free software

  • Italy: Court of Cassation rules against “Windows Tax”

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    broken WindowsItaly’s La Repubblica reported on Friday that the country’s Court of Cassation has ruled that anyone who buys a computer with pre-installed software and does not accept the terms of the licence when the computer is first booted up is entitled to a refund. The case involved was that of a Florentine consumer who’d bought a laptop with the Windows operating system pre-installed.

    The judges criticised the practice of selling PCs with a pre-installed proprietary operating system as “a commercial policy of forced distribution”. The court described this practice as “monopolistic in tendency”. It also highlighted that the practice of bundling software (affectionately known as ‘crapware’. Ed.) with the operating system means that end users are forced into using additional non-free applications due to compatibility and interoperability issues, whether they wanted these programs or not.

    The decision was welcomed by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). “This decision is both welcome and long overdue”, said Karsten Gerloff, President of the FSFE. “No vendor should be allowed to cram non-free software down the throats of users. This practice of forced distribution needs to end. We hope that the Italian authorities will turn this ruling into a real win for consumers and ensure that computer buyers can choose their device with any operating system they want, or none.”

  • EU public sector machine translation tool now available online

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Politics, Tech

    EU flagJoinup, the European Union’s public sector open source news website, reports today that MT@EC, the Machine Translation service developed by the European Commission under the ISA programme, can now also be accessed over a secure (https) internet connection; previously it was only accessible to institutions connected to the highly secure sTESTA network. The new web access now also allows public administrations that are not connected to the sTESTA network to request access for their staff.

    MT@EC is currently available free of charge to all public sector organisations. Since the tool has been trained mainly on official EU documents, it can handle and translate texts and documents related to EU policy and collaboration in the 24 official EU languages better than other tools. A presentation of the MT@EC service, including screenshots of the user interface, is available as a PDF. Interested organisations have the opportunity to participate in ‘customisation pilot projects’, concerning which more information can be found in the document “ÎœT for Member States: Description of pilots” (PDF).

    In this 2nd major release of MT@EC, the quality of the output has been further improved by adding data from more sources and by enhancing the processing for the current 6th generation of the machine translation engines. Users can now also submit PDF files, whilst support for other formats has been improved. Furthermore, language auto-detection is now available for text snippets. Users can drag and drop files if they are using the interface through the Firefox or Chrome web browsers. Users can also choose not to receive the translated text by email for confidentiality reasons but instead download it from their personal workspace in the interface.

    The European Commission (DG Translation) is organising a user conference on the machine translation service on 5th December 2014 in Brussels.

  • Welcome LibreItalia!

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Earlier today the birth was announced of LibreItalia, which has been founded by Italian members of The Document Foundation and has the objective of bringing together all the Italian users of the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite to speed up the adoption and promotion of the suite that is designed as a free individual productivity and office automation tool capable of closing the digital divide and breaking down the barriers to information technology for the poorest in society.

    LibreItalia logo

    In addition, LibreItalia will promote the ODF/Open Document Format (ISO/IEC 26300) standard for official documents, which was recently adopted by the UK government (posts passim) as a template for all content, together with PDF/A.

    The initial Board of Directors, which will be in post for two years, consists of seven members, five of whom are directly involved in the LibreUmbria project (which was originally established to promote the use of LibreOffice in public sector organisations in the Umbria region. Ed.): Sonia Montegiove, Chair; Marina Latini, Vice-Chair and Chief Technical Officer; Giordano Alborghetti, Treasurer; and Andrea Castellani, Alfredo Parisi, Gabriele Ponzo and Italo Vignoli, directors.

    All the new association’s news about LibreOffice is featured on the LibreItalia website. To become a member of LibreItalia, you’ll need to fill in an application using the relevant form after reading the site’s About us and Articles of Association pages. The membership fee for ordinary members is a mere €10.00 (reduced to €5.00 for students) and entitles members to a libreitalia.it mailbox.

    Becoming a member of LibreItalia means supporting the values of transparency, sharing and working together, the same values which characterise the original LibreUmbria project.

    For more information, email info (at) libreitalia.it.

