Open Standards

  • Tomorrow is Global Accessibility Awareness Day

    Steve WoodsBristol, Open Standards, Politics, Social Media, Tech

    We learn from Accessible Bristol that tomorrow, Thursday 9th May is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). On that day people all over the world will be coming together to spread the word about accessibility and Accessible Bristol will be among them.

    Throughout the day the Accessible Bristol team be on Twitter answering your questions about technology and accessibility, as well as tweeting useful accessibility tips and resources.

    Tweet your questions to @AccessibleBrstl and use the #GAAD hashtag to keep track of Global Accessibility Awareness Day activities.

    However, Accessible Bristol also has a challenge for the people in Bristol and the South West for 9th May and challenge you to do at least one of the following things on 9th May:

    • Go mouseless for an hour (touch screen devices don’t count);
    • Surf the web with a screen reader for an hour;
    • Create a captions file and share it with the video’s owner;
    • Write a blog post or make a video about the way you use and experience the web.

    This post originally appeared on Bristol Wireless.

  • LibreOffice 4.0.3 RC3 released

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The third release candidate (RC) for LibreOffice 4.0.3 is now available for download for evaluation and testing, etc.

    As usual, the development team stress that using LibreOffice pre-release builds for “mission-critical” purposes is not recommended.

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

    Potential users are also advised to consult the Releases Notes.

    When you visit the download page, it will try to detect the visitor’s system and offer the visitor the right download automatically, but may not succeed in all cases.

    People who are interested in even more bleeding-edge binaries of LibreOffice’s current development are advised to try the nightly builds. However, those are potentially even less suitable for productive work, provided by individual contributors and have not been approved in any way by a quality assurance process. Caveat emptor.

  • libwww released 20 years ago today

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The H Online reminds us that 20 years ago CERN in Geneva gave Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau official permission to release the libwww library free of charge, according to Berners-Lee, “to create a server or a browser, to give it away or sell it, without any royalty or other constraint”.

    Since then this act of altruism on the part of CERN has had a profound effect on the world of communications. libwww (Library World Wide Web) is a highly modular client-side web API for Unix and Windows, as well as being the name of the reference implementation of this API. It can be used for both large and small applications, including web browsers/editors, robots and batch tools.

    Its more modern replacement is considered to be libcurl.

    You can read more about libwww on Wikipedia.

    Reposted from Bristol Wireless.

  • Open source career taster days for women

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    BCS women logoIn conjunction with both Fossbox and Flossie, BCSWomen, the British Computer Society’s specialist women’s group, is organising 3 open source career taster days for women in London next month.

    The days involved are 13th, 20th and 28th May and the sessions will run from 10.00 am to 5.00pm.

    All the taster days will be held at BCS, 1st Floor, The Davidson Buidling, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA (map).

    The cost will be £10.00 plus VAT (i.e. £12.00 in total) per day, but this will include lunch and refreshments.

    The organisers are promoting these days as a series of three one-day workshops for women returners aimed at raising awareness of Open Source development as a dual skillset or second career.

    The course will aim at building awareness and confidence and help women take some first steps either towards learning to code or to update existing skills and to learn how they might contribute to open source projects. It will also aim to raise awareness of self-training opportunities and of open source career paths and entry points.

    Day 1 will include and introduction to FLOSS culture and licensing models, plus programming for Android mobile devices using MIT App Inventor.

    Day 2 will comprise an introduction to open source projects and resources, as well as an introduction to Git.

    Day 3 will give participants an introduction to programming with Python.

    Online bookings only will be accepted and those interested are advised that places are limited.

    Full details here.

    Reposted from Bristol Wireless.

  • How many LibreOffice users are there?

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards

    the LibreOffice logoIt’s always difficult trying to work out how many users of particular software packages there are out there. Be that as it may, The Document Foundation, the body behind the open source LibreOffice suite, has made an attempt at estimating the suite’s users.

    According to a report today in Le Monde Informatique, estime that the suite has 20 to 30 million users on Linux (many Linux distributions, e.g. Ubuntu and Debian, include LibreOffice as the standard office suite in their disk images. Ed.) and another 30 to 40 million users on Windows. Up to last autumn, LibreOffice had been downloaded 20 million times.

  • LibreOffice 3.6.6 released today

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The blog of The Document Foundation, the German foundation behind LibreOffice, announced the release of LibreOffice 3.6.6, the free and open source office suite for Windows, MacOS and Linux. It is described by the Foundation as a maintenance release for the 3.6 series

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

    This release is aimed at businesses and individual end users who prefer stability to more advanced features (those who want more advanced features can sample LibreOffice 4. Ed.). This new release is suited to the increasing number of organisations migrating to LibreOffice, which is steadily growing worldwide.

    LibreOffice 3.6.6 is available for immediate download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are also available from the Extensions Centre.

  • Hollyweb? Tell the W3C no thanks!

    Steve WoodsMedia, Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    According to its website, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where its member organisations, a full-time staff and the public work together to develop web standards, whose mission is to lead the Web to its full potential.

    These standards have so far been characterised by complete openness: all web standards are open standards.

    However, these open standards are now under attack.

    There’s a proposal currently before the W3C’s HTML5 Working Group to build DRM (aka Digital Restrictions Management by openistas. Ed.) into the next generation of core web standards. The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions or EME.

    The people behind EME are the major media companies; having failed to push such illiberal measures as SOPA and PIPA through the US legislature, the Big Media moguls are now going through non-governmental channels to try to sneak digital restrictions into every interaction people have online.

    image with caption Stop DRM in HTML5
    Hollyweb? No thanks, W3C!

    Netflix, Google, Microsoft and the BBC are all rallying behind this ludicrous proposal, which – as stated above – flies in the face of the W3C’s mission.

    However, a petition has already been set up to oppose the addition of DRM to HTML5 and 3rd May 2013 has been designated the International Day Against DRM.

    The petition page is also available in French.

    I’d urge everyone interested in open standards and all other forms of openness – such as open data and open source – to sign the petition; I’ve already done so.

    This article is reposted with some minor amendments from Bristol Wireless.

  • 2nd release candidate for LibreOffice 4.0.2 available

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards

    the LibreOffice logoOn 28th March, just one day after Document Freedom Day (posts passim) the LibreOffice team made the 2nd and final release candidate for LibreOffice 4.0.2 available for evaluation, quality assurance testing, etc.

    As per usual, potential users are warned that this is a development version and it should not be installed on production machines: in other words, the developers recommend not using LibreOffice pre-release builds for “mission-critical” purposes. These are intended for testing purposes only.

    For further information, potential users should consult the release notes.

  • Today is Document Freedom Day

    Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Tech

    The last day of March each year is Document Freedom Day, a worldwide celebration of open standards for document and information exchange.

    In 30 countries around the world, activists from more than 50 groups are hosting events from Brussels to Nicaragua to Taiwan.

    DFD2013 banner
    DFD – an annual celebration of open standards

    Open standards are crucial to ensure that different computer systems can work together and users can access documents irrespective of the computing platform or device they use.

    Sam Tuke, Campaign Manager at the Free Software Foundation Europe said: “Markets for digital products such as audio books and cloud documents have grown dramatically. Open standards let users break free from vendor lock-in and corporate control.”

    This year’s campaign focuses on web-streaming technologies, such as Adobe’s closed, proprietary and insecure Flash. “This time, we are encouraging people to switch to HTML5 technologies,” said FSFE Community Manager Erik Albers.

    Do you use open document formats? Examples include HTML (what the web is built upon), Open Document Format (the native file format used by office suites such as LibreOffice and OpenOffice), PDF and plain text (.txt).

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