Open Source News

Two thousand open source applications for the public sector — published on Feb 03, 2010

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The European Union's Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR.eu) as of today is offering public administrations access to more than two thousand free and open source applications.

ES: Administrations sponsor extension of open source network monitoring tool — published on Feb 01, 2010

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Several public administrations in Spain are sponsoring the development of Zorb, an open source extension to Nagios, an open source network monitoring tool. Zorb allows users to fine-tune the processing of events generated from the monitored instances, hosts and services. Zorb has just been published on the OSOR Forge.

DE: Rural district uses open source to manage IT at schools — published on Jan 31, 2010

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The rural district (Landkreis) Wittmund in northwestern Germany is using GNU/Linux to centrally manage computers usage at eleven of its schools, reports Univention, one of the open source IT companies involved in the project.

UK: Government tightens procurement demands in open source policy — published on Jan 31, 2010

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The government of the United Kingdom earlier this week published a revision of its open source action plan. Key changes are on procurement, the cabinet says.

DK: Danish state administrations to use ODF — published on Jan 29, 2010

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The Danish parliament and the Danish minister for Science this morning agreed that the Danish state administrations should use open standards, including the Open Document Format (ODF), starting on 1 April 2011. A formal vote on the agreement is planned for next Tuesday.

Management tools for SMEs published as open source by Spain — published on Jan 29, 2010

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Comerzzia, tools that can help small and medium enterprises to manage their offices and points of sales, has just been released as open source by Centatic, the Spanish government's resource centre on open source and open standards.

German government publishes XML converter on the OSOR Forge — published on Jan 29, 2010

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Genericoder, an open source XML converter, has just been published by Germany's Bundesstelle für Informationstechnik (Federal Office for Information Technology) in Cologne. The application converts lists of csv code into XML files that are compliant to OASIS Genericode Version 1.0, but according to its developers can be adapted to carry out other transformations.

IT: Public administration's portal builder adds business intelligence — published on Jan 28, 2010

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The Java Agile Portal System (jAPS 2.0), open source software designed to help Italy's public administration's build specialised websites, is about to get boosted with open source business intelligence (BI) options.

ES: Open Source GIS systems to be used by Spanish Wine makers — published on Jan 27, 2010

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Wine makers in Spain will soon be able to use the gvSIG open source geographic information services developed in a large part with the help of several of Spain's public administrations.

PL: Police considers moving to open source — published on Jan 27, 2010

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The Polish Police force wants to increase its use of free and open source software in order to cut costs, announces Andrzej Trela, Deputy Chief of Police and responsible for logistics, in an interview in the Police force's monthly newsletter, published on 15 January.

EU: Open Universities open source master published first two books — published on Jan 19, 2010

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The first two course books have just been published online for what is intended to become a university master programme on free and open source software and open standards.

Commissioner-designate Digital Agenda: public sector should use open standards — published on Jan 19, 2010

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The Commissioner-designate Neelie Kroes wants the public sector to increase its use of open standards, she said in her appearance before a European Parliament committee on 14 January.

HU: Open standards made mandatory for public administrations — published on Jan 15, 2010

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Open standards have been made mandatory for the IT systems of Hungary's public administrations. The Hungarian parliament voted in favour of amendments prescribing open standards, to a law on electronic government services, on 14 December. The changes received 197 votes in favour, one against and 146 abstentions, according to the Open Standard Alliance, a Hungarian advocacy group that lobbyed in favour of the amendments.

EU: European Parliament restart workgroup on open source software — published on Jan 15, 2010

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A number of members of the European Parliament are about to start an informal cross party working group on 'new media, free and open source software and open information society'. The intergroup is expected to begin in February, with the support of the European People's Party (EPP), the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats (Alde) and the European Greens.

FR: French Military contributes code to Mozilla Thunderbird — published on Dec 15, 2009

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The latest release of the open source email client Mozilla Thunderbird contains code from the French Military. The involvement of the Ministry of Defence with the free software email client goes back to 2006 when it defined requirements for added security features to Mozilla Thunderbird .