free software

  • AMD joins The Document Foundation Advisory Board

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    the LibreOffice logoThe Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice suite, has announced that chip maker AMD is now a member of its Advisory Board. AMD is a leading designer and integrator of pioneering technologies that are at the heart of the digital devices people use every day, pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

    “It is great to work on LibreOffice with The Document Foundation to expose the raw power of AMD GPUs and APUs, initially to spreadsheet users,” said Manju Hegde, corporate vice-president, Heterogeneous Solutions at AMD. “Bringing the parallelism and performance of our technology to traditional, mainstream business software users will be a welcome innovation for heavy duty spreadsheet users, particularly when combined with the compute capabilities of the upcoming generation of AMD Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) based products.”

    “It is exciting to work together with AMD and their ecosystem to take advantage of AMD’s cutting edge innovation right inside LibreOffice,” said Michael Meeks, SUSE Distinguished Engineer and TDF Board Member, “The growth in performance and parallelism available in the GPUs of today, and particularly with AMD’s revolutionary APUs of tomorrow, is something we’re eager to expose to LibreOffice users.”

    With the addition of AMD, The Document Foundation’s Advisory Board now consists of eleven members: AMD, Google, RedHat, SUSE, Intel, Lanedo, the King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology (KACST), the Inter-Ministry Mutalisation for an Open Productivity Suite (MIMO) from France, the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Software in the Public Interest, and Germany’ Freies Office Deutschland e.V.

  • France’s MIMO joins Document Foundation Advisory Board

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    MIMO logoMIMO, the French inter-ministerial group devoted to the promotion of open source within government, has become a member of the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation, which produces the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite, Numerama reports.

    MIMO, which was set up in 2005 by ADAE to facilitate the adoption of OpenOffice and then LibreOffice by civil servants, is thus becoming one of the 10 members of the Advisory Board with Google, Intel, Lanedo, Red Hat, SUSE, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Software in the Public Interest (SPI), the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST).

    The Document Foundation’s Advisory Board has no decision-making function within the Documentation Foundation, but has been established to represent the project’s major donors. It makes its recommendations to the Foundation’s Board, which makes the final decisions on the direction of LibreOffice. However, since its members support the project financially to the tune of $5,000-20,000 per year, the opinion of the Advisory Board does receive special attention.

    At present MIMO brings together the Ministries of Agriculture, Culture, Defence, the Economy, Ecology, Education, Finance, the Interior and Justice. Several public sector organisations have also joined the group, including CAF, DILA, ENA and the National Assembly. In total, 500,000 workstations have been equipped with free and open source office suites distributed by MIMO.

  • Free software a priority in education says French parliament

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    Marianne - symbol of the French RepublicThe Senate and the National Assembly, the two houses of the French parliament, have agreed to make free software a priority for education, according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. This Wednesday last the National Assembly confirmed a proposal by the Senate urging higher education institutions to give preference to free and open source software. However, the plan still needs to be accepted by the government.

    France’s senators have been urging the government to make free and open source software a priority in education for the past 2 months. In response, the government has indicated that it is prepared to encourage schools and universities in the use of free software and open document formats. However, this is not enough for the Upper House, which wants free software to be mandatory.

    Last month senators unsuccessfully tried adding free software use to plans for reorganising state schools; this week the Senate included it in proposals for higher education and research.

    The first proposal was watered down by the government when it came up for discussion in the National Assembly. Senators are hoping to succeed this time as their plan has now been accepted by a joint committee of both houses. The proposal will be voted on next week.

    April, a French free software advocacy group, is following developments closely and has welcomed the Senate’s recognition of the importance of free software. “We hope that the government is not going to make any new attempt at reversing this encouragement.”

    Unfortunately, the French government is resisting the Senate’s push for free software, alleging that it breaks European procurement rules (really? That’s a strange interpretation of those rules. Ed.). April says such a requirement is perfectly legal. “It was validated by the Conseil d’État (French administrative supreme court) in its decision of 30th September 2011. We urge the French government to publish a detailed legal analysis.”

