Hi,
We will be holding our February IFSO meeting tomorrow evening:
Irish Free Software Organisation
Tuesday 25 February 2014, starting 8pm
Long Stone pub, Townsend Street, Dublin 2
One topic for discussion will be how we can exploit some recent
success stories for Free Software in other European countries to push
software freedom in public bodies in Ireland. See below.
Hope to see you there!
Ben.
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Via FSF list:
The Italian government has made free software the default choice for
public administrations. In a document published last Wednesday, the
Italian Digital Agency issued rules saying that all government
organisations in the country must consider using free software before
buying licenses for proprietary programs.
https://fsfe.org/news/2014/news-20140116-01.en.html
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Via FSFE list:
The city of Munich successfully completed their GNU/Linux migration with
14.800 PCs[6]. They also announced that they will continue their
advocacy work for Free Software[7]. EC's Joinup reports that public
administrations in the Netherlands who use Free Software spend 24% less
than the ones who do not[8]. In Denmark public libraries are switching
to GNU/Linux, and are demanding a complete free admin system. Carsten
Agger, our local coordinator for Aahrus/Denmark, is involved in
providing this system[9].
6. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/munich-open-source-switch-completed-succes…
7. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/munich-continue-open-source…
8. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/oss-use-dutch-town-lowers-i…
9. https://blogs.fsfe.org/agger/2014/01/07/bibos-admin-admin-system-for-gnulin…
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Noted by Jen:
The UK Cabinet Office minister wants to move the govt to libre/openoffice:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/29/uk-government-plans-switc…
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Hi Folks,
Following some mailing list issues we've had to reconstruct the IFSO
members email list. This message is just to make sure that we've
included everyone from FSFE-IE who we should have.
If you have not received an email from me on the members list but you
think you should have then please let me know and I'll fix it.
Thanks!
--
Glenn Strong
Asst. Professor, School of Computer Science and Statistics
Course Director M.Sc. Interactive Digital Media
https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Glenn.Strong/ +353 1 896 3629
Hi all,
Two or three of us in Dublin are interested in starting an engineering (combined software and hardware) co-op / partnership devoted to Free / Libre Open-Source Software / Hardware. (I'm not sure what structure we will go with ultimately but we might provisionally refer to it as a 'co-op'.) We aim to differ from a typical "business" not just in our licensing however; perhaps even more importantly, we intend to be only "semi-commercial" (more details below).
There are more details in various docs at https://drive.google.com/?pli=1&authuser=0#folders/0B3roVHMOAaQPVFA3WGlZakt… (We'll hopefully be moving from Google docs to a FLOSS platform - e.g. Kune / Owncloud - at some stage.) There is a short list in one of the files there of some of the actual hardware / software projects we might undertake - although we do have others, and welcome new ideas.
To the extent possible we want to provide an antidote to the contentional "business" - in that we would like to practice values such as sharing, co-operation, altruism, and gift economy. So how will we make money? We're not sure yet, but we have ideas (and welcome new ones). Ultimately this wouldn't be just about "making money", and we would prefer that the people we work alongside share our values - which can be read at https://drive.google.com/?pli=1&authuser=0#folders/0B3roVHMOAaQPVFA3WGlZakt…
A relevant discussion is at http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057093702
If anyone has any questions they are welcome to contact me on or off-list. And if anyone knows other parties who might be interested, feel free to forward this to them.
There was a brief meeting before Christmas and will probably be another over the coming weeks. I might post details of that here in due course, if that's ok with the group.
Sincerely
David