At last! An article on stuff outlining the real problems with 'shared source' initiatives. I have been especially disappointed with tertiary institutions who have taken up this offer in the past as it has the potential to eat into the very heart of the next generation of OSS developers. The risk in the education sector is even worse as even the fact that you attended an institution who signed an agreement may be an issue although you may never have seen the code yourself.

Conspiracy theorists could have a field day...

A short article on stuff covering the recent visit of Mary Ann Fisher and GOVIS Open Source seminar. Interesting takeaways are:

• gov.uk saved 2.3 billion euro by switching to a Linux based procurement systems
• only 2% of companies see benefit in a in a total OSS stack, so hybrid systems are here for a while folks

Still lots of opportunity out there!

This article in Computerworld covers reaction to the State Services Commission OSS guidelines document here. There was a bit of discussion about this at the recent GOVIS Open Source Seminar as well. And of course the NZOSS mailing list has been fairly smoking!

The NZOSS is in the process of formulating a response to the SSC to express our concerns about some aspects of the guidelines.

And the byline is "But one third of companies have no board of directors or business plan"...

Not much depth to this article on Compterworld unfortunately. E.g What form does the Open Source software take?

Nevermind. We now have a number to bandy about in public.

And the Open Source connection? Well, according to the article on ComputerWorld, Kumar reformatted his laptop to run the Linux OS after the government started investigating the company.

Excellent to see the former CEO of Computer Associates believes Open Source software is ready for the desktop... not sure I'd ask him for a reference though.

And one to cheer me up. A nice little Computerworld article covering the use of Plone within the NZ Govt. Unfortunately due to the timing (a conflict with LCA2006) I missed Cyrille Bonnet of 3months.com recently giving a presentation to the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Computer Society about this.

Could possibly be a subject for a 'World Tour of New Zealand' though...

A nice article in Computerworld about Koha, the Open Source Library Management system. Chris's presentation at Linux Conf 2006 was very interesting. I was struck yet again by how much New Zealanders achieve overseas while being ignored at home. Koha is a case in point. Used by Libraries, Universities and businesses all over the world and there are, wait for it, two libraries in NZ using it. Go figure.

An interesting article on The Register. Regular Reg. readers will be aware of that august publications impartial and objective approach to reporting... no, wait, that must be some other paper...

Anyway, it's under Andrew Orlowski's byline if that's any help. I still can't quite shake the feeling that the GPL V2 vs. V3 argument is a bit of a storm in a teacup at this point. The draft GPL V3 is out looking for feedback and drawing up battle lines at this early stage seems a bit premature to me. On the other hand, given the personalities of the people involved in the document to date I'm not entirely sure that there will be a great deal of modification to it either, no matter what feedback is received. I will, as always, be prepared to be pleasantly surprised*.

This little gem comes from the Sunday Times in the UK. The story is titled 'Why not break free?' and the yoghurt comment comes from one Nicholas McGrath who is listed as Microsofts Director of Platform Strategy. We've clearly moved on from being carcinogenic and un-american...

The story itself is reasonably accurate and worth a read. The couple of errors I noticed may very well be due to an over-zealous sub-editor getting their hooks into it.