Gartner notes that 85% of companies are now using Open Source, yet 69% of them lack a formal Open Source policy, hence opening the door to “huge potential liabilities for intellectual-property violations”. Glyn Moody and Matt Asay righteously start bashing the report, noting how IP violations are not a big deal once you take FUD away. End of story? Not really...
Blogs
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2009, Year of the F/OSS?
Making bold predictions is a great way to be proved wrong. Whilst those who do so and with any reasonable success tend to be in positions of power else wise old hands with an acturial knowledge of their domain. Since I fall into neither category I'll proceed with some intrepidation...
I'm not sure how many times I've heard people state that Linux is ready for the desktop. But each time this has been said I've also heard a number people counter the claim. If it's not with the complaint that it's too difficult to configure, that it lacks hardware support or certain productivity tools. Whilst such things have now been largely addressed more recent gripes seem to be around overall user experience, and beyond which the fact that from a fresh install it rarely, if ever, looks as shiny and polished as some operating systems do.
European Commission publishes guidelines on the procurement of FOSS
The Open Source Repository and Observatory (OSOR), a new site sponsored by the European Commission to foster the exchange of FOSS related information and software among European public administrations, recently published guidelines on the procurement of open source software. Public administrations in Europe have to follow public tender procedures and the new guidelines give practical and legal advice on how open source software and related services can be incorporated into the procurement process.
Diebold faces GPL infringement lawsuit over their voting machines
Artifex Software, the company behind the open source Ghostscript PDF processing software, has filed a lawsuit against voting machine vendor Diebold and its subsidiary Premier Election Solutions, Ars Technica reported earlier this week. Last year, Jim March of BlackBoxVoting.org was investigating voting irregularities in Arizona. As part of his investigatios, he posted some inquiries about Ghostscript usage on the Ghostscript mailing list, with a sidenote of "is that a GPL problem?" And yes, it turned out it was.
Trust but Verify