  • Calibre 2.0 e-book manager released

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech

    Heise reports that the major change in version from 1.48 to the newly released version 2.0 of the Calibre e-book management software are not apparent in its interface or feature list. However, on the inside the developers have converted the code to the Qt 5 GUI library and thus eliminated quite a few errors which were due to the Qt 4 library previously used. In particular, errors in text display should therefore be a thing of the past. Nevertheless, Calibre 2.0 no longer supports Windows XP and OS X versions prior to 10.7 (Lion). Anyone using these dated operating systems would be better off sticking with Calibre 1.48.

    screenshot of Calibre

    However, the developers of version 2.0 have still added some new features. The software can now also synchronise e-books under OS X with MTP mobile devices (Android phones and tablets). There is a new Mark Books tool that can be used to mark books temporarily. The mark appears as a little pushpin icon next to the book and all marks are automatically cleared by restarting calibre. A detailed version history can be seen in the changelog.

  • China to launch a sovereign OS to counter Windows

    Steve WoodsLinux, Politics, Tech

    According to the official Xinhua news agency, China is hoping to launch a sovereign operating system in October in order to “wean” itself off operating systems developed abroad such as Windows, Le Monde Informatique reports. The Chinese OS, which still has no official name according to Xinhua, will be offered initially for desktop PCs, before being rolled out subsequently for smartphones. It will probably be a Linux distribution that has been revised and fixed by the Chinese security agencies and will be named China Operating System (COS). Xinhua quoted a report by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technologies (MIIT), the organisation entrusted inter alia with the regulation and development of the software sector in China. “We are hoping to launch a desktop PC operating system in October to support [local] app stores,” said Ni Guangnan of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Mr Ni heads up the alliance for the development of the official operating system created last March in the People’s Republic of China.

    China Operating System image

    According to the MIIT, Mr Ni cites the end of support for Windows XP and the ban on Windows 8 on Chinese government computers as an opportunity for the launch of a domestic OS. Earlier this year the Chinese authorities banned the use of Windows 8 on government computers, a move triggered following the end of support for Windows XP in April. Prior to that the authorities denounced Microsoft regarding the ending of security updates for the 13 year-old operating system. China was historically a bastion of Windows XP, largely due to the large-scale pirating of Microsoft software. Another reason for China’s discontent is thought to be the revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    China has long disagreed with foreign technology companies, particularly Microsoft and Google – but also sometimes with Apple – as regards their impact and influence in the country. However, the animosity increased considerably last month when the Chinese anti-trust authorities raided several Microsoft offices, seizing computers and documents within the scope of their investigation. This investigation was launched following complaints made in July 2013 into the manner in which Microsoft Windows and Office are linked and the compatibility between Windows and Office.

    A Red Flag base for the sovereign Chinese OS?

    Screenshot of Red Flag Linux
    Screenshot of Red Flag Linux. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
    China has been working on its own operating system for nearly fifteen years. Launched in August 1999, the Red Flag Linux distribution was partly financed by the government’s Information Ministry. The same year Red Flag was recommended as the replacement for Windows 2000 on all government PCs. The tensions at that time between the Chinese government and Microsoft were the origin for this directive. However, this local Linux distribution never took off and Red Flag Software, the company behind this local Chinese OS, closed down this year. However, the Red Flag OS is going to be revived.

    A report published by the MIIT on 20th August states that the assets of Red Flag Software have been acquired by Penta Wan Jing Information Technology Industry Group for RMB 38.62 mn. This sudden new development was also officially recorded by Mr Ni, who approved Penta Wan Jing’s acquisition and stated that a revitalised Red Flag distribution could contribute to the project to create a sovereign operating system.

  • Happy birthday, Linux

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    Tux - the Linux kernel mascotThe operating system based on the Linux kernel (sometimes also called GNU/Linux. Ed.), in all its myriad forms, is 23 years old today.

    It all began with an email by a young Helsinki University student called Linus Torvalds to the comp.os.minix newsgroup.

    Linus’ original email is reproduced below.

