Open Source | Steve Woods

FSFE elects new top officials

22/09/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

Matthias Kirschner and Alessandro Rubini are the new President and Vice-President respectively of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). They were elected last week in Bucharest during FSFE’s General Assembly, while Reinhard Müller was re-elected as Financial Officer. They will serve FSFE in those capacities for the next 2 years.

Matthias Kirschner has been an FSFE employee since 2009. He started using GNU/Linux in 1999 and realised that software is deeply involved in all aspects of our lives. Matthias is convinced that this technology has to empower society rather than restrict it. While studying Political and Administrative Science, he convinced the FSFE to accept him as its first intern in 2004. Since then he has been helping other organisations, companies and governments to understand how they can benefit from Free Software and how those rights help to support freedom of speech, freedom of the press and privacy.

Alessandro Rubini is an electronic engineer and holds a Ph.D. in computer science. He was an early Linux adopter, installing Linux 0.99.14, is an active Free Software user and developer, and author of the book “Linux Device Drivers”. After his doctorate, he left the university as he did not want to just write academic papers and now works as an independent consultant in the industrial use of GNU/Linux, mainly on device drivers and embedded system as well as on micro-controllers and PCB design. Recently he has been working with CERN within the White Rabbit project, aimed at sub-nanosecond synchronisation of I/O cards. One reason he enjoys working with CERN is the organisation’s policy of releasing all their work as Free Software and Free Hardware.

Alessandro was previously a member of the Free Software Foundation Europe from 2001 to 2006 and recently rejoined. He felt that FSFE is the right place for positive and constructive discussions about Free Software.

“I am happy to welcome both Matthias and Alessandro to their new roles,” says Executive Director Jonas Öberg, “both have been instrumental in shaping the organisation into its current form and I look forward to the expertise they will bring as we go about empowering users to control technology.”

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.
Tomorrow is Software Freedom Day 2015

18/09/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

Besides being International Talk Like a Pirate Day, 19th September 2015 is also a date for the diaries of people advocating free and open source software; it’s Software Freedom Day 2015.

The idea of Software Freedom Day (SFD) is for everyone without a vested interest in proprietary software to unite and educate the world about the ideals of Software Freedom and the practical benefits of Free Software. August 28th 2004 was the first ever Software Freedom Day and was initiated group of FOSS believers – Matt Oquist, Henrik Omma and Phil Harper – with the idea of distributing The OpenCD – a collection of free and open source software for Windows – to everyone.

SFD has since extended around the world with events being organised on every continent.

Why is software freedom important?

The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a set of basic human rights that most people would agree would be a bare minimum. Not often are our basic rights thought of in the context of technology, but as more and more our lives are dependent on technology, it is a rapidly growing concern. Technologies that matter to our freedom are used in our voting systems, our leisure, our work, education, art and our communication. What does this mean to you? It means that the basic human freedoms you take for granted are only as free as the technologies you use.

Transparent and sustainable technologies are vital to ensuring we can protect our freedoms.

Think about any software you use everyday that is proprietary and the consider that you can’t be sure what it is actually doing. Does your email system send copies of your mail to a third party? Is your web browser, logging and automatically sending your browsing history to someone?

As more and more of the world’s population starts using technology, getting online and developing the next major life-changing event of the future (such as the internet was for many of us), ensuring open, transparent and sustainable approaches are considered best practice is important; i.e. important to a future where technology empowers everyone equally, where knowledge is forever and where our basic human freedoms are strengthened, not hampered, by technology.

Reposted, with some edits, from Bristol Wireless.
LibreOffice & ODF to be adopted by Italian military

16/09/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

The Italian military is moving to LibreOffice and Open Document Format (ODF), according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. This will be Europe’s second largest migration to a free and open source office suite and open standards since the Italian Defence Ministry will be installing LibreOffice on 150,000 machines.

The migration will begin in October 2015 and is expected to be completed at the end of 2016.

The deployment of LibreOffice will be jointly managed by Libreitalia and the Italian Defence Ministry, with the former providing trainers and the Ministry devising course materials, which will later be released under a Creative Commons licence.

An agreement between the Ministry and LibreItalia was signed on 15th September in Rome by Rear Admiral Ruggiero Di Biase, General Manager of the Italian Ministry of Defence’s Information Systems and LibreItalia president Sonia Montegiove.

