July 17, 2006
FOSS at the DOD
Many governments around the world have taken a look at, and in many cases begun adopting, and putting in place policies for Open Source software in government. It makes sense in so many ways, public money for software that stays in the public domain, open scrutiny of security, and building on existing libraries instead of reinventing the wheel.
Now the Department of Defense is getting in on the action in a big way.
Posted by admin at 12:11 AM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2006
FOSS Legal Issues?
Some companies are considering Open Source technologies, but having reservations brought on by legal concerns. The Software Freedom Law Center has an article about Sarbanes-Oxley & GPL and finds there is no special risk. For those not familiar, the GPL is one of the more popular open-source software licenses, but is really only one among many.
On the flip side of the issue, here's another article which raises claims of potential legal problems relating to intellectual property claims, and of all things, confidential code. An interesting article, it seems dubious at best that software whose source code is *necessarily* available for review and audit would be *more* a risk. If anything I'd think less.
Posted by admin at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)
January 11, 2006
Open Source Driving Patent Reform
Here is an interesting development. In this Techworld article Open-source software revolutionises patent system, Nancy Gohring talks about some of the new developments. In particular the USPTO, IBM, and OSDL are working together to create a prior art database out of the likes of sourceforge.net and other sites like it. This will help patent examiners, and the public review patents for relevance and originality. Here's a NY Times article.
Posted by admin at 03:06 PM | Comments (0)
November 17, 2005
Google, Oregon + Portland State
As part of Google's supporing Open Source initiative, they have recently announced a $350,000 project with Oregon State and Portland State Universities. Also check out their summer of code project. Good for the community, and certainly good for Google.
Posted by admin at 02:24 PM | Comments (0)
November 10, 2005
Everyone on the OpenDoc Train?
OpenDocument now has even more support from industry heavies. The ODF Summit hosted by IBM and Sun Microsystems was attended by Oracle, Novell, Google, RedHat, Adobe, CA, Corel, Nokia, and others. Quite a lineup behind a new document standard. OpenDocument is important, as it allows any company to develop applications which support those formats, leveling playing field, and potentially loosening Microsoft's stranglehold over the desktop.
Posted by admin at 12:53 PM | Comments (1)
October 05, 2005
Massachusetts + OpenDocument
Recently there's been a lot of negative press over Massachusetts' proposed new policy to mandate OpenDocument file formats. Of course some argue it has the potential to change the world.
A little history...
It is truely phenomenal to watch technologies change and grow. In the late 80's and early 90's it was quite common to have text files which could be opened by any application. So too, many word processing applications (yes back then there were quite a few to choose from) had export/import functionality to support moving documents between them. But as Microsoft has thoroughly dominated the desktop space, however, it's Microsoft Word document format has become the de facto standard.
For most of the 90's and early 2000's, there wasn't a tremendous amount of debate over this. Office was available for the Macintosh, and folks using Operating Systems outside these two were a tiny minority. There was however, a consistent, and prevalent interest in using PDF files as the internet standard for documents downloadable off of websites, and in particular government websites, such as the IRS have always used that format for forms and instruction books.
OpenDocument is basically a XML based standard to describe and represent the formating in a word processing document.
So it is certainly encouraging to see real debate about these Open Standards, which in the long run would help consumers, and provide a more level playing field at least in the realm of Office applications.
It seems apt to quote a bit of Malcolm Gladwell here:
"People don't change when you tell them there is a better option. They change when they conclude that they have no other option."
Posted by admin at 12:51 AM | Comments (0)
September 28, 2005
Peru Requiring Open Source Consideration
Peru has passed legislation requiring public institutions to consider Open Source alternatives to traditional commercial solutions. Thus they join a growing list of governments bucking the trend of procurement practices that unfairly deny Open Source software solutions. Peru attempts to exclude the proprietary solutions! Linux Journal has an excellent in depth discussion of Linux and Government procurement hurdles.
In related news, Portland Oregon is hosting the first Government Open Source Convention. That site is also an excellent place to keep up with government Open Source developments and adoption.
Posted by admin at 10:28 PM | Comments (0)