In our recent survey on free and open source software in the UK education sectors, we asked colleges and universities for their main reasons for not selecting an open source solution according to 12 criteria. Below you can see how important each of the criteria were rated for software running on servers: Interoperability and migration … Read more
We’re big fans of Markdown at OSS Watch; the lightweight format is how we create all the content for the OSS Watch website (thanks to the very nice Jekyll publishing engine). Markdown is more or less a set of conventions for semi-structured plain text that can be fairly easily converted into HTML (or other formats). The idea is … Read more
Last week Open Source, Open Standards 2013 took place in London, an event focussed on the public sector. Naturally these being two topics we’re very keen on here at OSS Watch I went along too. Overall the key message to take away from the event was just how central to public sector IT strategy these two themes … Read more
OSS Watch Briefing Paper: Open Standards and Open Source Open source software and open standards are two of the key interventions in technology policy, whether that policy is made by governments, public sector organisations, or companies. Open standards can ensure interoperability and assist portability, allowing the switching of solutions and avoiding vendor lock-in. Standards can also … 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
Jason Schultz and Jennifer Urban of UC Berkeley School of Law have distributed a paper which provides an interesting analysis of the state of the patent system and its relationship to open development. In essence, they suggest that rather than avoiding the patent system, open development communities should instead engage with it, seeking to patent and … Read more
Here in the UK the Public Administration Select Committee has been looking into the poor record government has in procuring IT systems. The title of their report “Government and IT- “A Recipe For Rip-Offs”: Time For A New Approach” serves as a neat summary of the content. Stating the problem, the report says The UK has … Read more
Last week JISC CETIS put on a WidgetBash event. OSS Watch pitched in since W3C Widgets are an area we are particularly interested in having taken some code from the University of Bolton into the Apache Software Foundations incubator as Apache Wookie (incubating). This two day event focused on getting people up to speed on … Read more
There’s no date on his introductory post, but Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, has provided an opportunity for us to state which open standards for IT we want the UK government to use. This takes the form of an on-line SurveyMonkey survey that is open until 20 May 2011. Government … Read more
There is a rapid groundswell of concern about Facebook. The main issue is privacy, or rather Facebook’s attitude to individual privacy and data ownership. Over the years the default settings have relaxed from most items being private, to virtually none being so. Unless the user makes a concerted effort to change settings. Accordingly, there is … Read more