Open Forum Europe

ZDNet - Google on Tuesday announced the creation of the Google Chrome Operating System project, with the goal to build a Linux-based OS available for purchase on netbooks in the second half of 2010.

The search giant said in a blog post that most of the user experience will happen on the web, and the interface will follow the minimal Chrome browser aesthetic.

"As we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work," the company said.

Google said it had already been talking to partners for the project, although none was named. The project's source code will be open sourced later this year and is intended to run on x86 as well as ARM chips. A new windowing system will be created to run on top of the Linux kernel.

Yahoo Tech - Industry groups criticized and praised on Monday what they consider is a bias in favor of open-source software in the European Commission's plans to update the rules governing industry standard technologies.

The Commission set out a plan for a complete makeover of the rules last week, a move it said was essential if European information and communication technology (ICT) is to remain relevant and globally competitive.

Currently, government bodies are limited in their choice of ICT suppliers to ones that are registered with a short list of recognized standards organizations, including ISO, the International Standards Organization, its European equivalents the ESOs and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

The private sector has moved beyond this short list. Fora and consortia such as the W3C, OASIS and ECMA are all standards organizations and are widely recognized in the industry, but they cannot be referenced when a firm bids for a public sector contract, or when an authority is setting public policy.

The reforms proposed in the Commission's white paper "should improve the possibilities to use and reference E.U. recognised standards in legislation and public procurement," the Commission said in a statement.

Open Forum Europe (OFE), an industry group that takes a pro-open-source view, welcomed the move.

"Strengthening collaboration and cooperation in ICT standards development, both Europe-wide and globally is crucial," it said in a statement issued Monday.

The Commission "recognises the importance of global open standards as well as important Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) concerns like transparency through mandatory ex ante declaration of licensing terms and royalty free licensing to enhance software interoperability," OFE said.

Open standards, stimulating global standard setting and standardization based on openness criteria across domains "can help usher Europe into a new era of competitiveness and growth," said OFE's chief executive, Graham Taylor.

FT - Several governments have mandated that all their departmental technology deployments be based either partially or wholly on open source software (OSS).

This spring, Russia announced it was hoping to see all of its government offices running on open source; Germany has long been a proponent of Linux, with more than 500 government departments running open source software. Indeed, the national government even created an official migration guide for departments looking to move from proprietary systems to Linux or other OSS.

Nations such as Venezuela have also opted to run government IT systems on OSS, and China and other Asia-Pacific countries have set similar goals.

The move towards OSS in government is so prominent, that industry research firm Gartner predicts that by 2011 at least 25 per cent of domain-specific software in government offices around the world will be at least partially open source.

Channel Register - The UK government’s technology agency has given Microsoft’s launch of the new Subscription Enrolment Schools Pilot (SESP) the thumbs up.

Becta said in a statement that the scheme would help improve choice for schools that were mulling subscription agreements with the software giant.

SESP builds on Microsoft’s existing School Agreement, said the agency. It loosens some of the restrictions tied to the MS subscription licensing deals that required schools “to license Microsoft products across their entire ‘eligible’ ICT estate”.

Becta claimed the new scheme should also help cut costs at schools as they will no longer to be required to cough up cash for systems that aren’t needed.

Previously, schools were shackled with complex and pricey licensing agreements from Microsoft. Becta had been a vocal critic of such arrangements.

CNet - Matt Asay - Microsoft's Internet Explorer's market share is absolutely falling. The question is, by how much?

I've reported before that Internet Explorer (IE) drops 5 percent market share points each year, while Mozilla Firefox gains 5 percentage points per year. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that IE's market share may be dropping more precipitously than previously reported, falling to 60 percent share in June 2009 instead of the 68 percent share expected.

Or is it?

The H Open - The Swiss Federal Administrative Court has issued an interim verdict in a legal action brought by a group of open source companies against the Swiss Federal Office for Buildings and Logistics (BBL) for awarding a software procurement contract to Microsoft without a tendering process. The decision revokes the restraining order issued at the end of May, but only allows the BBL to continue to obtain such services from Microsoft as are necessary for ensuring the continued function of federal information systems.

