April 24th, 2010
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Reproduced from Business Review Online
Since early 2004, it has been the government’s stated policy to use open source software in the public sector wherever possible, as long as it offers the best value for money.
To date, the policy has had little impact. So will the latest tweaks to its open source Action Plan make a difference?
Software is “open source” when the source code is freely available to be viewed, shared or changed – things that you can’t do with more traditional proprietary software. Crucially, open source is also the cheaper option in many cases.
So how good is the government’s record on using open source so far?
Read the full article at Business Review Online
April 23rd, 2010
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OSS user group has noted two Open Source Related events that will be held in Malta during the month of April.
> Following last year’s success, 2i Ltd will be organising the World Plone Day on the 28th of April 2010. Registration at http://wpd.2iltd.com
> The user group also noted two recent adverts and articles on local papers stating that the Government of Malta will be launching an Open Source User Group for Open Source within Government. This will happen at MITA, Gattard Hse on the 30th of April 2010.
Registration by email at oss.mita@gov.mt
Follow more OSS related events.
March 31st, 2010
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Reproduced from OpenSource Magazine
At first glance, the ecosystem in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) world can seem a bit complicated. There are several ways to get software: project websites where you can download it directly, use a software management tool that your Linux distribution provides, or you may also be able to install a Linux distribution that includes everything you need right out of the box! Once you understand this ecosystem, you can find where your contributions would be most useful, and why contributing is beneficial to your organization and the FOSS community.
So, where does this all begin? FOSS often originates with a project which maintains the source code for the software and provides its own development and support infrastructure.
A Linux distribution is a carefully culled collection of software from these upstream projects which makes a complete operating system and even includes a lot of application software. This collection of software is tested and prepared to run securely and maintainably together. Debian is built upon this model.
Read the full article from OpenSource Magazine
March 13th, 2010
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Reproduced from Open Source Magazine
Interesting tidbit from the folks at Geeknet (They are the owners of SourceForge, Slashdot and Ohloh). OSS projects hosted on SourceForge are increasingly becoming more platform agnostic. Since early 2005, the percentage of projects that are platform agnostic has increased from approximately 50 percent to nearly 70 percent as of Q3 2009.
Here are some of the numbers:
- Amount of OSS Windows compatible projects has grown from 72 percent in 2005 to 82 percent in 2009. (This is approximately 350,000 of the total 433,000 OSS projects)
- Windows is the only operating system compatible with the top 10 all-time most downloaded projects on SourceForge
- 23 of the top 25 projects run on Windows and 14 of them run only on Windows
Read the full article from Open Source Magazine
Open Source at SUN