Open Standards | Steve Woods

Greens/EFA urge greater FOSS use in European Parliament

02/12/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

Joinup, the EU’s open source public sector news website, reports today that the European Parliament’s Greens/EFA Group is urging the European Parliament to make an earnest attempt to using free and open source software. In a letter to EP President Martin Schulz (PDF), which was released last week Friday, the group links free software and open standards to the Parliament’s transparency obligations.

The text of the letter is reproduced below.

Sir,

Thank you very much for your reply to our letter of 10 July 2013 regarding Free Software and Open Standards in the European Parliament, further to the Decision on discharge in respect of the implementation of the general budget of the European Union for the financial years 2010 and 2011.

We are very happy to have received the first, and ground-breaking, report on the matter, but we kindly remind you to ensure that the study is completed as well, as requested in the European Parliament resolutions of 10 May 2012 and 17 April 2013, on Parliament’s obligations, in particular under Rule 103 of its Rules of Procedure, with regard to Free Software and Open Standards.

We have commissioned a second opinion on the report to better understand how we can contribute to the Parliament’s efforts in this field. Please find it attached. The opinion concludes that a study on Parliament’s transparency obligations under Rule 103 vis-à-vis its ICT-policies would “result in recommendations to what extent the use of FOSS and open standards is critical to adhere to these principles as a whole”.

We believe that if, as the opinion suggests, these recommendations were to follow from the Rules of Procedure, it would serve the Parliament well to develop them.

Thank you for taking immediate action to remedy the situation.

Yours faithfully,

(signed)
Rebecca Harms

(signed)

Daniel Cohn-Bendit

Co-Presidents
Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament

No political organisation seems to be complete without a modicum of hypocrisy. In this instance, despite the Greens/EFA’s avowed espousal of free and open source software and open standards, readers may be interested to know that the PDF version of the letter was produced using the proprietary Nitro Pro PDF production software, which runs exclusively on the Windows operating system. 😉
LibreOffice 4.1.3 released

01/11/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

The Document Foundation (TDF) blog announced earlier today that LibreOffice 4.1.3 has been released for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. This is the third minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family, which features a large number of improved interoperability features for proprietary and legacy file formats.

According to TDF, the new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.1. Nevertheless, for enterprise adoptions, The Document Foundation suggests the use of LibreOffice 4.0.6, which is supported by certified professionals.

The release of LibreOffice 4.1.3 is taking place just one day before the LibreOffice HackFest in Freiburg, Germany, where the community will gather at the ArTik to get started on EasyHacks under the mentoring of experienced LibreOffice developers such as Thorsten Behrens, Eilidh McAdam, Bjoern Michaelsen, Markus Mohrhard, Eike Rathke and Michael Stahl.

LibreOffice 4.1.3 is available for immediate download. Change logs are available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.3/RC1 (fixed in 4.1.3.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.3/RC2 (fixed in 4.1.3.2).
Jamaica adopts GNU Health

29/10/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech
Jamaica is to become the first country in the world to adopt GNU Health, the free and open source health and hospital administration system nationwide, Joinup reports, following the signing of an agreement between the Jamaican Ministry of Health (MoH) and GNU Solidario, a NGO supplying free software for health and education.

This will be a herculean task, demanding cross-sectoral integrations from all the regions of this country. To initiate the implementation, programmers, system administrators, physicians, nurses and health records staff, as well as other public officials gathered to participate in several meetings, workshops and focus groups. The MoH Health Informatics team itself had representatives from both the national and the regional levels, as well as health records, clinical, IT and management personnel.

After an intense week, the initial guidelines for the project were designed in order to complete the first stage by the end of this year.

GNU Health provides the following functionality:
- Health Information System (Demographics, Epidemiology);
- Hospital Information System;
- Electronic Medical Records.
In addition, GNU Health has won the Best Project of Social Benefit award from the Free Software Foundation, amongst other international awards.
Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region to save €2 mn. with OpenOffice

15/10/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

The administration of the Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region will switch to the open source OpenOffice productivity suite, Joinup reports. It thus hopes to save some €2 mn. euro on the licences that it would have spent for updating the ubiquitous MS Office suite. To prepare the migration, a three-month pilot involving 300 workstations has started at the region’s Directorate-General for Agriculture; all other regional departments will switch over to OpenOffice by the end of 2014. The region employs some 3,545 office staff.

The region is currently using a ten year-old version of MS Office. Instead of spending €2 mn. to upgrade 3,200 proprietary licences that are due to expire next year, the province decided to switch to OpenOffice which “offers basically the same functionality”.