V3 - White paper says new approach is vital to boost competitiveness

ISRIA - The Norwegian government has adopted a series of new obligatory IT standards for the state sector. Now it will be easier for users to get access to information material offered by the government - whether it be graphics, videos, sound or picture material - regardless of which software and computer equipment is being used.

This is the second step in a long term effort by the Ministry of Government Administration and Reform to establish recommended and obligatory IT standards to be used by public institutions and enterprises. The new obligatory standards are included in the Reference catalogue, accessible on the government website www.regjeringen.no (in Norwegian). This catalogue already contains obligatory document formats for web publication. The purpose of the standards is e.g. to provide simpler and more effective electronic interaction within the public sector and between public institutions and the users.

- All users are supposed to have equal access to public information and services on the internet. The state should not discriminate users based on what kind of technical equipment and soft ware they are using. This decision means that the users are granted a right to watch or download multi-media material from the state in open format; that is, formats not locked to specific suppliers in the market, reform minister Heidi Grande R�ys says.

In short, this is the content of the government decision:

BBC Click - There is no doubt that free technologies, mainly open source software, are proving more popular both inside and outside the computer industry.

Behind this growing acceptance is a non-commercial movement of independent developers that are putting together the open source software that anyone can use.

Paul Allen, editor of ComputerActive magazine, said the defining feature of open source software was that the set of tools and systems were developed by enthusiasts rather than big companies.

But he added it should be treated as "free thinking rather than a free lunch" because it is not always free of charge.

Out of this movement have come fully-fledged programs, such as Open Office for e-mail, spreadsheets, word processing and presentations, and VLC for video, that were put together for free by a community of people.

"The entire source code for the software is made available to the community and anyone can modify it," said Phil Andrews from open source software provider Red Hat.

CNet - Matt Asay - Over the past 10 years that I've been involved in open source, one thing has become strikingly clear to me: there are no real predictors of open-source success. There are, of course, general principles that contribute to the creation of successful open-source projects, but serendipitous "right project, right time" circumstances often matter most.

I was therefore intrigued to read two articles that crystallized my own thinking around critical components of successful open-source projects.

ZDNet - The GNU General Public Licence is falling in popularity, looking at all the versions of the GPL as a whole, according to figures released on Tuesday by Black Duck.

At the same time, Microsoft's open-source software licence, MS-PL, is gaining ground in the open-source world, the company said.

Black Duck, which provides services and products for developers working with open-source code, compiled the figures from its database of more than 200,000 open-source projects collected from the internet.

The company found that the GPL was the most popular open-source licence, used by about 65 percent of the projects in the survey. In addition, it said that usage of the GPL v3 licence had expanded fourfold in the past year, from 2,345 in June 2008 to 9,500 in the current study.

Over the past year, the GPL v3 has moved past the Mozilla, MIT and Apache licences to the number-five spot, behind the BSD licence. Black Duck predicted that the GPL v3 would pass the BSD licence in about six months.

ZDNet - Canonical, the London company that founded the Ubuntu Project, on Wednesday announced professional services to support companies that are building 'private cloud' infrastructures behind their corporate firewalls.

Earlier this year, the company released a technical preview of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), an open-source system that allows companies to build private clouds that match the Amazon EC2 interface.

Introducing the support in a statement, Canonical chief executive Mark Shuttleworth said: "Enterprises are realising that building 'private clouds' enables them to better manage variable workloads, while reducing the waste of idle servers.

The Register - Oracle is cooking up a strategy around the cloud, something chief executive Larry Ellison once referred as "idiocy" - albeit the sort of fashionable idiocy he's willing buy in to.

Sources close to Oracle have told The Register there's a growing pace of activity inside the database maker - at all levels - on the subject of cloud computing.

Senior Oracle executives are understood to be working on a holistic corporate story that encompasses Oracle's assets in databases, applications, and middleware.

At a lower level, people in Oracle's product units are working individually on projects that would make more of Oracle's applications and middleware available for use in cloud computing. It's understood these include putting Oracle's Siebel and PeopleSoft applications into the cloud.

CNet - Matt Asay - As I type this, Firefox 3.5 is blazing past 5.6 million downloads, having been released just a day and a half ago. While such uptake for Mozilla's upgraded browser is impressive, the bigger story is how Firefox 3.5 is upgrading the Web with its extensive support for HTML 5. Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) 8 has brought the company's browser back into the 21st century, but its sluggish (and perhaps perverse) response to emerging Web standards threatens to leave it in Web 1.0 Blunderland.

