Monthly Archives: February 2009

New #ukgovOSS Action Plan

Earlier this week, Tom Watson, Cabinet Office Parliamentary Secretary, published the Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan. It’s had a pretty mixed reaction, with mild scepticism (niq’s soapbox: Is gov.uk going open-source?) being the average reaction from … Continue reading

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Fairtrade Fortnight

This week and next week are Fairtrade Fortnight. As I’ve mentioned in discussions at the Co-operative Group, there are some drawbacks to Fairtrade (most of which can be overcome by trading with co-operatives locally), but it is worth supporting fairtrade … Continue reading

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Welcoming a helping hand

I’ve added the lovely k’s Helping Hand to Koha Community Blogs. I’m particularly pleased to see a site combining both Koha and Drupal, two of my current favourites. A bit more about the background to the site is over at … Continue reading

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Banking with Free Software/Firefox: MPS Italy

Websites I’ve just updated the online banking compatibility list after a report from Italy that Monte dei Paschi di Siena is not currently working for GNU/Linux users. Can anyone confirm they broke it, or tell us how to get it … Continue reading

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

OSI and FSF Licence Approval Comparison

The Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation are probably the two authorities on what is free and open source software that are better respected than the debian project. It’s fairly easy to see that the famous licences (GNU … Continue reading

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Three Releases: Debian, Co-op and Videos

Three things I really like have released recently:- Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (“Lenny”): I installed it on a laptop the weekend before going to a conference and I’m really impressed. It installed fairly neatly and was good-looking (gtk installer from USB … Continue reading

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The South West RDA’s Business Stakeholder Conference: Shooting the Economic Rapids

I was at this event back in November and they’ve just emailed me this week to point out the speeches and some recordings are now available online. The appointed Regional Development Agency is getting more powerful as our indirectly-elected South … Continue reading

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SPI February 2009

The monthly board meeting of SPI will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 11 Feb) at 20:00 UTC. Members may have seen that the meeting announcement came out on time – hooray! It looks like minutes may also catch … Continue reading

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Voice09 LiveBlog

After a few hiccoughs, I’m trying to gather live coverage of Voice09 in Birmingham today and tomorrow over on the software.coop site. I have access to the wifi, but picture uploads will mostly have to wait until I can bugfix … Continue reading

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Setting up and sustaining a global FOSS-based business (Ian Lynch)

Another Monday, start of the working week and I’m thinking about business again. Ian Lynch of The Learning Machine is a smart cookie who I’ve collaborated with before. He leads a free-software-based business which is very different from TTLLP’s cooperative … Continue reading

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