    Reposted from Bristol Wireless.

  • Genoa to use open source ‘wherever possible’

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics

    Genoa coat of armsThe City of Genoa in Italy is now encouraging the use of free and open source software and is saving local taxpayers more than €100,000 per year, Lettera43 reports.

    The Municipality of Genoa has decided to promote the use of free software and open source to save more than €100,000 a year. The council has already begun to use free software for services such as email, civil registry (births, marriages and deaths) and its intranet.

    In addition, trials are underway in nursery schools with e-learning and the use of PCs with free software and new groupware tools.

    “Free software, basically free, is a software in which the source code is accessible to all, editable by all,” said councillor Isabella Lanzone. “It will help us to free ourselves from the monopolies of the big computer companies and limit local government costs.”

    Furthermore, Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, writes that Genoa will use open source ‘wherever possible’. The council is to start using the image manipulation tool Gimp, document archive solutions 7Zip and PDFCreator, as well as testing the use of Quantum GIS, Kosmo, Postgres and PostGIS for its Geographical Information Systems (GIS).

    In addition, the council has announced it will be using Open Document Format as the standard format for its electronic documents.

    Finally, the city is to use Linux for a number of PCs meant to be used by council staff members that do not have access to a computer by default to enable them to access the council’s personnel resources.

  • LibreOffice 4.1 RC1 released

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    ODF file iconThe first release candidate for LibreOffice 4.1, the free and open source office productivity suite, has been released, according to The H Online.

    LibreOffice’s developers have released the RC1 version with release notes listing 61 bugs that have been fixed since the version’s Beta 2 publication a fortnight ago.

    This is the first of 3 release candidates scheduled between now and 22 July when the final release of LibreOffice 4.1 should take place.

    Due to the integration of libmwaw, LibreOffice 4.1 will also be able to handle legacy Mac formats from pre-Mac OS X applications such as Microsoft Word for Mac 5.1, Write Now 4.0, MacWrite Pro 1.5 and AppleWorks 6.0.

    LibreOffice 4.1.0 RC1 is available from the LibreOffice pre-releases downloads page. As with all pre-release builds, the developers do not recommend LibreOffice 4.1.0 RC1 for “mission critical” tasks.

  • Italy’s South Tyrol region migrating 7,000 PCs to LibreOffice

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Südtirol coat of armsWith the migration from MS Office to LibreOffice, public sector organisations in Italy’s mostly German-speaking South Tyrol region are making their first major steps towards using freien software. Over the coming 3 years, will convert 7,000 PC workstations and thus save some €600,000 in licensing fees.

    Free software gained entry to Italian public sector organisations just under 20 years ago, but has so far only gained a niche presence. This has now come to an end as all public sector organisations in the South Tyrol shall in future be using the LibreOffice instead of Microsoft’s proprietary paid-for office suite. Over the next 3 years the regional government alone will be converting 7,000 computer workstations to the free software package, in addition to which several thousand more workstations in municipalities and the health sector will also be migrated.

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

    “With the introduction of free software for standard applications, this of course means saving for us, but not just that by a long way: free software also makes us more flexible and flexibility is of major importance in a quickly changing field such as IT”, says Alderman Roberto Bizzo, the member of the regional assembly with responsibility for IT, on the philosophy associated with the change to free software.

    Bizzo, Kurt Pöhl, head of the regional government’s IT department, free software expert Patrick Ohnewein of TIS and trade unionist Erwin Pfeifer gave a presentation yesterday the public sector’s new software strategy.

    Goodbye MS: announcing the migration to LibreOffice
    Goodbye MS Office: announcing the migration to LibreOffice

    A working group was established in February in which TIS’ experts – in concert with the regional government, municipalities and the health sector – sounded out how free software could be used in all public sector organisations. The result of the consultations is the gradual introduction of free software, starting with LibreOffice. The ODF format has also been defined as the standard public sector document exchange format.

