Admin: Listserv Outage

Apologies to anyone who noticed a loss of service @ lists.nzoss.org.nz this morning between 0100 and 0900 NZDT. A power glitch in the central Wellington area caused the server concerned to drop briefly - but also caused the network it connects to to experience an outage for several hours. Any email waiting should now have dequeued, and all is back up and running.

Copyright Recommendations relieve Creative Freedom Foundation

The release of a cabinet paper today by Minister of Justice Simon Power was a relief to the Creative Freedom Foundation which had been opposing Internet disconnection on accusation. Bronwyn Holloway-Smith, Director of the Creative Freedom Foundation was relieved on reading the details of the Cabinet paper, saying ”this new proposal steers well clear of that [disconnection] approach, respecting due process and the principle of being innocent until proven guilty by experts.”

ACTA Shenanigans Disappoint

The Ministry of Economic Development have continued to refuse opening of the text of the ACTA agreement currently under negotiation. In a meeting with the Ministry today Don Christie, President of the NZOSS, asked if the Ministry could publish a section of the text. After leaks of the text earlier in the year there is concern that the agreement will force legislative changes that were strongly opposed by a large portion of the New Zealand IT industry, including the NZOSS and InternetNZ.

NZ Herald interviews President of NZOSS

Don Christie is more than the President of the NZOSS. He has been operating his Wellington based IT company, Catalyst IT for 12 years. In this NZ Herald article he describes the principles he founded his business on, and how the relationship between the open source community and commercial organisations such as his work. Catalyst are involved heavily with the public sector, but are also addressing the needs of educational institutions.

Public Sector Remix Launches IT Vendor Capability Survey

The New Zealand Open Source Society and Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Information Management today launched an IT vendor capability survey, as part of the Public Sector Remix project.

The Remix project involves a number of central, regional and local government agencies working together to trial free software for common desktop tasks such as document management, mail, calendar and browser-based information services.

InternetNZ and Creative Freedom Slam Secret Copyright Agreement

InternetNZ and the Creative Freedom group have slammed a change of direction in the latest round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations which are seeking to cut off peoples Internet connections for copyright infringement. Earlier this year the Creative Freedom group promoted an Internet Blackout in support of repealing changes to the Copyright Act that have cut peoples connections if they commit copyright infringement.

Users Tout Python in Education

The New Zealand Python User Group is promoting Python as a programming language ideal for introducing students to software development. The group claims Python is one of the closest programming language to the English language and is therefore very simple to learn. As evidence of the simplicity of Python they point to Otago University who have decided to teach Python as part of an introductory course to programming.