Free Software Linux

Glyn Moody (See blogroll) has an absolutely cracking post on his Open Enterprise blog regarding a recent announcement from Russia. The really interesting bit for me is not the article itself so much, although it is indeed great news and very inspirational, but the comments that follow. Firstly, the main story. It is that Russia has had such a successful time using Open Source software in some School pilots that the government have decided to roll it out across ALL schools in Russia.

Here is a picture of our stand at the Woking Means Business show. Do you think we could fit a few more computers on it? Can you identify them all? There are actually two more under the desk that are not visible in the picture.

Hi all, we have a slight dilema and I thought it would be good to see if anyone “out there” had any thoughts or experience they could help us with. The company we use for hosting and who we are very happy with, Bytemark,  provide the hardware and support services that this and other sites of ours run on.  We are getting to a stage now where our server is quite sluggish at times and has a lot of old baggage that we could really do with cleaning up. Our plan is to get a second server and then to migrate just the services we need in a controlled fashion. Once that is accomplished and we are happy, we can then shutdown the old (this one) machine and stop paying for it.

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.

My regular desktop computer, Twoflower*, that I use for work and play is dying… Twoflower is pretty old now by PC terms and is becoming quite unreliable. I built it about 4 or 5 years ago I guess, although I can’t remember exactly when, and it has been a good workhorse until quite recently. But the time has finally come to move on.

I know I’m kind of preaching to the converted here but I have been thinking about ideas to promote OSS, and our company’s services, here in the UK. And I’m particularly thinking about this with regards to our current economic climate, i.e. very dodgy. For most of the readership of this blog it will come as no surprise that Open Source is a bloody great way to avoid spending money on software. That’s a very simple argument and one that has merit. But clearly capital cost isn’t the only answer and replacing existing infrastructure with something new, even if it is free, can be costly in other ways. So are there other benefits and factors where Open Source Software solutions can be of distinct benefit in these rather troubled times?

I switched on our new website this morning. It has taken far longer than I anticipated, but these things always do don’t they?

We don’t often talk directly about our business activities on this blog. But once in a while something happens that rightly deserves a mention. Our Open Source consulting business, The Open Learning Centre, has been very busy of late. We’ve been working with a household name hardware manufacturer and a very well known high-street retailer to deliver a really exciting and innovative product to the consumer market. Say hello to the webbook (click for a very big image).