While not library related, this is pretty neat news. The Boy Scouts of America have started an Open Source Initiative. This from the official site:
Welcome to the Boy Scouts of America Open Source Initiative. The Boy Scouts of America Open Source Software Website serves as a centralized resource where the Scouting Community can focus their efforts and resources in an efficient manner. The OSI Project provides a platform where the community of Scouting volunteers can work together with the Open Source Community towards the creation of software designed to meet the unique needs required to support the activities of Scouting.
In the tradition of the Open Source Movement, the resources of the OSS Website are “Open” to the community. We welcome the participation of organizations who face the same sort of technology issues that we do. Many of the challenges faced by the local Boy Scout Councils, and their volunteers, are the same challenges that other non-profit organizations deal with every day.
The Boy Scouts of America wish to express our thanks and greatest admiration to the Open Source Community. Without the efforts made by the volunteers and advocates of Open Source Software, the Boy Scouts of America OSI Project and the OSS Website would not have been possible. The Open Source Community calls new entries into the Community “converts”. We have listened, we have learned, and we have been converted, thank you. The OSS Website is built from 100% Open Source. In addition to being built from Open Source Software, the OSS Website itself is an Open Source Project.
Next Tuesday is Firefox 3 Day, according to Mozilla’s developer news web site. The most recent release candidate was made available on June 5thyesterday, so that’s a pretty quick turnaround – a sign to me that the browser’s definitely stable.
After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 — the best web browser, period.
Netvibes’ chief architect François Hodierne announced the opening of netvibes.org, a website dedicated to Netvibes’ Open Source projects: “By giving away our technology, we hope to foster innovations in the widget and personal-page space, and launch a discussion about their wide implementation.” Netvibes widgets are based on UWA, the Netvibes Universal Widget API. ‘Universal’ since UWA-based widgets run on any platform that supports common Web standards (HTML/JavaScript/CSS). That means iGoogle too.
We’re seeing more and more of this happening in the Web 2.0 world.
I wanted to share this very interesting video lecture by Yochai Benkler with you.
In this lecture, Yochai talks about the shift in power in the core economic activities to the hands of the population at large - all because of the computer. He talks about how open source is very visible in the software world because it’s easy to see - but that this actually happens throughout the web.
This is just a bit from the beginning of the talk - instead of summarizing it all for you, I’m going to let you listen for yourself
Hmmm. I was pointed to this article from a commenter on this blog. The good news is that Microsoft is adding support to Office 2007 for ODF … the not so surprising news is that they’re not doing it to help support open source users … it’s because their format OOXML is harder to sustain than ODF.
In Microsoft’s announcement, the company said it was adding native support for ODF due to increasing pressure from customers “and because we want to get involved in the maintenance of ODF”. The company now says OOXML support would require substantially more work.
So, good news for the open source world - but not really a giant leap for the people at Microsoft.
Horowhenua Library Trust and Katipo Communications in New Zealand are pleased to annouce the release of Kete Version 1.0.
Kete provides a platform for developing community contributed content. It allows uploading of different types of content: topics (html text based content), documents, audio files, images, movies and links. Kete is the māori word for basket, in the Kete system a basket is the overall organising structure for content. Beyond baskets content is organised by the community using tagging and relating pieces of content to each other.
Kete is developed with Ruby on Rails, utilizes Zebra z39.50 full text indexing engine developed by IndexData, is fully compatible with Koha, and is released under a GNU General Public License (GPL).
Kete recently won the 2007 3M Award for Innovation in New Zealand Libraries, and a Special Mention at the 2007 World Summit Awards for the North America - Oceania Region in the e-inclusion section.
Full documentation, contacts and links to the code repository can be found at the project site http://kete.net.nz
Last month I announced that Relais International was open sourcing it’s interlibrary loan software. Yesterday I read that Relais International will now be partnering with LibLime.
LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, and Relais International, Inc. world leader in resource sharing solutions for libraries, are pleased to announce a new strategic partnership between the two companies. This development comes shortly after Relais International’s announcement of its intent to release the Relais resource sharing and document delivery products under an open-source license.
Mozilla is attempting to break a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in 24 hours with its upcoming Firefox 3 release.
“Download Day” is nothing new for the Firefox crew, and it’s really a great way to spread the word to the world about software. Sure, people can download things whenever they want, but there’s something cool about all doing it at once…it’s like Hands Across America. Except it has little to do with hands, and it’s global. You get the idea.
Facebook and open source addicts unite - we can soon help out with the Facebook Platform. I read this today (a day late):
Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications and have them run on those social networks, too.
A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed to us that the social networking company will announce an open-source initiative around its Facebook Platform sometime today or tomorrow. We originally broke this story we broke yesterday. We’ve also learned from another source that the name of the initiative will be fbOpen.