The Register - Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and a General Public License author, has slammed plans to include Mono in Debian's default install as a "dangerous" risk for the open-source community.

In a statement published on the Free Software Foundation site, Stallman says the move is being taken "for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#."

"The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents," Stallman said. "This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from future danger."

Centre for Policy Studies - The UK Government will spend about £16.5 billion on IT in 2009/10, equivalent to 1.4% of GDP. Most of this money is wasted, with only 30% of projects succeeding, writes IT expert Liam Maxwell in a new report (It's Ours: why we, not government, must own our data) published by the Centre for Policy Studies and described as a "must-read" by the Ideal Government Project.

Effective use of Information Technology (IT) can do much to improve public services. In particular, it has the potential to break the central monopoly by giving individuals the ability to exercise real choice and control over schools, GPs, hospitals and other services.

But improving government use of IT is not just a question of effective project management. Rather it is a matter of changing the assumptions behind the government's use of IT. For a clear choice is emerging:

ZDNet - The US Department of Justice has decided to extend its investigation into Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun, according to a brief statement put out late on Friday.

The Justice Department's 30-day window for looking into the $7.4bn (£4.5bn) deal was set to expire Friday. Instead of approving the acquisition, the Justice Department informed Oracle that it is extending that deadline, according to The Wall Street Journal. However, it is likely that the move simply means final details are being ironed out before the Justice department will give the acquisition its stamp of approval.

The news did not change Oracle's optimism that the deal will be approved.

ZDNet - The One Laptop per Child XO-1 interface is now available on a USB stick.

Sugar Labs, responsible for building the low-cost device's OS, has released the interface online for loading onto any USB flash drive greater than 1GB, and will allow it to be used on "any PC or netbook", it said in an announcement on Wednesday.

Called 'Sugar on a Stick v1', Sugar Labs hopes it will help spread the use of the OS in classrooms, without the need for the OLPC device.

An IDC analyst said in February that the OS would be one of the OLPC's more attractive aspects that vendors would be interested in copying for the netbook market.

OFE - OpenForum Europe calls for stronger government awareness about importance of their role in the adoption of open standards in the market place. “A consumer has no choice when a government publishes information in a file format tied to a specific vendor – even if that has not been a problem for decades, now it clearly is”, says Basil Cousins, OFE Director and Convenor of ODF European Action Group. “The market is, in principle, ready to move to a more mature phase”.

The H Open - Downing Street has responded to a recent e-petition on the Number10.gov.uk website asking for a commitment for the Timely Information to Citizens (TIC) project to be based around open source. The government supported the principle that where new software was developed it should be made available under an open source licence. This would make the software available to other local authorities.

OFE Press Release - "OpenForum Europe observes with great interest the long-awaited inclusion of support for ODF within the release of Microsoft's Service Pack 2 for Office 2007. This adoption underlines the growing requirement by both public and private sector for open standards based interoperability based on ODF. It represents a strategic victory for ODF, a victory which we need to consolidate.

Governments across the world, including the UK, have adopted ODF. This number continues to grow as has the depth and range of ODF supporting software. Over 50 ODF supporting word processors, spreadsheets and presentation applications are available - a significant proportion originate in from Europe. OpenForum Europe are actively supporting the ODF Workshop in the Hague on 15th -16th June called at the invitation of the Dutch Government which will focus on full interoperability for ODF implementations.

It is hoped that their support of ODF will represent a substantive move by Microsoft towards ungrudging participation in genuine multi-vendor interoperability. Freely exchangeable document formats are fundamental to the development of open interoperability frameworks which intimately link both public and private users with each other and with their suppliers. Open document formats enable competitive choice to the IT user, encouraging wide ranging innovation. Closed document formats stifle customer choice.

OpenForum Europe will continue to advocate genuinely open solutions and will carefully monitor the impact of ODF and other document format implementations."

Basil Cousins says: “This COULD be an opportunity for Microsoft to prove its critics wrong. We will watch the first user trials of SP2 with great interest - let the public judge.”

Basil Cousins - Director, OpenForum Europe