Open Source

  • Happy birthday TDF and LibreOffice

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    On 28th September 2014 The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice productivity suite will both turn four. In that time LibreOffice has had eight major releases, close to 100 million downloads, attracted over 800 new developers, a large number of active volunteers in every corner of the planet and millions of desktops “migrating” from proprietary to free office suites.

    LibreOffice is the fastest growing free software project of this decade: for 48 months in a row, it has been able to attract at least three new code contributors per month and an even higher number of volunteers active in localisation, quality assurance, marketing, communications and the development of local communities.

    Happy birthday LibreOffice

    Earlier today (25th September) The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3.2; this is the second minor release of the LibreOffice 4.3 family, further improving the quality of the most advanced and feature-rich free office suite for Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. Further details of the release of LibreOffice 4.3.2 are available on The Document Foundation’s blog.

  • Introducing FixMyDocuments.eu

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    FixMyDocuments.eu logoFixmydocuments.eu is a campaign aimed at helping European public sector organisations make better use of open document formats, such as ODF.

    A number of public sector organisations throughout Europe have decided to support open document formats when communicating with the public and FixMyDocuments.eu is a campaign to help them implement their decision effectively. One of the largest of these is the UK government, which recently opted for open standards for communicating and working with anyone outside Whitehall (posts passim).

    Inspired by the FixMyStreet project, FixMyDocuments.eu aims to help European public sector organisations that have decided to support ODF to implement their decision by documenting, tracking and reporting their compliance online. Anybody can report public web pages which are not compliant with the decision, which are then checked and added to a central listing which is updated weekly.

    One of the first supporters of FixMyDocuments.eu was European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes. In her statement of support (no. 6 on the list. Ed.) Neelie Kroes says:

    When open alternatives are available, no citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to use a particular company’s technology to access government information. No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one, through a government having made that choice first. I know a smart business decision when I see one – choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed.

    Well said, Neelie!

  • Under a week to go to SFD 2014

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    Software Freedom Day 2014 bannerIt’s under a week to Software Freedom Day (SFD) 2014, which is being held this year on Saturday, 20th September.

    SFD is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The organisers’ goal in this celebration is to educate the public all over the world about the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, government, in business and at home – in short, everywhere!

    Software Freedom International a non-profit organisation, coordinates SFD at a global level, providing support, give-aways and a point of collaboration, but volunteer teams around the world organise the local SFD events to involve their own communities.

    For anyone wishing to organise a local event, there’s a handy start guide on the SFD wiki, as well as promotional materials.

    If you do organise an event, don’t forget to register your event and team so the event can be added to the 2014 events map.

    Software Freedom Day was established in 2004 and first observed on 28th August of that year.

    Reposted from Bristol Wireless.

  • Italy: Court of Cassation rules against “Windows Tax”

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    broken WindowsItaly’s La Repubblica reported on Friday that the country’s Court of Cassation has ruled that anyone who buys a computer with pre-installed software and does not accept the terms of the licence when the computer is first booted up is entitled to a refund. The case involved was that of a Florentine consumer who’d bought a laptop with the Windows operating system pre-installed.

    The judges criticised the practice of selling PCs with a pre-installed proprietary operating system as “a commercial policy of forced distribution”. The court described this practice as “monopolistic in tendency”. It also highlighted that the practice of bundling software (affectionately known as ‘crapware’. Ed.) with the operating system means that end users are forced into using additional non-free applications due to compatibility and interoperability issues, whether they wanted these programs or not.

    The decision was welcomed by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). “This decision is both welcome and long overdue”, said Karsten Gerloff, President of the FSFE. “No vendor should be allowed to cram non-free software down the throats of users. This practice of forced distribution needs to end. We hope that the Italian authorities will turn this ruling into a real win for consumers and ensure that computer buyers can choose their device with any operating system they want, or none.”

  • EU public sector machine translation tool now available online

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Politics, Tech

    EU flagJoinup, the European Union’s public sector open source news website, reports today that MT@EC, the Machine Translation service developed by the European Commission under the ISA programme, can now also be accessed over a secure (https) internet connection; previously it was only accessible to institutions connected to the highly secure sTESTA network. The new web access now also allows public administrations that are not connected to the sTESTA network to request access for their staff.

    MT@EC is currently available free of charge to all public sector organisations. Since the tool has been trained mainly on official EU documents, it can handle and translate texts and documents related to EU policy and collaboration in the 24 official EU languages better than other tools. A presentation of the MT@EC service, including screenshots of the user interface, is available as a PDF. Interested organisations have the opportunity to participate in ‘customisation pilot projects’, concerning which more information can be found in the document “ΜT for Member States: Description of pilots” (PDF).

