Cuba government to go open source
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Red hat revolution The Cuban government has found another way to thumb its nose at the US, its bullyboy neighbour - opt for open source and throw its Microsoft software in the dustbin.â¦
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Open source software is a viable alternative to commercial proprietary software, with potential significant value-for-money benefits for government, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) has concluded.
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More than a decade after Microsoft released final standalone version of MS-DOS, open-source version is here.
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Enterprises are opening up to open source alternatives to commercial software, panelists said at the SDForum conference âOpen Source Entering the Mainstream,â held in Santa Clara, Calif., last week.
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Open-source backers plan to launch a "census" project next year that would allow companies -- using a tool devised by OpenLogic -- to figure out how extensively they use open-source software.
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State and city governments, spearheaded by Massachusetts, are becoming the newest converts to the open source software movement.
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While open-source software is new to the Middle Kingdom, Beijing is looking to change that. Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik explains why.
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InfoWorld - A new U.K. think tank launched on Monday will analyze how open-source software can be used in government and the private sector.
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In Berlin on Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled a product package aimed at local and regional e-government initiatives, in the midst of growing government opposition in Europe to proprietary software.Microsoft&#39;s Citizen Service Platform includes applications and templates designed for local and regional governments primarily in Europe and the United States. It is built on products, including SharePoint, Office Live, and Windows Server.While Microsoft has been selling software to the public sector for years, it has recently begun focusing on local governments after discovering that many people interact with their local governments more often than the federal government, said Ralph Young, vice president of Microsoft&#39;s Worldwide Public Sector group.Europe alone has more than 80,000 local and regional governments, Young said.Governments can use the Citizen Service Platform to create portals, manage documents, deploy alert systems in the case of emergencies, and create and manage citizen information databases that can be shared among different agencies.Microsoft is introducing the product as it faces&#160;mounting opposition Europe. Some governments there are migrating to open source products as a way to avoid being locked into a single vendor of proprietary software.Others, such as the Netherlands, are taking a more extreme route. Late last year, the Dutch parliament mandated that government organizations choose open source over proprietary software if a viable product is available. Agencies must also use open standards. The national government must comply with the new rules by May, with local governments following by the end of this year.Young was unfazed by the mandate. &quot;We have many opportunities in the Netherlands to work with local and regional governments,&quot; he said. &quot;We don&#39;t see any federal mandates having real impact locally because of local jurisdictions&#39; ability to make decisions in their best interest in terms of how to better serve citizens.&quot;Microsoft could be counting on local governments having autonomy from such federal mandates, said Mark Anderson, a consultant and founder of the Strategic News Service. &quot;There are a lot of times when a government will posture, and it doesn&#39;t really intend that posture to be carried through the rest of the country,&quot; he said.Still, some European government agencies may be predisposed to choose software other than Microsoft&#39;s, more so since the software giant began pushing its Open XML document format there, Anderson said. Microsoft is in the process of&#160;attempting to have Open XML be accepted as a standard&#160;by the International Organization for Standardization. Open XML competes with the Open Document Format promoted by IBM. Critics of Open XML accused Microsoft of stacking votes in the standardization process, souring some in Europe on Microsoft even further.Microsoft thinks that cost will determine decisions for many local governments. &quot;It&#39;s much less a religious discussion about open source and commercial software as it is about what are the solutions available that governments can see value from,&quot; said Young. &quot;Local governments are empowered to make decisions and if they say &#39;This is the best value for the dollar I spend over the life of a service capability, that will govern my decision-making process.&#39;&quot;
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The Office of Government Commerce (OGC), UK, has finally given the green signal persuading governments to consider the deployment of open source while implementing new systems.
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PARIS - A group of European research institutions and open-source software companies has launched an effort to build new tools that will make it easier to do complex IT projects based on Linux and other open-source software, they said this week.
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(InfoWorld) - The French government plans to make the region around Paris a center of excellence for open-source software development, the French Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry, Thierry Breton, said Monday. The goal of the center of excellence is to develop a healthy and profitable open-source software industry. Breton, previously head of France TÃ©lÃ©com SA, announced the plan at a news conference to discuss a new report on the French economy's future, "The intangible economy: tomorrow's growth." A new economic and technological model, built on free software, is forming in the IT industry, Breton said. As this new opportunity opens up, it is "calling into question the dominant positions formed in the software industry over the last 15 years." France must seize this opportunity, in a sector where the country is teeming with talent, he said. Breton hopes that sales of software and other intangibles will help the French economy grow by between 3 percent and 4 percent annually. In contrast, the Chinese economy, based on more tangible goods such as the export of computers, is growing at around 10 percent annually, according to figures from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. A group of academics and open-source software entrepreneurs have come together to create the center of excellence. Roberto Di Cosmo, professor at the University of Paris 7, will lead the group, assisted by Alexandre Zapolsky, chief executive officerÂ of open-source software services company Linagora SA. FranÃ§ois Bancilhon, CEO of Linux distributor Mandriva SA and StÃ©fane Fermigier, CEO of open-source enterprise content management software company Nuxeo SAS will also take part. The group's members said the center of excellence will allow the Paris region to renew its industrial base and slow the loss of jobs to low-cost locations. Although the Internet other tools have simplified virtual collaborative working, software development still needs a physical place, Di Cosmo said via e-mail. "It would be very naÃ¯ve to forget the importance of human contact, and the physical environment in which many projects grow before moving into the virtual phase. If everything is so simple in the virtual world, why are there so many developers' conferences?" he said. Explaining the choice of Paris as a center, Fermigier said, "We work with many people elsewhere, but the kernel is in the Paris region." While Breton is clearly most concerned with France's economic growth, the center will also contribute to the development of the software industry across the European Union, Fermigier said. The French government has published the report as a PDF file.
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Several organisations will celebrate Saturday&#39;s International Software Freedom Day by hosting open source events around the country.
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President Bush plans to outline new steps today aimed at pressuring Cuba's government to move to democracy and ease political repression, including offering new scholarships and computer access for the country's youth and the creation of a new international fund to finance Cuban reconstruction un...
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New draft of revamped open-source General Public License is due soon, but final release schedule is open, FSF executive director says.
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It&#39;s called the International Open Source Network (IOSN), which is an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) with a primary goal to promote Free and Open Source (FOSS) software usage.
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The goal is to convince more government agencies and private companies to use more open-source software.