Articles, stories and opinion pieces on open source that do not necessarily reflect the official position of the NZOSS.
All opinions are the authors own.
I know, I know, it's difficult to do sometimes with peer pressure or FOMO being such relentless forces in our lives today... but that in itself is part of the problem and manifests itself in some truly fringe thinking being accepted as mainstream... Food for thought comes in the form of two articles, one about the US DoJ AntiTrust case against Google and the other an opinion piece in The Register about preventing the abuses the web giants of today partake in.
Hold my beer, as some might say... especially those that work at The Register. There is a nice piece written by Matthew Hughes in their 'Personal Tech' section on how to get started with a refurbished laptop of some sort or another running our favourite OS.
One of the things that has always mystified me is the mad rush to 'the cloud' for Microsoft Office products... they are pretty large cyber attack vectors when they are running on your PC and there is no reason to think they won't continue to be when they are in 'the cloud'... except you will no longer have control over them at all!
In the past New Zealand has shown great foresight and leadership in the world by staying true to its national ethos, even at the cost of breaking from international conventions. From recognising a woman's right to vote and denying US nuclear powered warships the right to transit, NZ has shown the willingness to make a principled stand, even if doing so was seen by many as risky. These decisions have proven to be some of our best moments, and have helped to shape our national pride and culture. New Zealand again has an opportunity to make a principled stand.
Apologies received to date:
Ewen McNeill
Please post any further apologies as comments.
Many members of the NZOSS have snapped up early bird tickets for Linux.conf.au which is being held in Wellington, New Zealand in January 2010.
As an indication of interest in this event, early bird tickets sold out nearly *two* weeks before the close off dates. Registrations for normal tickets remain open until Dec 24th, but it is worth getting in quick.
Due to a hardware failure the NZOSS mailing lists were offline for about 2 days.
(The website is hosted seperately and is unaffected.)
In the interim we've set up a 'manual distribution system' which will redistribute posts to all 'subscribers' but without all the typical listserv features - there's no web archive, and no automated subscribe/unsubscribe process.
[New mailing lists are coming - now sooner rather than later - so subscribers should stay tuned]
If you wish to join the NZOSS OpenChat List; Remove yourself from it; or have any questions, please email sysadmin{at}nzoss.org.nz and i'll address it as I can [manually]. Again, apologies for the inconvenience.
I should make subscribers aware, however, that in the current state of the 'list', any 'bounces' generated through problems with 'subscribers' email addresses will go back to the original poster. This is a potential privacy issue and for this reason I draw peoples attention to this. If you have an issue with this behavior, I can remove you from the distribution list - please drop me an email to the above address.
Cheers
Mark Foster
NZOSS Admin team.
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.
An article on stuff taking a look at what Microsoft need to do to participate in the new world order. Nice plug for the Open Source/Open Standards business model.
I'm sure Mr. Gates knows all this but there's no harm in repeating it.