    Read the original press release in German or Italian.

  • Polish Economy Ministry to release source code for consultation site

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

    Polish eagle emblemPoland’s Ministry of Economy will release the source code that it wrote for linking its back office to a site built with the Drupal open source content management system (CMS), reports the EU’s public sector open source news site Joinup. The site is used for consultations and tgathering feedback on the Ministry’s projects and policies.

    “This is more than a standalone consultation platform based on Drupal”, a Ministry spokesperson explains. The service is made of two parts: firstly, a module for the Drupal-based site to create consultations and share documents and secondly the code that links this module to the document management system. “We’re using Zend Framework to create this second part. The solution allows us to embed the document and work-flow management system, including legislative and technical rules for creating the documents.”

    The applications are currently being readied for a production environment. The spokesperson remarked that the developers are still fixing a few bugs, but live data is already being used.

    The ministry expects this phase to be completed in about a month, after which the code will be published on a software development site, although the Ministry still has to decide which code repository to use.

    Poland’s Foundation on Open and Free Software (FWIOO) says that the Ministry’s site “has the potential to become the default on-line consultation platform of the Polish government.” FWIOO was also involved in drafting the software’s specifications. “One year ago we created a similar tool for the Ministry of Administration and Digitization. That was also a combination of Drupal and free software extensions”.

  • Debian 7.1 released

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Debian logoThe post below appeared on the Debian News website on Saturday, 15th June 2013.

    The Debian project is pleased to announce the first update of its stable distribution Debian 7 (codename “wheezy”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

    Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian 7 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 7 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

    Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.

    New installation media and CD and DVD images containing updated packages will be available soon at the regular locations.

    Upgrading to this revision online is usually done by pointing the aptitude (or apt) package tool (see the sources.list(5) manual page) to one of Debian’s many FTP or HTTP mirrors. A comprehensive list of mirrors is available at: http://www.debian.org/mirror/list

    The original post also contained an extensive list of bug fixes and security updates for the affected packages; full details of these can be found in the changelog.

  • LibreOffice 4.1.0.0 beta2 available for testing

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    LibreOffice developer Fridrich Strba has announced that the second beta of the forthcoming LibreOffice 4.1.0, which is planned for release between 22 and 28 June, is ready for testing.

    One new feature now allows users to rotate images in Writer, several translations have been improved and a number of bugs have been fixed. The image rotation feature was implemented by Tomaz Vajngerl, who closed a feature request that had been open since early 2011.

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

    LibreOffice 4.1.0 will include a number of new features, such as embedded fonts. This has been called the “most important feature” in the forthcoming release and allows users to include the fonts used in a document within the document, preventing text being displayed differently on systems where the original fonts are not available. This can happen when non-system or custom fonts are used and they have not been installed on the operating system of the reader.

    The change log contains a detailed list of all the bugs which have been fixed in LibreOffice 4.1.0 beta 2.

    This latest beta release can be downloaded from LibreOffice for testing on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (deb and RPM packages) platforms.

  • LibreOffice 4.1.0 Beta 1 announced

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    the LibreOffice logoThorsten Behrens of The Document Foundation has announced the first beta release of LibreOffice 4.1.0.

    This will be the sixth major release of LibreOffice in two and a half years and comes with a set of attractive new features.

    However, Behrens points out that LibreOffice 4.1 Beta1 is not ready yet for production use and that LibreOffice 4.0.3 should continue to be used, if stability is preferred to testing bleeding edge versions.

    The release is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X from LibreOffice’s QA builds download page at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/pre-releases/.

    Any bugs should be reported to the FreeDesktop Bugzilla: https://bugs.freedesktop.org.

    A list of known issues and fixed bugs with 4.1.0 Beta1 is available on the LibreOffice wiki.

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