Fortiter Et Recte
The Linux Terminal Server Project team have released version 5.2 after two years and almost one thousand commits. It has become one pretty powerful product! I like the ability to “run the whole session remotely or run select applications locally to use specific hardware or advance 3D capabilities.”
Neat.
The nouveau project has done it! Finally, an open source 3D driver for NVIDIA video cards has arrived and will ship with Fedora 13. Let’s take a look (including a few benchmarks).
There are plans afoot to replace the UK government’s computer systems with a “cloud” and free software.
The government will also push for “open source” software to be used more widely among central and local government’s 4m desktop computers. That poses an immediate threat to Microsoft, whose Windows operating system and Office applications suite is at present firmly embedded as the standard on PCs in government..
I doubt that Microsoft would sit idly by and let this happen, though.
Is the success of Linux directly proportional to its ability to integrate with existing proprietary systems like Windows? If so, should free software developers be spending more time integrating with it instead of building better software for free platforms?
Albany Senior High School in Auckland New Zealand is a new school, set up just last year in 2009. Most education institutions are “Microsoft shops” but this school has bucked the trend by going the free software route.
Applications used within the school include OpenOffice, Google Docs, Moodle for managing education content, and Mahara for student portfolios. The Koha software used by the school library was also customised to integrate more closely with the LDAP security system and to allow book recommendations.
Go my Kiwi cousins, go!
I missed this previously, but Munich has finally switched over to exclusive use of ODF for documents, and PDF for non-editable documents.
The city administration’s standard desktops now consist of the free OpenOffice.org office suite, Mozilla’s Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client and several other open source applications, such as the GIMP image editor.
Yep, the Kiwis beat us at everything these days and now those sensible chaps in Government begin trials of Linux and free software.
In 2003, the NZ government recommended use of Free software on the desktop for agencies (not just the server side). Now, we’re starting to see it happen. Hurrah!
The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Horizons Regional Council and NZ Post will all begin trialling the replacement of their existing Windows desktops with machines running Linux and other open source software in February.
It’s almost enough to want to move overseas and become a Kiwi.
It has just been revealed that the Australian Government spends “over half a billion dollars each year” on proprietary software licenses. That’s somewhere over $500,000,000.
The Greens are heading a call for the Government to use free software and for the first time in my life I find myself agreeing with them.
Greens communication spokesman Scott Ludlam said:
“We know [software] costs are sky high and governments are a huge revenue source for companies like Microsoft, but there are also very strong public policy grounds for using open-source software. And one is to make sure that government information is accessible to the largest number of people as possible at no cost to them.”
It was on the front page of the Canberra Times yesterday.
If the PM wants to save money, here’s a great way to do it. In fact, for the cost of licenses for a single year, the Government could hire 5000 full time highly paid open source developers. By leveraging existing free software it wouldn’t be too hard to build anything and everything that the Government uses for it and the Educational sectors.
-c
While I’m still up, I might as well tell you about my latest article, “Proprietary Software and Linux: Good, Bad or Somewhere in Between?”.
This comes on the heels of Canonical asking users to vote on which software (such as Adobe Photoshop and Apple’s iTunes) they would like to see made available through Ubuntu.
During a speech at the University of Washington in 1998, Bill Gates said:
“About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
Now that China is addicted to Windows, Microsoft is indeed coming to collect, but thanks to Linux their plan could backfire, badly.