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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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