The Ministry of Defence is the first Italian central government organisation to migrate to open source software for office productivity. On the other hand, many regional public sector organisations have already made this move, such as the Emilia-Romagna region, the provinces of Perugia, Cremona, Macerata, Bolzano and Trento, the cities of Bologna, Piacenza and Reggio Emilia, the Galliera Hospital in Genoa and healthcare ASL 5 in Veneto, to name but a few.

The Italian Defence Ministry project is also one of Europe’s largest migrations to date to a free and open source office suite. The largest European public sector organisation using free software office suites is currently the French Interior Ministry with some 240,000 desktops. Many French ministries use open source office suites including the Tax Agency, the Finance Ministry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Agriculture. LibreOffice is deployed on some 72,000 PCs within the French Gendarmerie, which also uses Ubuntu Linux as its operating system of choice.

In June 2014, the autonomous regional government of Extremadura (Spain) confirmed that 10,000 PCs in its healthcare organisation are running open source office applications and that the same is planned for its own 22,000 PCs. In Germany the city of Munich runs also runs LibreOffice on over 17,000 Linux workstations.
FSFE supports recognition for User Data Rights

29/08/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has announced today that it supports the publication of the User Data Manifesto 2.0, which aims at defining basic rights for people to control their own data in the internet age. The manifesto is published today and also supported by GNOME, KDE, Netzpolitik.org, ownCloud, Spreed, “Terms of Service – Didn’t Read” and X-Lab.

Whether for social networking, collaboration or for sharing pictures, among many other activities, users are nowadays increasingly using online services and are thus at more risk than ever of losing control of their own data.

According to the User Data Manifesto, people should have:
- Control over user data access;
- Knowledge of how user data is stored and which laws or jurisdictions are applicable; and
- Freedom to choose a platform, without experiencing vendor lock-in. The FSFE believes that Free Software is necessary to guarantee this.
“The recognition of the User Data Rights defined in the manifesto is an important block to build a free society in the digital age”, says Hugo Roy, deputy coordinator of FSFE’s Legal Team and co-author of the User Data Manifesto.

The manifesto is a good starting point for an important debate about users’ rights online. The FSFE anticipates other organisations joining the effort to promote online services that respects users’ rights and freedoms.
LibreOffice 5.0.1 released

28/08/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

Yesterday The Document Foundation, the German non-profit organisation behind the LibreOffice productivity suite, announced the release of LibreOffice 5.0.1, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 5.0 family.

This version comprises a number of fixes compared with the major release – version 5.0.0 – announced on 5th August 5. So far, LibreOffice 5.0 is the most popular version of LibreOffice ever, based on the feedback from the marketplace.

LibreOffice 5.0.1 is aimed at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. For more conservative users and commercial deployments, The Document Foundation recommends LibreOffice 4.4.5. For commercial deployments, The Document Foundation suggests engaging certified professional support.

Those interested in technical details of the release can consult access the change logs at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.0.1/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.0.1/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

LibreOffice 5.0.1 is immediately available for download and users, free software advocates and community members are encouraged to make a donation to The Document Foundation.
Windows 10 desktop: still catching up with early Linux

16/08/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

July 2015 saw the release of Windows 10.

One feature that Microsoft has been really making a great fuss about is the implementation (finally) of virtual desktops for the first time in a way that can be accessed easily by users.

A virtual desktop is a term used with respect to user interfaces to describe ways in which the virtual space of a computer’s desktop environment is expanded beyond the physical limits of the screen’s display area through the use of software. This compensates for a limited desktop area and can also be helpful in reducing clutter.

Microsoft is calling the Windows 10 implementation of virtual desktops Task View.

Windows 10 with Task View virtual desktops shown near the bottom of the screen.

Whenever a new release of Windows comes out, users of other operating systems such as Mac OS X and the various distributions of Linux, always wonder what baubles will be ‘copied’ from their OS of choice.

This time, it’s virtual desktops.

On Linux systems both major window/display managers – GNOME and KDE – have had virtual desktops for well over a decade.

Indeed, the first version of KDE, released 17 years ago in July 1998, included them, as shown in the following screenshot.

KDE version 1 showing 4 virtual desktops in use. The virtual desktops can be accessed via the taskbar or pager in the desktop’s top right-hand corner.

GNOME also included virtual desktops as early the GNOME 2.0 release which appeared in 2002.

