This week the Internet’s been ablaze with news of another security flaw in a widely used open source project, this time a bug in OpenSSL dubbed “Heartbleed”. This is the third high-profile security issue in as many months. In each case the code was not only open but being used by thousands of people including … Read more
6 Months ago, 4 journalists quit their respective jobs at the leading UK Linux magazine, Linux Format. Today, a new magazine hit the shelves of the country’s newsagents: Linux Voice. With the same team behind it, Linux Voice has the same feel and a similar structure to old issues of Linux Format. However, Linux Voice … Read more
Mobile World Congress is running this week in Barcelona. While it’s predicable that we’ve seen lots of Android phones, including the big unveiling of the Galaxy S5 from Samsung, I’ve found it interesting to see the coverage of the other devices powered by open source technologies. Mozilla announced their plans for a smartphone that could … Read more
OSS Watch, supported by Jisc, has conducted the National Software Survey roughly every two years since 2003. The survey studies the status of open and closed source software in both Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE) institutions in the UK. OSS Watch is a non-advocacy information service covering free and open source software. We … Read more
At FOSDEM last weekend I saw an excellent talk by Richard Fontana entitled Taking License Compatibility Semi-Seriously. The talk took a look at the origins of compatibility issues between free and open source software licences, how efforts have been made to either address them directly or dodge around them, and ask whether it’s worth worrying … Read more
In a recent training session, I discussed commitment gradients – how much extra effort is involved to move between each stage of involvement within a project. After the session I was asked for some examples of commitment gradients and how it’s possible to make them shallower, so it’s easier for people to progress their involvement … Read more
We’ve just updated our Open Source Options for Education list, providing a list of alternatives to common proprietary software used in schools, colleges and universities. Most of the software we list is provided by the academic and open source communities via our publicly editable version. Some new software we’ve added in this update includes: SageMath … Read more
[UPDATE 04/06/13] Since this blog post was written, the trademark for Koha in New Zealand has been granted to HLT. See Chris’s comment below. Earlier in the year, I wrote a case study on Koha, the open source library management system released under the GPL, detailing the history of the project and how the sale … Read more
In November OSS Watch travelled to Altlenigen near Mannheim in Germany to run a 2-day workshop for the TYPO3 community as part of their Marketing Sprint Week. Across the 2 days, Scott Wilson and I presented sessions on the varieties of communities and why we form them, communication within online communities, governance of free and … Read more
The concept of a software patch is well understood by users of version control systems such as CVS and Subversion, but with the recent rise in popularity of distributed version control systems (DVCSs) such as Git, a new method for submitting changes to a project has evolved: the pull request. While not a feature of … Read more