    In this 2nd major release of MT@EC, the quality of the output has been further improved by adding data from more sources and by enhancing the processing for the current 6th generation of the machine translation engines. Users can now also submit PDF files, whilst support for other formats has been improved. Furthermore, language auto-detection is now available for text snippets. Users can drag and drop files if they are using the interface through the Firefox or Chrome web browsers. Users can also choose not to receive the translated text by email for confidentiality reasons but instead download it from their personal workspace in the interface.

    The European Commission (DG Translation) is organising a user conference on the machine translation service on 5th December 2014 in Brussels.

  • Welcome LibreItalia!

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Earlier today the birth was announced of LibreItalia, which has been founded by Italian members of The Document Foundation and has the objective of bringing together all the Italian users of the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite to speed up the adoption and promotion of the suite that is designed as a free individual productivity and office automation tool capable of closing the digital divide and breaking down the barriers to information technology for the poorest in society.

    LibreItalia logo

    In addition, LibreItalia will promote the ODF/Open Document Format (ISO/IEC 26300) standard for official documents, which was recently adopted by the UK government (posts passim) as a template for all content, together with PDF/A.

    The initial Board of Directors, which will be in post for two years, consists of seven members, five of whom are directly involved in the LibreUmbria project (which was originally established to promote the use of LibreOffice in public sector organisations in the Umbria region. Ed.): Sonia Montegiove, Chair; Marina Latini, Vice-Chair and Chief Technical Officer; Giordano Alborghetti, Treasurer; and Andrea Castellani, Alfredo Parisi, Gabriele Ponzo and Italo Vignoli, directors.

    All the new association’s news about LibreOffice is featured on the LibreItalia website. To become a member of LibreItalia, you’ll need to fill in an application using the relevant form after reading the site’s About us and Articles of Association pages. The membership fee for ordinary members is a mere €10.00 (reduced to €5.00 for students) and entitles members to a libreitalia.it mailbox.

    Becoming a member of LibreItalia means supporting the values of transparency, sharing and working together, the same values which characterise the original LibreUmbria project.

    For more information, email info (at) libreitalia.it.

  • Calibre 2.0 e-book manager released

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech

    Heise reports that the major change in version from 1.48 to the newly released version 2.0 of the Calibre e-book management software are not apparent in its interface or feature list. However, on the inside the developers have converted the code to the Qt 5 GUI library and thus eliminated quite a few errors which were due to the Qt 4 library previously used. In particular, errors in text display should therefore be a thing of the past. Nevertheless, Calibre 2.0 no longer supports Windows XP and OS X versions prior to 10.7 (Lion). Anyone using these dated operating systems would be better off sticking with Calibre 1.48.

    screenshot of Calibre

    However, the developers of version 2.0 have still added some new features. The software can now also synchronise e-books under OS X with MTP mobile devices (Android phones and tablets). There is a new Mark Books tool that can be used to mark books temporarily. The mark appears as a little pushpin icon next to the book and all marks are automatically cleared by restarting calibre. A detailed version history can be seen in the changelog.

  • Happy birthday, Linux

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Tux - the Linux kernel mascotThe operating system based on the Linux kernel (sometimes also called GNU/Linux. Ed.), in all its myriad forms, is 23 years old today.

    It all began with an email by a young Helsinki University student called Linus Torvalds to the comp.os.minix newsgroup.

    Linus’ original email is reproduced below.

    Hello everybody out there using minix –

    I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

    I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them 🙂

    Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

    PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

    I love Linus’ modest assertion that his creation wouldn’t be big and professional like GNU! 🙂

  • Lombardy to move to open source

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

    flag of LombardyFree software for public sector organisations will become a reality, at least in the Lombardy region, according to Italy’s Today news site. An agenda item submitted by the Five Star Movement, which makes provision for promoting the use of free computer systems in the public sector, has been approved by the regional council.

    “In Europe and in forward-looking Italian organisations, open source has been adopted comprehensively and is useful in saving public funds; in fact it also ensures financial savings due to the possibility of public sector organisations re-using software,” explains the Five Star Movement’s Eugenio Casalino, who presented the agenda item in the regional council.

    In 2012 the Italian government did away with a grant of €40 mn. to provide Italian public sector organisations with Microsoft software.

    Hat tip: Paolo Vecchi.

Posts navigation