Legal aspects of FOSS in the enterprise

2009-04-20 by mjr

Raphael Bauduin emailed me to say that he’s organising an event for Profoss: “(28 april in Brussels) will take a look at legal aspects of the use of FOSS in professional environments. http://www.profoss.eu/events

It will bring interesting information for most ICT professionals, even for those specialised in FOSS, but if this is not for you, it might be of interest to people around you (your boss or colleagues), so don’t hesitate to spread the information around you.”

There is problem with the current website: it requires javascript. An updated site without that problem will appear “very soon”.

If you go to the event, I’d love to hear how it goes – please leave a comment on this article!

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KohaCon09 remotely

2009-04-18 by mjr

Irma and Bob of CALYX information essentials wrote in:

“For those interested and not able to participate in the KohaCon 09 action in Plano.

Some conferees are Twittering: Cover it live or pipes.

Some are blogging

Some again are having their photo taken on flickr.

Presentations are starting to show up on slideshare tag kohacon09 and twitter #kohacon

It sounds like a great conference!”

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SPI April 2009

2009-04-15 by mjr

The monthly board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 15 April) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted, but a bit late, so there’s another discussion about that going on behind the scenes. The frustrating thing is that fixing the announcements doesn’t really need selling out to Google or anything complicated – simply using “at” on a server to schedule the email would work… I know, because that’s pretty much what I do at TTLLP for routine member emails.

Only the secretary has posted any report at the time of writing and there are no discussion items. There are two sets of minutes up for approval, but one contains at least one error which I’ve already described by email. Should be a short meeting, though.

Once again (aren’t Wednesday evenings awful for me?), I may be without a stable network connection during the meeting. Even so, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted.

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Do Some Good on Good Friday

2009-04-10 by mjr

Bloggers Unite for Earth Day
from BloggersUnite resources

It’s Good Friday and even if you don’t believe the stories, maybe you’d like to do some good today. Here are some things you might want to support:-

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Switched over to LLU and ADSL-2+

2009-04-09 by mjr

A couple of months ago, I switched over to ThePhoneCoop’s LLU package. The new service is good so far. The ADSL is blazingly fast (I wonder if it will remain so good) and the main drawbacks so far are a lack of reverse DNS (currently escalating that one up through tech support) and a slightly noisy dialling tone on the phone. I was initially switched to a dynamic IP address (which was a change I wasn’t told about in advance), but got a static on request so we could restrict the VPNs a bit more.

As usual, LUGgers were a source of help when it looked like going a bit wrong. Thanks to oddbloke for positive feedback about Buffalo routers (they work fine with OpenWRT, but not tried ADSL). Big thanks to Noodles for pointing out that the Buffalo router I linked wasn’t an ADSL router, despite being listed as such, that the only ADSL chipset to have full open source support is the AR7 (but the wifi is dodgy) and that the Broadcom chipsets have 2.6 support but maybe with a binary blob.

I’m still not sure if a new router is necessary. The infernal Belkin seems to be working, but it’s disconnecting and rebooting a lot more often. I seem to be on the TalkTalk/CPW network – anyone know of problems with Belkin routers? I’ve not seen anything yet.

Also, who else has unbundled and how was it for you?

Posted in ThePhoneCoop | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Why is public and charity money paying for the private sector’s marketing?

2009-04-08 by mjr

The workshop I went to recently and the ICT Champions in general (“Website Under Development” – release early, anyone?) seem to be funded by public and charity money. As I mentioned, the worst thing was all the needless promotion of certain companies’ products, so why are they promoting private products instead of being neutral and open?

That’s bad for Britain, bad for the competing products that are co-produced by the Voluntary and Community Sector and bad for the VCS workers because it trains them in single-tool methods instead of transferable skills. Let the private sector pay for their own adverts! Why can’t we stop making this mistake?

Which brings me to the other problem with that ICT advice: well-meaning common-sector businesses like ours can’t update it autonomously, for two reasons:

  1. All the texts I saw were under various Non-Commercial and No Derivative licences which make them hazardous or unusable to IT support businesses.
  2. Particularly on Free and Open Source Software, the advice is at best misleading and unhelpful. This is very frustrating: based on our private work and success in explaining things, I’m sure we could do better, but for various reasons, no-one is paying for us to publish that. Instead, someone’s paying to publish statements like “There’s no such thing as ‘open source'” written by someone from an association that includes Microsoft and Oracle.

Again, why is public and charity money paying for the private sector’s marketing? Why is it published under blocking copyright terms, scattering broken glass across the path just built? Where can we get funding to publish our explanations?

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Cooperatives in the New York Times

2009-04-06 by mjr

“NCBA invites you to pick the Monday, April 6th edition of the New York Times to check out the front section for a very special advertorial on cooperative business.

NCBA will receive a copy of the Advertorial to place on its Web Site on Monday and we will distribute a link so you can post it on yours in the next edition of the eNews. However, we hope that you’ll let everyone at your cooperative know to pick up the Monday New York Times as everyone in the cooperative community should be proud to be part of this national effort to promote cooperative awareness.”

These are challenging times for all businesses, but cooperatives are well-placed to weather the storm. I’ll report back from our Bristol co-ops event later or tomorrow.

Posted in Cooperatives | 1 Comment

A Question of Debian ClamAV, Freshclam and Volatile

2009-04-02 by mjr

I’m not a big fan of virus-scanning on the mailservers (I think you should bolt your email-sending computers right down so that viruses and spambots can’t send email), but it seems to be a necessity these days. So, I was a bit late starting on mailserver-antivirus and mainly pay attention to it when it goes badly wrong. I’ve got clamav installed where needed, but recently I’m seeing clamav hang, eat CPU and cause postfix to defer all emails while logging nothing useful. Often this seems to be soon after freshclam kicks in. Anyone else seen this problem? Moreover, anyone managed to narrow it down and fix it?

On some systems, instead of having freshclam, we have clamav-data from volatile which seems to work better, but are they missing out on anything by doing that? Does it lag a bit behind and download a bit more?

Is there a third option, either another way of feeding clamav, or an alternative debian package, which you think people should consider?

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Cooperatives-SW Board and Housing Enquiry, Bristol, 6 April 2009

2009-04-02 by mjr

With our AGM in Plymouth rescheduled until June or July, the Cooperatives-SW board will meet in Bristol on Monday. Cooperatives-SW aims to represent co-operative and mutual enterprises in the region. As with previous meetings, if you’d like to meet up beforehand, let me know through this blog, identi.ca or email. Bristol is near HQ, so I expect I’ve met most people there who want to talk to me.

The meeting is just before a co-operative and mutual housing hearing. Places will be limited so please contact CDA (Brave Ltd) on 0117 989 2536 if you would like to reserve one.

Posted in Cooperatives | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

You’re a Damn Fool

2009-04-01 by mjr

As usual, the TTLLP office will open noon ’til mid-evening on 1 April. I’ve already noted one thing on identi.ca that might be an April Fool’s joke (surely it’s not real) and we’ve enough to do without double-checking everything we’re told.

Further, timezones and international communications (we work with companies from +1100 to -0900 IIRC) makes April Fool’s jokes really tedious. Unless it’s done really carefully, the joker is probably the fool, either too early (31 March) or too late (afternoon) for some of the targets.

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