“Free and open source software enables more effective actions, with a very low cost, when financing small projects for public administrations”, says Osvaldo Gervasi, president of Umbria’s Open Source Competence Center (CCOS) and professor of Computer Science at University of Perugia. “This type of software is key to the re-use of applications by public administrations.” The activities of Umbria’s open [...]

The Open Web Foundation was founded to help developer communities collaborate and share technical innovation on the web, bringing to the world of formats and protocols the same successful grassroots approaches established by the open source community. Modeled after the Apache Software Foundation and Creative Commons, the Open Web Foundation seeks to facilitate the creation and implementation of specifications with [...]

The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to build a repository for hosting and developing it’s open source applications, including flight software, ground software and engineering tools. The organisation on 11 November posted a call for tender to start the development of the repository. ESA wants to determine the requirements, architecture and implementation of a repository of space open source software. [...]

Mogens Kühn Pedersen, chair of the Danish Standards Committee, says Microsoft is lying when it says it will implement ISO OOXML in the next version of its suite of office applications. On Saturday Pedersen accused the software vendor of lying, in an article by the Danish news site Business.dk, part of the newspaper Berlingske Tidene. Pedersen, professor of Informatics at [...]

“Peer-to-peer” (P2P) is synonymous with piracy and bandwidth hogging on the Internet. But now, Internet service providers and content companies are taking advantage of technology designed to speed the delivery of content through P2P networks. Meanwhile, standards bodies are working to codify the technology into the Internet’s basic protocols.

The MPAA is pressuring the FCC for the authority to cripple recording devices using so-called “Selectable Output Control” (SOC). Basically, SOC would enable Hollywood to actually shut off the video outputs on your cable box, DVR, or other recording device when particular movies or shows come on. When the movie’s over, the outputs might turn back on. Your devices would [...]

We hate crashes. When Firefox crashes, we try to get you back on your feet as quickly as possible, but we’d much rather you not crash in the first place. In Firefox 3.6, we are changing the way that some third party software hooks into Firefox which should eliminate a good chunk of those crashes without sacrificing our extensibility in [...]

Editor’s note: This is a very long, but informative article. It’s worth the read. If you are new to the Free Software community, you need to have some understanding of the license that governs it, or at least one of the main licenses. I’ve started to wonder if Novell or IBM has explained to SCO’s Chapter 11 Trustee Edward Cahn [...]

Data compiled by top500 shows that Linux is the operating of choice on supercomputers. That’s good news. The table (image reproduced below) does not go into details like which distro is the most popular on these supercomputers, but that’s not important. What matters is that we’ve won that battle.

European Researchers have created the first integrated semantic search platform that integrates text, video and audio. The system can ‘watch’ films, ‘listen’ to audio and ‘read’ text to find relevant responses to semantic search terms. At last, computers are able to look for meaning in our multimedia searches.

I’m used to reviewing one distro at a time, and that has worked quite well. You could read a review and assuming it is well written and detailed, decide whether to download and install it on your PC. For this review, however, I’m doing a two-for-one – revewing and comparing two very popular distros. For the reader, I think it [...]

Apple’s ridiculous iPhone app approval process has hit a new low, with rejections for “ridiculing public figures” and using Apple’s own APIs to access Apple icons. These are just the latest reasons why the U.S. Copyright Office should approve EFF’s effort to legalize jailbreaking of the iPhone—customers and developers shouldn’t need Apple’s approval before using the software they want.

We spend a lot of our time at EFF trying to spot new proposals in copyright across the world, and understanding whether they’re good or bad for civil liberties. We’re not the only ones: our understanding depends on the work of hundreds of researchers worldwide who are constantly sifting through new drafts and consolidating older reforms in hundreds of nations.

The explosive growth of video on the internet calls for new ways of sorting and searching audiovisual content. A team of European researchers has developed a ground-breaking solution that is finding commercial applications. Most video search technologies currently rely on semantic annotation in which videos have to be manually tagged with keywords so they can be found via a text-based [...]

A study at Örebro University in Sweden indicates that mobile phones and other cordless telephones have a biological effect on the brain. It is still too early to say if any health risks are involved, but medical researcher Fredrik Söderqvist recommends caution in the use of these phones, above all among children and adolescents. Few children who regularly use mobile [...]

If you want to introduce a group of people to the Web, a group that’s never used a PC, and have never used the Internet, what route would you take? Sell them a Windows PC, or one powered by a Linux operating system? My guess is it would be a Linux PC, and that’s is exactly what discount.age and Wessex [...]