Progressive Plan for Digital Agenda
OPEN WORLD FORUM
Open is the Future: Open Innovation, Open Enterprise, Open Society
30 September - 1 October 2010, Paris
TWO DAYS OF EXCEPTIONAL CONFERENCES
15 keynotes, 8 Think Tanks, 20 workshops...: Open forges, Open Source governance, community marketing, diversity... and how to make the most of them for your organization.
APPLY NOW FOR YOUR FREE REGISTRATION BADGE
Read MoreOFE WORLD NEWS ROUND UP
- SCO gets sale approval (Sep 02, 2010)
-
The Register - SCO's request to sell off its software business has been approved by the bankruptcy courts. The Delaware court approved the motion to sell SCO's software business leaving a rump company to pursue what's left of its Linux legal action. SCO's Unix is still in use, and still bringing in revenues.
- EU: International team developing open source hospital information system (Sep 01, 2010)
-
OSOR - An international team of software developers specialising in medical systems is working on a hospital information system. Earlier this month on the OSOR Forge, the project began soliciting others to join the team. "If you are willing to participate in this great community, there are plenty of things to be done, from translation, quality control, adding new functionality to localization."
- Co-founder of Microsoft sues tech giants (Aug 31, 2010)
-
Washington Post - Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen lobbed a patent violation lawsuit at some of Silicon Valley's most prominent companies on Friday, accusing them of using ideas hatched at one of his former businesses. Allen's now-defunct company, Interval Licensing, is suing Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and seven other firms, accusing them of infringing on four of its patents related to Internet search and e-commerce. According to the suit, Interval is asking for an injunction against the companies to prevent further infringement.
- MPEG-LA video codec to stay free for end users (Aug 31, 2010)
-
ZDNet - The MPEG Licensing Authority patent pool has announced that its AVC portfolio licence will remain free indefinitely for video that is free to end users. The AVC portfolio licence covers the H.264 codec, a digital video coding standard used by technologies including YouTube and Vimeo. The MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG-LA), which licenses the AVC portfolio, said in a press release on Thursday that video which is free to end users — known as Internet Broadcast AVC Video — would not require royalties.
...In May, Google announced a competing video format, WebM, which was both open source and royalty-free. Despite much speculation at the time that WebM's video coding standard, VP8, would infringe MPEG-LA's patent pool, there have been no formal claims to that effect.
- Tory council's open source plans stymied as government considers policy (Aug 27, 2010)
-
Computer Weekly - A leading Tory council has been delayed in its attempt to replace Microsoft with open source software because the government is yet to fulfil an election pledge to introduce open standards. The Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead, one of the four "vanguard" councils testing the government's Big Society project, also came to the attention of Microsoft after its IT strategy promised in April to "move away from the Microsoft Office platform and replace it with an open source or cloud alternative".
- Red Hat offers its cloud APIs as industry standard (Aug 27, 2010)
-
Reuters - As the industry call for cloud interoperability grows more fervent, open-source enterprise software company Red Hat has submitted its cloud platform, Deltacloud, to the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) as a potential standard for cloud interoperability, the company said Wednesday.
- EU: Guideline For Public Administrations On Procurement Revised (Aug 26, 2010)
-
eGov monitor - In June 2010, the study Guideline on public procurement of Open Source Software, which contains information to explain the usefulness for public agencies in adopting open source, was updated based on recent procurement policies in Spain, Malta and Italy.
In addition to the guidelines for procurement of open source software, the study provides practical information on how to accomplish this within the existing legal framework of procurement regulations, as well as including ready-to-use templates for legal texts.
- Amazon Tops Cloud Study (Aug 26, 2010)
-
InformationWeek - Aimed at enabling enterprise IT application development for cloud computing, some 400 projects specifically associated with cloud computing were found in Black Duck’s study. The firm provides products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software. Open source projects are proliferating in the cloud, growing 70% from 2008 to 2009, according to an analysis made public Monday by Black Duck Software.
- We love open source, says Microsoft (Aug 25, 2010)
-
Daily Telegraph - A senior Microsoft executive has admitted that the company’s previous criticism of open source software was ‘a mistake’
Microsoft has often been critical of some elements of the open source technology community. In 2001, Steve Ballmer, the company’s chief executive, described Linux, the open source operating system, as a “cancer” that threatened his company’s intellectual property, while in 2007, Microsoft accused Linux and other open source providers of violating more than 200 of its patents.
But Jean Paoli, general manager of Microsoft’s interoperability strategy team, is attempting to build bridges between the two communities, and acknowledges that Microsoft’s stance in the past has not always been helpful.
- Government calls for intellectual property evidence (Aug 25, 2010)
-
The Register - The Intellectual Property Office is asking for evidence which might influence future policy. The IPO said it wanted to answer some basic questions like how much British businesses spend on protecting their intellectual property, how much patents help push research spending, which firms make money out of intellectual property without using patents and whether trade marks help innovation and growth. The bureaucrats are also working with German researchers to compare different international approaches to intellectual property protection.
- OpenSolaris group votes to disband (Aug 24, 2010)
- ZDNet - An end has come to a major part of Sun Microsystems' attempt to transform Solaris from a proprietary version of Unix to an open-source operating system built by others, too. Instead of becoming a rival to the broadly-developed Linux operating system, control over the OpenSolaris project essentially on Monday reverted to its new corporate master, Oracle, which acquired Sun and its assets in January. After Oracle gave the group the cold shoulder, the OpenSolaris Governing Board voted unanimously to disband, according to meeting minutes.
- Ubuntu quietly breaks off Sparc affair (Aug 23, 2010)
-
The Register - Maverick Meerkat is set to become the last version of Ubuntu that'll run on Oracle's Sparc, ending a four-year relationship. Also getting canned is Ubuntu running on Hewlett-Packard's Itanic 64-bit challenger.
NEWS FROM THE OPEN SOURCE OBSERVATORY
EU: Rise in use of EUPL for publishing open source software — Aug 31, 2010
UK: 'Government use of ODF would help break vendor lock-in' — Aug 30, 2010
EE: Tallin city and college fund poll and referenda application — Aug 30, 2010
FR: Marseille city administration can't get rid of vendor lock-in — Aug 27, 2010
ES: Andalusia government studying switch to open source desktop — Aug 27, 2010
RECENT OFE PRESS RELEASES
E-Governance Policies for Interoperability and Open Standards - 2010-07-02
Consensus emerging on the need for reform of ICT standardisation - 2010-06-24
OFE CEO's Summit 2010 Review - 2010-06-13
