“equally critical of proprietary and open source myths, advocating software choice beyond marketing and romanticism”
The Italian Conference on Free Software, now at its fourth edition, will be held in Cagliari on the 11-12 of June.
The call for papers is now open! Associations, free software researchers, developers, open source companies, public administrations, open source advocates and creative commoners are invited to submit their proposals before 18th of April.
A logo contest is still open, if you want to participate send your before 7th of March.
New Zelanders have been given the chance to write their own laws in 2007, now it is Italian time: the Italian Democratic Party just launched a wiki to publicly discuss the bill ‘Network neutrality, free software and society‘.
Continue reading ‘Participatory Legislation: the Italian Democratic Party Launches a Wiki’
Today’s Open Source software maturity is confirmed by its offering of ERP software. Not only do Open Source ERP solutions bring solid and broad features sets, they do so at a lower cost of implementation as mentioned at a Business Meets IT seminar in Belgium today.
ERP by xcode
Interviews from speakers at the formerly mentioned ERP event organised by Profoss on 18 November and 2 December show however this is still is a market to take. If most ERP project have regular contacts (the only apparent exception being the absence of contacts between Adempiere and Compiere), those contacts are not due to competition. Competition for Free and Open Source ERP software is found in the big companies like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM. Demand for OpenERP is so big, that it’s sometimes hard for them to follow the demand.
The origin of the ERP solutions covered are multiple: a local initiative for OpenERP, development in the academic world for Openbravo, a fork from another project (Compiere) for Adempiere. These different development paths show the diversity of ways to create Free and Open Source Software. OpenERP and Openbravo development are backed by a company, whereas Adempiere has taken the collaborative approach, where all companies or individuals interested are able to contribute easily according to a process put in place.
Companies or organisations targeted vary in size and market and in the end cover most of the spectrum of the market: from wholesale to public administrations, from 10 to 2000 users. If two years ago OpenERP had a lot of request from SMBs, today they get a lot more request from bigger companies.
Technorati Tags: Open Source ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning, Profoss, Open Source Conference, Adempiere, Compiere OpenBravo, OpenERP, open source applications
During the yearly conference ‘Free Software in Higher Education’ held by ALT Linux in Pereslavl in Russia last weekend, there were several interesting talks on the migration of schools to Free Software, which made me change previous views on the ways of migration of schools to Free Software.
It is no secret that teachers in schools all over Russia are now very concerned about the problem of software legalisation as a failure to do so may lead to criminal persecution. The case of Alexander Ponosov boosted the level of awareness dramatically. However, it takes more than fear to be able to move to Free Software after years of experience teaching on top of proprietary software on Windows. If the teachers do not start getting involved in promotion of Free Software, the country may end up paying more for proprietary software than ever while becoming progressively dependent on proprietary products.
What makes me feel more optimistic is that such positive view on Free Software (not just a refuge from proprietary software, but a better alternative) is now gaining momentum in Russia. And the process is developing on its own without any direct involvement of state or large enterprises.
On the community level, a dozen of teachers of Computer Literacy in small towns and villages of Tomsk region connect to each other via an irc channel to share experiences and methods of migration to Free Software. They install Free Software packages for Windows, test-drive and migrate to Linux distributions in their own schools and they spread the knowledge in neighboring schools. On the municipal level, a town of Dimitrovgrad sets an example of creation of a municipal educational network for schools built with Free Software. The town also promotes installation of the ALT Linux Junior distribution (which is the most probable platform of the planned country-wide migration) at schools and gathering of feedback.
Meanwhile, the Republic of Tatarstan is boasting to be the first to come up with the idea of creation of a tailored Linux distribution for educational purposes with localisation for Tatar language (previously unavailable on any platform) — before a similar initiative was launched on the federal level.
Thus, Free Software in Russian middle education seems to be possible as it has proven to be able to gain support on all levels: federal, regional and municipal/rural. What we need to achieve now is to help the positive examples of Kazan, Dimitrovgrad and Tomsk region replicate in other places. Second, we need to help the representatives of all the three levels get to know each other and cooperate with each other while staying aware about the experience of colleagues in the other regions.
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