    Hello everybody out there using minix –

    I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

    I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them 🙂

    Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

    PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

    I love Linus’ modest assertion that his creation wouldn’t be big and professional like GNU! 🙂

  • Lombardy to move to open source

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

    flag of LombardyFree software for public sector organisations will become a reality, at least in the Lombardy region, according to Italy’s Today news site. An agenda item submitted by the Five Star Movement, which makes provision for promoting the use of free computer systems in the public sector, has been approved by the regional council.

    “In Europe and in forward-looking Italian organisations, open source has been adopted comprehensively and is useful in saving public funds; in fact it also ensures financial savings due to the possibility of public sector organisations re-using software,” explains the Five Star Movement’s Eugenio Casalino, who presented the agenda item in the regional council.

    In 2012 the Italian government did away with a grant of €40 mn. to provide Italian public sector organisations with Microsoft software.

    Hat tip: Paolo Vecchi.

  • LibreOffice 4.3 ready for download

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Via its blog, The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3; this is the 8th major release of the free and open source office suite since the birth of the project in September 2010.

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

    LibreOffice 4.3 offers a large number of improvements and new features, including:

    • Document interoperability: support for MS’ OOXML Strict, OOXML graphics improvements (DrawingML, theme fonts, preservation of drawing styles and attributes), embedding OOXML files inside another OOXML file, support for 30 new Excel formulas, support for MS Works spreadsheets and databases, as well as Mac legacy file formats such as ClarisWorks, ClarisResolve, MacWorks, SuperPaint and more.
    • Comment management: comments can now be printed in the document margin, formatted in a better way, and imported and exported – including nested comments – in ODF, DOC, OOXML and RTF documents, for improved productivity and better collaboration.
    • Intuitive spreadsheet handling: Calc now allows several tasks to be carried out more intuitively, thanks to the smarter highlighting of formulas in cells, the display of the number of selected rows and columns in the status bar, the ability to start editing a cell with the content of the cell above it and the user being fully able to select text conversion models.
    • 3D models in Impress: support of animated 3D models in the new open glTF format, plus initial support for Collada and kmz files that are found in Google Warehouse, in order to add a fresh new look and animations to keynotes (support for this feature is currently on Windows and Linux versions only).

    LibreOffice 4.3 also supports “monster” paragraphs exceeding 65,000 characters in length. This is an example of an 11 years old bug solved thanks to the modernization of the old OpenOffice source code. In addition, the accessibility technology on Windows has become a standard feature, thanks to the improvements based on IBM’s IAccessible2 framework.

    The full list of new features and improvements of LibreOffice 4.3 is available on the wiki.

    According to the Coverity Scan service, the quality of LibreOffice source code has improved dramatically during the last two years, with a reduction of the defect density per 1,000 lines of code from an above the average 1.11 to an industry leading 0.08. Read Coverity’s report for more information.

    LibreOffice 4.3 and LibreOffice 4.2.6 – which will be released on Friday – are available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions and templates to enhance the software’s functionality and add specific features can be found at http://extensions.libreoffice.org/.

  • Fortune and cowsay get egalitarian

    Steve WoodsLinux, Oddities, Open Source, Tech

    Fortune is a simple program that displays a pseudo-random message from a database of quotations that first appeared in Version 7 of Unix and runs on the command line on Unix-like systems.

    Cowsay is another simple program running on the command line which generates ASCII pictures of a cow with a message.

    I have used fortune and cowsay in the past to demonstrate the use of a pipe | which feeds the output of one program and uses it as the input for the next program.

    Today running fortune | cowsay yielded the message in the image below.

    cowsay showing output reading equal bytes for women

    The message is most apposite as half the human race is under-represented in IT and other technical fields.

    In March this year The Guardian reported as follows:

    In 2005, women made up 24% of computer science students. By 2010, that figure had dropped to 19%, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. A 2012 report from Creative Skillset found that only 29% of the interactive media industry in the UK is female, and the majority hold positions in art and design and communications rather than engineering.

    The Guardian’s report concluded that

    There is a long way to go before there is parity between the genders in the technology industry. But every baby step made has a tiny effect on the representational content of the diverse audience that uses software and hardware. Developers are known to develop solutions for themselves.

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