The Hague Declaration, recently published by The Digital Standards organization, proposes that all governments adhere to free and open standards for IT activities. Something that strikes me about Digistan’s declaration is its basis in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and not a technical document. The three things The Hague Declaration calls on all governments to do, are as follows. Read the rest of this entry »

The ZDNet article on PLM/BPM vendor, Aras, covers reasons this former proprietary vendor decided to open source its Innovator products. Two points that stuck out for me, concern what open sourcing enabled Aras to do. Read the rest of this entry »

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) issued a press release on its newly published Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3. This license affects the modification and distribution of software oriented toward Web-based services.

The popular adoption of Web-based applications as an alternate to in-house software implementations has meant that free and open source software developed for web-based usage can be picked up by companies outside of the ones that originally developed the software, modify it, and foist it upon the world as a new business without necessarily contributing the modifications back to the project. That is a bone of contention for many. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve seen a lot of press about the open source telephony system, Asterisk. Although I haven’t worked in the telephony world for some time, I remember what it was like administering those systems years ago in a midsize company that handled large event ticket sales.

We ran some systems on OS/2 and for larger ACD call center requirements, Unix. These were not inexpensive systems. If I go to AsteriskNOW.org, now I can download a specialized Linux distribution that installs as an easy-to-set-up PBX system. Since TEC’s current newsletter issue is focusing on telephony issues, I figured I’d post a bit about the open source side.

The Asterisk project originates with a company called Digium, which looks like the center of a whirlwind of related activity. IP telephony vendors claim that one of the benefits they offer is a reduction in costs that would normally be incurred from toll services, and this message is frequently targeted toward small and medium businesses. So if you combine that with some of the other common open source advantages, you get an interesting product to consider. Read the rest of this entry »

I just saw this announcement about Compiere’s 11 new demos. The company is offering a sneak peek of its next generation Web-architecture. While watching the first demo, I notice it really stresses ease-of-use in the interface.

Whether others agree that it’s easy to use or not, I don’t know but, but it is interesting that Compiere publicly asked for feedback in its public forum on the subject. A few days ago I posted about some debates taking place on the user-friendliness of enterprise software. I suggested that getting the software development process to incorporate greater open communications like in open source projects, could help improve the user-friendliness. Well this is a real live example of just that.

I received an e-mail notice today about Cofundos, a “community innovation & funding” site, which launched last week. Cofundos looks like one possible solution to an often murky area in the open source software space: how to continue fueling development.

Suppose you find some open source software useful but it doesn’t have commercial backing devoting regular developers (for example, Red Hat or Compiere) to its well-being, and suppose you don’t want to employ developers internally to improve, fix, or modify it, then no matter its utility, a lot of people or companies might be wary about relying on it in any larger-scale sense–who can they go to if they have a problem? Read the rest of this entry »

Like the old tootsie pop ads that ask how many licks it takes to get to the center, how many annoyances does it take to get people and businesses to change desktop operating systems? Aside from the frequent crunch of bloggers discussing their switch from Windows to Linux, we’re still waiting to find out.

In the news this week, Microsoft annoyed a number of admins with its Windows Desktop Services update. This added to many peoples’ perception that Microsoft pushes some of its updates without asking–an aggressive practice disliked for policy, security, troubleshooting, or other reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is not an oxymoron. The Open Source Initiative recently approved two Microsoft licenses (the Microsoft Reciprocal License and the Microsoft Public License) as compliant with the open source definition.

Why would Microsoft want to publish an open source license? The very idea of Microsoft participating in the open source community might sound odd. After all, hasn’t Microsoft been one of the most vocal proprietary vendors against free and open source software? Isn’t Microsoft known for its attempts to undermine open source standards? Often yes, but the company has also been dabbling, to various degrees, with open source for a while (its FlexWiki application is one example). Read the rest of this entry »

A few online tools make it easy to compare criteria about software, side-by-side. Of course, you probably expect that I think TEC provides the mother of all evaluation tools for comparisons (true). But this is about some of the other guys. Two sites I like, which I recently came across might be useful to you if you’re scanning the horizon for high-level comparison info. The first is Opteros’s EOS Directory and the second is ITerating. Both approach the issue in different, complementary directions to TEC’s. Here’s a bit of what’s interesting about their approaches and why I think they can offer valuable supplementary information.

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