Last week I gave a talk on open source as part of a Microsoft Azure for Education day at UCL in London. I was sharing the stage with Stephen Lamb from Microsoft, who gave a great overview of the various open source projects that Microsoft are engaged in, including Node.js and PHP for Windows. But … Read more
Over the past month there has been a steady trickle of announcements from organisations switching from MySQL to MariaDB. From next month, MariaDB will replace MySQL as the default database in Fedora. And now RedHat has announced its doing the same. Even Wikimedia started using it. So what is MariaDB, why is the switch happening, … Read more
In a previous post I discussed two different models for open source services; the “secret source” model, which is based on providing a differentiated offering on top of an open source stack, and a copyleft model using licenses that address the “ASP loophole” such as AGPL. Another way of looking at these two models is … Read more
Earlier this month EdX, the nonprofit organisation set up by MIT and Harvard to provide a MOOC platform, released part of its code under an open source licence – the Affero GPL. MOOCs – “Massive Online Open Courses” – have been hitting the headlines frequently in 2013, with high profile proponents and some big name … Read more
If you make decisions regarding software procurement in your institution or business, I’d highly recommend you read this article from Opensource.com. In it, Gunnar Hellekson of Red Hat shows that an “open source software policy” can be easily re-written to apply to all software, in a lot of cases by simple removing the phrase “open … Read more
OSS Watch have released a new briefing paper on using the Open Source Options guidance document from the UK Cabinet Office. The briefing provides additional guidance on making use of Open Source Options for procurement in the education sector. View it here: Open Source Options: Making Use Of The Cabinet Office Guidance On Open Source … Read more
Ubuntu is one of if not the most popular Linux-based operating systems aimed at the desktop market. Ubuntu’s development is primarily sponsored by Canonical, a UK-based company founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. Shuttleworth funded the launch of both Canonical and Ubuntu from his personal fortune, raised from the sale of his company Thawte … Read more
As with many Higher Education institutions, Manchester Metropoliton University (MMU) recently faced the challenge of migrating its Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) from WebCT Vista, which was purchased by Blackboard in 2006 and is approaching its end of life. MMU’s choice was to migrate to the open source Moodle VLE, using a solution hosted at the … Read more
I am a bit of a gaming geek, on the quiet, and gaming is one the areas in which open source software has never really caught up with closed source. Development models within the gaming industry have remained largely untouched by open approaches until relatively recently, so I was interested to read the following in … Read more
Mobile technologies have become an integral part of our lives. Research indicates that by 2015 80% of people accessing the Internet will be doing so from mobile devices. Mobile applications and services are changing the way we engage with the web, and to a certain extent with each other. At the same time, cloud technologies deliver … Read more