Jisc are inviting people to take part in a survey on how they discover and use software in a work-related context. Findings from this survey will help Jisc to understand problems faced by the higher and further education sectors and how Jisc and its partner organisations might help. Please take part in the survey, which … 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
This guest post has been contributed by Nicole C. Engard, author of Practical Open Source Software for Libraries. I’ve been teaching and researching open source software for what seems like ages, so sometimes I forget that other librarians don’t necessarily know about all of the great open source tools I do. There are a few must … Read more
We’ve written several times recently about the UK Cabinet Office’s Open Source Procurement Toolkit, and the Open Source Options document that forms part of it. The original document lists open source alternatives for common proprietary solutions that might be used in government and public sector organisations. The types of software solutions listed are mostly generic … Read more
Building APIs into your software, especially when they’re exposed as a web service, is a fantastic way to broaden engagement with your open source software project. APIs allow people to extend and integrate with your software without having to touch your core codebase, which is good for maintainability and for uptake. Moodle is a fantastic … Read more
Yesterday evening Canonical posted a much-hyped “virtual keynote” (video of Mark Shuttleworth) announcing Ubuntu for phones. This heralds a new open source phone OS entering the scene, and I’d like to take a look at some of the points from the 20 minute video that I found interesting, as well as how it’s been received … Read more
Pressbooks, a popular platform for creating and distributing e-books, have announced they will be making the code for their platform open source. Pressbooks builds on top of the open-source blogging platform WordPress. If done right, this could be very good news for the education sector, which has shown keen interest in e-books recently. e-Books have … Read more
In the final of my trio of posts deconstructing the “cloud”, I’m going to be looking at Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS. SaaS is the next layer of the “cloud” stack that sits atop Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) (when it’s been built using such a platform), and/or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Software-as-a-Service is usually presented to the user as a web … Read more
Interactive whiteboards are something you find in pretty much every school, college and university these days. Mostly these come from one of two companies, Smart and Promethean, both of which also supply the main software application that typically teachers and students interact with. This application is closed source and runs on Windows and does some … 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