Windows has actually had API support for virtual desktops since Windows NT 4, which was released back in 1996, which just shows how long it takes a lumbering quasi-monopolostic behemoth to get round to implementing things.

I’d sooner use an operating system that was a pioneer, rather than a laggard that attempted to imitate the best of others. 🙂
Plasma Mobile brings KDE 5 to the smartphone

28/07/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

At this year’s Akademy conference for KDE developers, the makers of the Linux desktop environment presented a version of the Plasma desktop for mobile devices, heise reports. Plasma Mobile will be an open alternative to today’s widely used mobile operating systems, but one in which the user’s privacy and freedom are to the fore.

An early development version of Plasma Mobile is running on the LG Nexus 5. It can be deployed with the Ubuntu Phone flashing tools. The developers have their sights on a usable version for the 2016 Akademy 2016. Ubuntu Phone serves as the technical foundation upon which the Qt GUI framework and KDE Frameworks runs, together with the Wayland display manager which brings the Plasma shell to the display. In addition to KDE and Qt apps, Plasma Mobile can also runs Ubuntu Mobile apps.
PDF – a religion?

16/07/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Oddities, Open Source, Tech

Amongst some technology enthusiasts free and open source software is promoted with a zeal approaching that of Christian evangelism, i.e. the preaching of the gospel or the practice of giving information about a particular doctrine or set of beliefs to others with the intention of converting others to the Christian faith.

Does this mean that free and open source software – also referred to by the acronym FOSS – is now a religion?

Richard Stallman – founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation – has been known to appear at events in pseudo-religious garb masquerading as his alter ego, St IGNucius of the Church of Emacs.

Since the foundation of the FOSS movement a couple of decades ago, there have been many developments in information technology and the working of the internet.

Of these one of the most notable is the development by Google of predictive search terms; as one types, Google tries to anticipate the final search string. This can have some interesting results, as evidenced by the screenshot below.

PDF – Portable Document Format – was originally a proprietary standard developed by Adobe Systems. It was released as an open standard on 1st July 1 2008 and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008, at which time control of the specification passed to an ISO Committee of volunteer industry experts.

No information is available as to when Judaism, Islam and Catholicism are to be released as open standards under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization. 😉
Bari to migrate 75% of workstations to LibreOffice

03/07/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

Bari Today reports that the Municipality of Bari is migrate 75% of its workstations to the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite during the current year.

According to Alessandro Tomasicchio, the councillor with responsibility for technological innovation, “In this way we guarantee the participation of citizens in public sector decision-making.”

In addition, the council is adopting ODF – the standard file format of LibreOffice and other open source office suites – as the standard file format that meets all the authority’s technical requirements.

Management of the project entails various kinds of skills, from the analysis of flows of documents within the council to the management of interactions between users and IT systems. Great attention has been paid to staff training and internal communication, which are regarded as fundamental elements for achieving the local authority’s goal.

After analysing the software solutions available and practical testing, the Innvoation Department decided to adopt the free and open source LibreOffice suite, which is compatible with other proprietary office suites, including MS Office currently used by Bari.

The choice of LibreOffice, unlike proprietary software, is compliant with the provisions of Article 68 of the [Italian] Digital Administration Code and the Apulia Region‘s law on the adoption and promotion of open source by public sector organisations.

By the end of the current year at least 75% of Bari’s workstations will migrate from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.

Antonio Cantatore, head of Bari’s Innovation Department also stated that one reason for switching to LibreOffice would be major savings in the total cost of ownership (TCO). By not having to pay licence fees to Microsoft for the Office package currently installed on 1,700 of Bari’s workstations, the local authority is looking at costs savings €75,000 +VAT.
Registration is open for 2015 LibreOffice conference

02/07/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

Registration for the 2015 LibreOffice Conference, which will be hosted by the Danish city of Aarhus from 23rd to 25th September (posts passim), is now open, The Document Foundation blog has announced.

Attendees can register at http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/registration/.

The Call for Papers is still open until 15th July 15, 2015. Tracks for papers are based on Development, Quality Assurance, Localization, Documentation and Native Language Projects, Ease of Use, Design and Accessibility, Migrations and Deployments, Certifications and Best Practices, ODF, Document Liberation and Interoperability and Building a Business around LibreOffice.

The conference website also includes some practical info about travel and accommodation.

This year’s conference is being sponsored by CIB, Collabora, Google, Magenta and RedHat.

Why is software freedom important?

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