Danish Board of Technology: Public administration can save billions
using Open Source software
http://lwn.net/Articles/13301/
I found this abstract on Free Software by the Danish public
administration very interesting. And at least in Portugal it would be
very interesting to have such a report right now (a law proposal for the
use of Free Software in the portuguese public administration is going to
be voted in the parliament).
I've contacted the responsible person (Jan Opstrup Poulsen
<jop(a)Tekno.dk>) and he told me that they are seeking funding to
translate it to english.
The danish report is at
http://www.tekno.dk/pdf/projekter/p02_open-source-rapport.pdf
Is it possible to help with this effort ? I have asked how much funding
they are seeking, but I haven't received an answer yet. Is there someone
who understands danish that would be able to donate some time to this
task ?
--
João Miguel Neves
All,
I am one of the core developers of an eCommerce solution (oscommerce)
licensed under the GPL. I am based in germany and the project leader is
also in germany. Two core team members are in USA.
It has been brought to our attention that there are some lawsuits in USA
about patent infringement, filed by a company called PanIP (Pangea
Intellectual Properties L.L.C).
You can read more about these patents here:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20021020S0002http://www.youmaybenext.com/why.htmlhttp://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/22/015241&mode=thread&tid=155
IANAL - but IMHO these patents are not valid under EU-jurisdiction -
correct?
As our program fits quite exactly in these patents - must we be worried
about possible legal actions against us or our core team members in USA?
Or does the GPL mak esure we will have no problems?
This patent stuff is getting more and more ridiculous.
IMHO there is prior art - Vend/Minivend was first published in 1995. But
does that count in any way?
Jan Wildeboer
Does somebody know something about the development of the Free Software
Magazine? The last published issue was April.
http://www.rons.net.cn/english/FSM/english/FSM/online
But we still have Brave GNU World, don't we?
Wouter.
I meant to send this to the list, but sent it to Jan only.
I forgot to mention a particularity of the espacenet database.
you can never be sure a patent is granted. If you see
the suffix B1 when looking at a patent pdf then it was granted
but if you see the A1, A2 or A3 you only know it was applied for, it might
be granted or it might not. See details at
http://www.aful.org/wws/arc/patents/2000-10/msg00272.html
Xavi Drudis Ferran
xdrudis(a)tinet.org
I thought this piece of news would be interesting:
Danish Board of Technology: Public administration can save billions
using Open Source software
http://lwn.net/Articles/13301/
The most interesting part (to me):
In Hanstholm municipality they had a pilot project since April which
showed that the don't have more problems using OpenOffice.org and
StarOffice instead of Microsoft Office as their office suite and each
user only needs one to one and half our of training to learn the new
office suite. The municipality will now use OpenOffice.org and
StarOffice on all workplaces (200 in all) and saves 300.000 Danish
Kroners (ca. 40.000 EUR) each year in license fees. They will still use
Microsoft Windows as operating system.
--
João Miguel Neves
The proprietory BitKeeper license starts to bite.
Debain Daily News reports:
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/39/index.en.html
Your license to use BitKeeper free of charge is revoked if you or
your employer develop, produce, sell, or resell a source management
tool. Debian distributes rcs, cvs, subversion and arch at least and
this seems to be a different case. Ben Collins however, who works
on both the Linux kernel and the subversion project, got his license
to use BitKeeper free of charge revoked. Ulrich Drepper experienced
similar problems. This has also been brought up on Slashdot and
discussed on debian-devel.
[resent since it did not pass trough for some unknown reason]
Hi.
I'd like to let you know (remind you, for those who had come to the
Libre Software Meeting, maybe ?) that we're organising, with Soissons
Technopole, the 1st edition of the LIBRE SOFTWARE TROPHIES (Les
Trophées du Libre), an international Free Software Competition.
Details on http://www.tropheesdulibre.org/main.php?lang=en
The competition is free and open to any Free Software author, and closes
februray 15th 2003.
The winner of each category will win a trophy, and a server (and a
trip to France, the trip being offered also to the 2 other finalists
in each category).
The goal is to promote Free Software in various fields for the end
users, trough an international competition, and would be a great way
to make your projects recognised (employers, sponsors, etc.).
Categories :
* Games : Arcade, MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online
Role-Playing Games), strategy, thought processes, ...
* Applications for Public Agencies : Interoperability of data among
administrations, GIS, e-government, Intranet, ...
* Company Management : ERP, CRM, merchandising management,
bookkeeping, GroupWare, Workflow, ...
* Educational : E-learning, e-publication, specific distribution,
...
* General Public : Office, multimedia, desktop, personal
accounting, stock market, ...
* Accessibility : Writing and voice recognition, free software use
facilitation, ...
As you can see, it's a pretty wide range of applications, so you have
all chances to find yours ;)
APRIL and FSF Europe (Chapter France) are among the partners of the
competition (along with MandrakeSoft, Bull, Sun, France Telecom R&D,
and other local companies or organisations).
I was told that St Ignucius might be there to honour the winers ;)
Don't hesitate to enter the competition (registration really easy),
and spread the word to your fellow programmers.
If you need more info, please let me know, and I'll send it to the
organizers.
Best regards,
P.S.: address any remarks about translations and other details of the
website to info(a)tropheesdulibre.org... as we're mostly only
french-speaking folks things may sound weird to you ;)
--
Olivier BERGER (OpenPGP: 1024D/B4C5F37F) - Secrétaire de l'association APRIL
APRIL (http://www.april.org) - Vive python (http://www.python.org)
Pétition contre les brevets logiciels : http://petition.eurolinux.org