This is an article in the Australian Computer world about Peter Quinn, the erstwhile CIO of the State Government of Massachusetts and one of the chief proponents of the move to the Open Document Format.
The excellent news is that he is scheduled to speak at the upcoming LinuxWorld Conf & Expo in Sydney. This would be a really great session to attend coming from someone who was definately in the front lines.
Get over there if you can.
The message below is copied from a Postgresql mailing list. A vote of confidence in Open Source.
Brent Wood
The Consolidated Court Automation Programs (CCAP) of the Wisconsin Court System has migrated to PostgreSQL for all of its Circuit Court web operations. Eight production databases have been converted, six of them around 180 GB each, holding statewide information replicated real-time from 72 county databases. The central copies support audit functions, statewide statistics and report generation, and this web site:
http://wcca.wicourts.gov/
Given the success of this effort, we expect to be converting the other court databases to PostgreSQL.
This is the NZOSS' new Constitution, as of November 2019.
Table of Contents
Good to see some of that heading towards an Open Source project in this article on stuff. Some of the money is earmarked for the OSVLE and modules for Moodle. Interestingly one of the recipients is Telford Rural PolyTech. They were mentioned at the GOVIS OSS as one of the organisations who couldn't afford to participate in any proprietary e-learning environment and had recently set up a Moodle based system. Nice to see that they are looking developing modules themselves. That's what community is about.
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:
Still lots of opportunity out there!
With the rise of the internet it has becoming ever more important that digital data can be exchanged freely among people, no matter where they are, how much money they have or what language they speak. While this sounds like a natural idea, it is far from widely accepted among proprietary software developers, many of whom seek to control their consumers through vendor lock in, i.e. the process of using restricted, undocumented or patented data formats to ensure that users find it very difficult to switch to alternative applications or systems.
Open Standards are designed to describe data formats such that anyone may read, write or update data using tools that suit their needs at the time. Open Standards are generally determined and agreed upon as a result of free and open discussions between all interested parties. Once defined, Open Standards may be implemented by anyone who wishes to write an application to access the data. The management of on Open Standard is usually performed by an independant body that is not controlled by any one vendor organisation although there is nothing stopping a vendor from participating in the standards definition process if they wish. In fact vendor participation in the an Open Standard is encouraged as a means to widen the acceptance of the standard.
Free and Open Source Software is simply computer software that provides its users with specific freedoms that are not usually available with commercial or proprietary software. There are various subtly different interpretations of what these freedoms should be - these are formalised in the definitions provided by two major groups:
The Berkley System Distributions or BSD's may be regarded as the forerunners of Linux and other Open Source projects. They were the original 'free' unix systems however there were some legal challenges made in the 1980's that caused some problems. These challenges were resolved in the BSD's favour and now there is a stable community built around them. They don't have as many applications available out of the box as Linux however because they support many of the same open standards it is usually a realatively simple task to port an application if required.
Because the BSD's have been around for longer than Linux they are regarded as being more mature however the development community isn't as large and support for some hardware isn't as well catered for as with Linux. They are ideally suited as an open replacement for proprietary UNIX systems. They also use the BSD license, rather than the GPL as used by Linux.
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.
