The European Commission when assigning funds sometimes paid little attention to projects’ overlapping, that it comes with no surprise considering that they don’t keep updated the European F/OSS-related research activities page.
Jean-Christophe Deprez - QualOSS project coordinator - in a email conversation told me that the EC eventually realized it, and asked few EC-funded projects to collaborate, as results from the Flossquality initiative.
Collection, aggregation and correlation of data fetched by open source public repositories is of great help when you need to assess open source product quality. Let’s see how things are going at QualOSS and what should we expect from them in the next future.
Continue reading ‘Open Source EC Funded Projects: QualOSS’
Having been both critical and supportive of some EU funded open source projects in the 6th framework program, I wish to have a look at promising or creditworthy open source related projects backed by the EU.
The Association for Competitive Technology criticized what they consider a bias in favour of open-source software in the European Commission’s plans. I wish to help to give public evidence revealing how our money has been spent on open source initiatives so far, possibly accelerating the dissemination process of results and findings.
Just raise your hand and let your voice be heard!
Today Italian bloggers protest against an Italian government bill introducing rules which will put at risk the internet freedom of speech in Italy.
See the English version of the press release to know more.
OpenOffice.org Security Project - the Security project’s Wiki currently covers all about digital signatures, encryption and document integrity, feel free to join and help with more items.
Magenta Lorem ipsum generator - an extension generating the dummy text Lorem ipsum.
OpenOffice.org New User Orientation - new-user orientation quick start guide by OpenOffice.org Ninja.
The European open source observatory opened up about one year ago, last February went into the wild 2.0 and now offers a free Virtual Forge service, aimed at giving a better understanding of hosted projects.
Europe keeps investing money to fund OSOR development, now trying to mimic Ohloh metrics and data, instead of spending energies to create synergies with others.
In the OSOR news Marco Battistoni, Unisys OSOR Technical Manager, says (emphasis is mine):
However setting up and operating such a repository can be very costly and time consuming (believe us, we know!): one has to buy servers, internet connection, install the necessary applications, hire experts to operate the site 24/7… This needs a lot of commitment both in human and in financial resources.
I’d prefer to see our money spent to create something new, or simply to share knowledge about interesting open source projects and tools. There are definitely more forges than necessary.
Yesterday Jaspersoft announced the availability of Jaspersoft Unlimited, a special offer at a lower price. Jaspersoft offered a similar package back in 2007, but this time training has been added to the bundle.
Brian Gentile, Jaspersoft CEO and open source core advocate, commenting the news told me:
Continue reading ‘Open Source BI: Jaspersoft Special Offer and the Real Value of Open Source BI’
Yesterday Microsoft announced that the number of projects hosted on CodePlex breached the 10,000 mark, just after CodePlex celebrated its third anniversary.
Even if numbers are not impressive compared with Google code - becoming home to over 80.000 projects in half the time - it is definitely a measure of how seriously Microsoft is taking its open source strategy.
Continue reading ‘Microsoft Open Source Strategy: CodePlex keeps Growing’
I keep updating my blog to organize information in a clearer way, and I made some changes just yesterday, while WordPress was stating that WordPress themes are GPL too.
Matteo Ionescu, who originally brought my blog to 2.0 life, helped me to make more cosmetics changes, especially about new and old widgets, and my K2 template today comes with a slightly new look (new ‘top posts’ box, smaller ‘categories’ box, etc).
Comments and feedback are welcome, more is to come soon!
Sun PDF Import Extension - The extension allows to import and modify PDF documents, the perfect tool to change dates, numbers or small portions of text. Long documents or with sophisticated layouts are not suitable for the PDF Import Extension, though.
OpenOffice 3.1.0 Plus Win Portable USB (Italian) - The Italian school Ettore Majorana in collaboration with Ylvo COMPANY the created the Italian version. The English version is available at the PortableApps website.
OOo gets OCS - The OpenOffice.org Annual Conference website runs on OCS software.
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