I will speak about CONESYS and Software 4 Open Communities at the UKUUG 2003 Conference, which takes place from August 1-3.
Category Open Source
Free/Libre Open Source Software
Against the Grain: Getting Projects To Work Together
Some thoughts on collaborating Free and Open Source projects by Gregor J. Rothfuss and Paul Everitt:
“Last year we wrote a piece here questioning whether open source projects were motivated to work with each other. This article was in the context of our work with OSCOM and its attempts to bring together open source content management projects and developers.
The article stimulated some interesting questions. Now that we’ve had some time to take some steps and try some ideas, we thought it appropriate to report back.”[1]
via OSCOM general mailinglist
OSAF receives $98,000 grant
Some good news form the OSAF Website: “We are pleased to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has agreed to provide a $98,000 grant to fund a planning project to extend OSAF’s Chandler software application to meet the information technology needs of higher education. The Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) originally planned for its new Personal Information Manager application to target individual and small-to-medium business users that need a better tool to manage and share their email, contacts, calendars and notes. Based on expressions of significant interest from the higher education community, OSAF, with support of the Mellon Foundation, is undertaking a study of how to address administration, scalability, and security issues of that segment.” [1]
[1] http://www.osafoundation.org/MellonAnnouncement_Mar-31-2003.htm
IETF Patents and GPL
Lawrence E. Rosen warns the Open Source community about IETF patents in the OSI discussion mailinglist:
“As I understand the GPL, none of the IETF standards that include that patented technology can be implemented under the GPL because of its Section 7.
Any open source projects implementing IETF standards should carefully review the IETF IPR list to ensure that they have proper patent licenses.”
An additional remark by Eben Moglen states:
“Moreover, patents are not global, only local. To say that we cannot *develop* under GPL because a patent exists in country X, and a license has been published there to which those making, using, or selling in country X *might* be asked to subscribe would go much too far. That situation certainly does not prevent development elsewhere, and distribution under GPL can certainly proceed.”
Find the whole thread here.
OSAF Status Report
The Open Source Applications Foundation started to post summary information about their activities. The first “OSAF Status Update February 26 2003” is available at http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Main/OSAFStatusReports.
Numbers and Facts
David A. Wheeler: “This paper provides quantitative data that, in many cases, using open source software / free software is a reasonable or even superior approach to using their proprietary competition according to various measures. This paperâ??s goal is to show that you should consider using OSS/FS when acquiring software. This paper examines market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. It also has sections on non-quantitative issues, unnecessary fears, usage reports, other sites providing related information, and ends with some conclusions. An appendix gives more background information about OSS/FS.”
http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html
Special Interest Group Open Source
It was the first time that the Special Interest Group Open Source met in Stuttgart/Germany at February 6th. ZZ/OSS has been there, as well as 20 other representatives from companies like MySQL or Oracle. It is the aim of this task force to foster the communication flow and knowledge transfer between the participants, as well as co-operations amongst those. The meeting was organized by bwcon.
Sandro Groganz 