skip to main |
skip to sidebar
There are so many parts to the institutions running the European
Union that it's easy to lose sight of them all and their varied
activities. For example, one of the lesser-known European Parliament
bodies is the Directorate-General for Internal Policies. You might
expect the studies that it commissions to be deadly dull, but some turn
out to be not just highly interesting but hugely important.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The Norwegian Ministry of Finance seems to be taking a bit of stick
at the moment. It wants all the existing cash registers in the country
thrown out and replaced with new ones, as the Norwegian site E24 reports (via Thomas Steen and Google Translate)
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Recently I've written about several moves towards mandating openness in various ways - in the UK,
Spain and Portugal. That's all well and good, but what people want to
know is whether moving to open solutions brings benefits - in
particular, whether it saves money. Fortunately, we have a long-running
experiment being carried out by the city of Munich that provides us
with some hard data.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
A couple of weeks ago, I was reviewing
Spain's move to open standards. The good news is that elsewhere on the
Iberian peninsular, Portugal, too, is doing great work in this area.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Last week I wrote a piece suggesting that FRAND is dying. It was written in the wake of the major UK decision on open standards, and was mostly based on odd bits of anecdotal evidence. So I was rather pleased to learn from Techrights that Spain made a similar decision some years back, something I missed at the time.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Last week's big announcement
by the UK government was principally about procurement, detailing the
new rules that will apply when government departments acquire software.
Naturally, then, it concentrated on the details of that approach, and
how it would be deployed and enforced. A key part of that was using
open standards to create a level playing field for all companies,
regardless of whether they offered open source or proprietary code.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
In the wake of the news that Android sales now represent around 75% of the global smartphone market
during the most recent quarter, there's still some surprise that this
has happened. After all, this was a sector that Apple absolutely
dominated just a few years ago. Some find it hard to understand how
Android has pulled this off in just five years.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the main forces driving the move to open access is the idea
that if the public has already paid for research through taxation or
philanthropy, then it's not reasonable to ask people to pay again in
order to read the papers that are published as a result. The strength
of this argument is probably why, in part, open access continues to gain
wider acceptance around the world.
On
Techdirt.
In a huge win for open standards, open source and the public, the
long-awaited UK government definition of open standards has come down
firmly on the side of RF, not FRAND. The UK government's approach is enshrined in an important new document defining what it calls Open Standards Principles.
Annex 1 provides definitions and a glossary, including the following
crucial definition of what is required for a standard to be considered
open:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
I've been noting "hopeful" moves towards the wider use of open source
by the UK government for so long that I daren't do it again. But the following is certainly worth mentioning:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Back in February I wrote
about an exciting project from the Cabinet Office: a complete overhaul
of the UK government's "citizen-facing" Web sites. It was exciting in
part because it was rather good, which made a nice change for a
government computing project, but more particularly because it was open
source through and through.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Long-suffering readers may recall that the issue of FRAND licensing
in the context of open standards cropped up quite a lot this year. We
still don't know what the final outcome of the UK consultation on open
standards will be, but whatever happens there, we can be sure that FRAND will remain one of the hot topics.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Linux went from being a cool personal hack in a bedroom to software
that would eventually change world just over 21 years ago when Linus
sent out his famous "Hello everybody out there using minix" message that
invited people to join in. As I noted last month, that open, collaborative approach was really quite new and proved key to the uptake and development of Linux.
On
The H Open.
Last week, I mentioned
that I attended the Open Forum Europe 2012 conference. Preceeding it
was the first meeting of the Open Forum Academy (OFA), of which I am a
member. Here's how it describes itself:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Neelie Kroes is not your average European Commissioner. Before she
became the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, her current post,
she was European Commissioner for Competition, and in that capacity made
a speech about open standards in 2008, which included the following statements:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Reports about open source tend to be rather one-sided: either
polemics against, or propaganda for, depending on who's paying for them.
That makes a new report written by Jim Norton, former President of the
BCS, with the rather unoriginal title "Open for Business", particularly welcome, since it has been sponsored by Amadeus, which describes itself as follows:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
The term "open source" was coined back in February 1998, and
initially it applied only to software. But as the power of open,
collaborative development became apparent, other spheres have adopted
the "open" tag along with the underlying approach. Here's the latest
example -- open source planes:
On
Techdirt.
One of the most important messages in the history of free software – and computing – was posted 21 years ago, on 25 August 1991:
On
The H Open.
There is a natural tendency to concentrate on what is happening
locally, and so most of the stories here on Open Enterprise are about
what's happening in the UK, or developments
that affect it directly. But it's important to remember that open
source is a global development, and that things are bubbling away
everywhere, all the time.
On
Open Enterprise blog.