Free Software Linux

The very limited use of FOSS in the UK’s education sector has long been a source of much puzzlement and even anger - from this side of the IT divide at least. In the last year or so we have, happily, seen a rise in the background noise level, and more recently with BECTA’s activities and the award of the approved supplier status to Sirius IT as signs that things are finally changing.

Halleluya The Inquirer has broken the news that the UK Government, helped by BECTA, has finally approved at least two companies to be official suppliers of Open Source Software into our Education sector. OPEN SOURCE companies have been granted official permission to supply software to the UK public sector for the first time in British history.

I’m not quite sure I fully grasp what is going on with this (some would say I never do) but maybe it might be of interest to other readers and hopefully someone will come along and explain a bit more. I was looking about on-line the other day just following my (rather large) nose around the ‘Anthony Baggett’s theme being used by Number 10 Downing Street’ story. And I came across something I don’t really understand. Perhaps others might be able to shed some light on what might be going on here?

Here is the output of a Linux command called tree on the original contents of the theme that NMM claim to only have used the stylesheet from1.

This is a post largely related to the response that David Smith of New Media Maze posted yesterday regarding the farce of their web site development for Number 10 Downing Street.

This is quite amazing stuff really. You just couldn’t make up a better story.

The Number 10 website fiasco just keeps going.

New Media Maze, that “Full Service New Media Agency”, look to have really screwed up. Not only have they nicked a free Wordpress template and removed the attribution and removed the license, but it seems the site itself is actually full of bugs and errors too.

Being “that-kind-of-a-bloke”, I thought I’d dig a bit further into the Number 10 Steals Free Wordpress Theme story Here’s the background:

Number 10’s new website, from our beloved government who are such strong users and supporters of Open Source Software [NOT], is running on Wordpress. This isn’t actually big news now. There’s plenty of comment about that on the web via Google.

 

 Customers, Partners Run Top Supercomputers on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for High Performance Computing

Press Release

World’s three most powerful supercomputers run SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell

WALTHAM, Mass.— 11 Jun 2008— Supercomputers around the world are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell®. According to TOP500, a project that tracks and detects trends in high-performance computing, SUSE Linux Enterprise is the Linux* of choice on the world’s largest HPC supercomputers today. Of the top 50 supercomputers worldwide, 40 percent are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise, including the top three – IBM* eServer Blue Gene at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, IBM eServer BlueGene/P (JUGENE) at the Juelich Research Center and SGI* Altix 8200 at the New Mexico Computing Applications Center.

ComputerWorld: "Web 2.0 tools could significantly improve state and local government communications with constituents, as well as aid in recruiting top college graduates for IT positions, according to speakers and users at the Pennsylvania Digital Government Summit here last week. However, speakers also warned that local and state government officials would have to move slowly, since they face perpetual IT funding and manpower constraints." Complete Story Advertisement: read more

From the article: The notional value of Europe’s investment in free/libre or open source software today is €22bn, representing 20.5pc of the region’s total software investment, a senior UN researcher will tell an intelligence briefing on open source in Dublin later this week. Rishab Ghosh, a senior researcher at the UN University in Maastricht, will tell the Open Ireland conference in Dublin that the spend in the US on free/libre or open source software (FLOSS) stands at €36bn and accounts for 20pc of software spend in the US. Read More.

For those of you in the Washington, D.C. area, on Wednesday, June 4 Gartner, Inc., an information technology research and advisory company, presents Gartner InFocus Day: Government. Spend a full day exploring enterprise change strategies designed to help you drive change specific to your environment. The conference offers a highly-focused single track and interactive workshop style sessions aimed at everyone from CIOS to IT directors to non-technical, strategic government leaders.

The MetaVid project captures legislative proceedings and make full video streams accessible and searchable from the text transcripts. Check out MetaVid directly or search Pelosi read more

At last, some mainstream coverage of our financial system that is worthy of attention. Marketwatch - Paul Farrell does a nice job of covering Kevin Phillip's new book "Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics & the Crisis of American Capitalism." read more