The region has set aside a budget of €220,000 for the switch to OpenOffice; this budget includes a staff training element.
Italy’s Macerata province halfway through LibreOffice migration

01/10/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that Italy’s Macerata province is halfway its migration to the free and open source LibreOffice suite as a replacement for Microsoft Office. LibreOffice is currently used on 230 of its 450 workstations. The migration is expected to be completed in December next year.

The same article also reports that Windows is being replaced by Linux as the workstation operating system used for non-specialised tasks on the provincial government’s PCs.

These moves are expected to save the provincial authority some €150,000 in 2014. For Italy as a whole, the Asca news agency states the LibreOffice 2013 Conference in Milan was told that migrating the public sector to LibreOffice could save the public purse €300-500 mn.
LibreOffice improves support for OOXML

18/09/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

According to Heise, Suse and Lanedo have completed a project to improve the interoperability of the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite with OOXML, the format used by Microsoft Office files. The requirements were jointly defined by several bodies, including Munich City Council, the Swiss Federal Court and the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and the project received total funding of €160,000.

The improvements have been incorporated into LibreOffice versions 3.6, 4.0 and 4.1. The code is licensed under the LGPL and MPL 1.1 3, but may also be used under the Apache 2 licence, so it can also be incorporated into Apache OpenOffice.
Under 3 weeks to LibreOffice Conference

09/09/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech
The LibreOffice Conference will officially open in less than three weeks at the University of Milan on Wednesday, 25th September, the blog of The Document Foundation reminds us. The opening session will be held in the historic Cà Granda building, while all technical sessions and tracks will be hosted by the Department of Computer Science.

LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

The conference is being sponsored by Canonical (the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Ed.) and open source consultancy Collabora, whilst Google and CloudOn will be sponsoring the live ‘hackatons’ happening on Wednesday and Thursday evening and open source consultancy Lanedo sponsoring the food for the conference breaks.

The conference will close on Friday, 27th September with the traditional Q&A session, where project members can question The Document Foundation’s board of directors.

The conference tracks will cover the following:
- Open Document Format (ODF);
- LibreOffice Development;
- Community Development;
- Best Practice for Deployments and Migrations; and
- Building a Business with LibreOffice.
For the first time during a conference, there will be a chance of sitting together with LibreOffice developers to hack the code, or just discuss the next feature.

“LibreOffice Conference comes to Italy at the right time, as during 2012 and 2013 there have been several migrations to LibreOffice in the public administrations at regional and local level,” says Italo Vignoli, a member of The Document Foundation’s board of directors and the leader of the conference team. “Meeting with the project members will encourage other public administrations and enterprises to undertake the migration to LibreOffice”.

Conference sessions will be broadcast online, as well as being recorded and made available on the conference website.
LibreOffice 4.1.1 released

29/08/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.1.1, for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. This is the first minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family, which features a large number of improved interoperability features with proprietary and legacy file formats.

According to the developers, the new release is a step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.1. However, for enterprise adoptions and production environments, The Document Foundation recommends LibreOffice 4.0.5.

LibreOffice menu screen

LibreOffice 4.1.1 is available for immediate download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Change logs are available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.1/RC1 (for bugs fixed in 4.1.1.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.1/RC2 (for bug fixes in 4.1.1.2).
Valencia completes move to LibreOffice

24/08/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website, reports that government of Spain’s autonomous region of Valencia has completed its migration from MS Office to LibreOffice, the free and open source office suite.

Under this initiative, LibreOffice has been installed on a total of 120,000 public sector workstations.

The initiative forms part of the costs savings and reduction programme undertaken by the autonomous government to reduce current ICT costs, and those of procuring proprietary software in particular. According to the government’s head of ICT, Sofia Bellés, “This action has already enabled us to save €1.3 mn. since the start of the project and will generate annual savings of €1.5 mn. in proprietary software licences starting from next year”.

Besides the financial benefits, the investment in LibreOffice entails other benefits, such as the availability of applications in Valencian and Spanish, vendor independence and the freedom to modify and adapt the software to the users’ needs.
LibreOffice 4.1.0 release candidate 3 ready for download

23/07/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

The third release candidate (RC) for LibreOffice 4.1.0 is now available for download for all platforms – Linux, Mac OSX and Windows – for evaluation, QA testing, etc.

Potential users are warned that this build is in a release configuration and will replace any existing LibreOffice install.

LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

Users are also advised to read the release notes.

Furthermore, it’s a pre-release build, which the developers do not recommend for ‘mission critical’ purposes.

There are some major improvements in LibreOffice 4.1.0, including lots of bug fixes, news features and better interoperabilty; a full list of these can be found in the LibreOffice 4.1 release notes.

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