cases, download building or project specs.

More...

Tories want open source in Whitehall

The government could save more than £600 million a year if it used more open source software, the shadow chancellor has estimated.

George Osborne said the savings would cut 5% off Whitehall's annual IT bill.

More...

HP Sees Huge Linux Desktop Deals

Hewlett-Packard is closing custom deals for thousands of desktop PCs running Linux, which has the company assessing the possibility of offering factory-loaded Linux systems, an HP executive said.

"We are involved in a number of massive deals for Linux desktops, and those are the kinds of things that are indicators of critical mass. So we are really looking at it very hard," said Doug Small, worldwide director of open source and Linux marketing at HP.

More...

New open-source malaria drug welcomed by Medecins Sans Frontieres

The medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) welcomes the introduction of a new user-friendly and cheaper 2-in-1 tablet of artesunate-amodiaquine against malaria. The treatment, also called ASAQ, is the result of research by the non-profit Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) in cooperation with Sanofi-Aventis. It demonstrates how research and development can take place without patenting for availability in the public domain.

More...

Open source funding: the complete picture

VCs invested $475.2m in Linux and open source-related vendors in 2006, up 61.6% from $294.0m in 2005. The total amount raised since 2000: $1.89bn.

More...

European spend on open source software hits €22bn

The notional value of Europe’s investment in free/libre or open source software today is €22bn, representing 20.5pc of the region’s total software investment, a senior UN researcher will tell an intelligence briefing on open source in Dublin later this week.

Rishab Ghosh, a senior researcher at the UN University in Maastricht, will tell the Open Ireland conference in Dublin that the spend in the US on free/libre or open source software (FLOSS) stands at €36bn and accounts for 20pc of software spend in the US.

More...

Big Debian Linux Payday For HP

HP is making $25 million by supporting the free Debian GNU/Linux distribution in what may ultimately turn out to be a challenge to commercial distributions from Novell and Red Hat.

HP announced in August 2005 it would be offering support services for Debian, which has been one of the most popular and widest deployed community-based Linux distributions since its inception.GNU/Linux.

In fiscal 2006, $25 million in hardware sales in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) were directly related to HP's Debian support.

"I was pretty shocked when I found out about this," Jeffrey Wade, worldwide marketing manager of open source and Linux at HP, told internetnews.com.

More...

South African Government Adopts Open Source Policy

South Africa announced Thursday its plan to use open source software on government-run computer systems. Officials said the strategy will lower costs an enhance local IT skills. The use of open source solutions has been on the rise within government, particularly within governments outside of the United States, said Gordon Haff, principal IT advisor and analyst for Illuminata.

More...

National Open Centre (NOC) holds official launch in Houses of Parliament

The National Open Centre (NOC) holds its official launch, hosted by John Hemming MP, in the Houses of Parliament on the 26th February 2007. Nearly 100 individuals from the ICT industry: small business, multi-nationals, proprietary and the open source community, public sector, education and the media have accepted the invitation to this landmark launch.

More...

Carnegie Mellon Folds Open Source Into New Degree Offering

Carnegie Mellon West's Software Management program is built on the university's existing software engineering curriculum, the school explained, but adds a business and organizational component that "breaks with tradition by giving students the broader perspective needed to collaborate with and lead the global, distributed teams that are defining next-generation software".

[...]

A key component of those next-generation organizations will be open source.

More...

SugarCRM opens EU centre in Dublin

SugarCRM, a fast-growth US software company, is to create an initial 10 new jobs by the end of 2007 at its new European headquarters in Dublin.

More...

IDC: Linux Ecosystem Worth $40 Billion by 2010

At the Linuxworld Open Solutions Summit, which kicked off today in New York, IDC analysts detailed where they see the Linux ecosystem today and where it is headed by 2010.

For 2006, Al Gillen, research vice president of system software at IDC, told an early morning audience that the research firm has pegged the Linux ecosystem that includes servers and software to be worth $18 billion. By 2010, Gillen said, the market will be worth $40 billion.

More...

Yale on $0 a Day

Getting into college may be tougher than it used to be. But top schools are offering a growing number of courses free online.

Following the lead of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other highly competitive schools, more institutions are posting online everything from lecture notes to sample tests, and even making audio and video files of actual lectures publicly available. The sites attract anywhere from thousands to more than one million unique visitors each month.

More...

Venture capitalists bet big on open source companies - LinuxWorld

Investors showered over $21 million collectively on two open source start-ups last week: Fonality, an Asterisk IP PBX vendor, and GroundWork Open Source, a network management firm. Venture capitalists are betting these companies will challenge larger vendors such as Avaya or Nortel in telephony, or HP or IBM in network management, with lower-cost, open source-based products.

More...

Emerging Markets Embracing Open Source

Developers in emerging market countries are substantially increasing implementation of Open Source code in their applications, according to Evans Data Corporation’s just released 2007 Emerging Markets Development Survey. In this survey that covers developers in regions such as Brazil, Russia/Eastern Europe, India and China, 69% of respondents said they are currently using OSS, which is up from 59% six months ago. The increased adoption rate correlates to the sharp adoption of Eclipse in countries like India and Brazil, as well as a rise in Linux development in many of the emerging markets.

More...

French students to get open-source software on USB key

French authorities will give out 175,000 USB memory sticks loaded with open-source software to Parisian high school students at the start of the next school year.

The sticks will give the students, ages 15 and 16, the freedom to access their e-mail, browser bookmarks and other documents on computers at school, home, a friend's house or in an Internet cafe -- but at a much lower cost than providing notebook computers for all, a spokesman for the Greater Paris Regional Council said Friday.

It's a way to reduce the digital divide, said spokesman Jean-Baptiste Roger.

More...

Free wireless for Dublin

Dubliners can look forward to free wireless internet access anywhere in the capital if Dublin City Council goes ahead with plans to launch a WiFi internet service.

Such a service would allow everyone from commuters on buses to tourists in city parks to access the web from wireless devices.

The council has tendered for consultants to offer advice regarding regulatory, technological and financial issues surrounding the deployment of a citywide wireless broadband-access service.

"Many European and US cities have set up citywide WiFi networks which are independent of the private sector," said Brian Curtis, Dublin City Council's IT manager. "We have a tender out for advisers to give independent advice on a number of issues around citywide WiFi access."

More...