ISO have put up a press release here about it. It comes in four parts for a total of 7,228 pages... not your average bedtime reading I would guess... and no, I don't feel like shelling out 342 Swiss Francs (NZ$529) to find out, although I am curious about what format it is supplied in...

Congratulations (again) to Richard Hulse for the work he does at Radio NZ and for getting this project into the GNU GPL domain.

Please do show your support by contributing to this very worthy audio player project.

Continuing in the vein of Open Source in real businesses we have this article from NetworkWorld. Robert Wisemen and Kevin Bomar talk about benefits Sabre Holdings derive from the use of Open Source software in their business. Sabre Holdings provide services to both airlines and travel agents around the world and are truly a 24/7 operation.

Lots of affirmation around bullet points we all know about and they even discuss some of the drawbacks... my favourite comes from page 4...

iTWire is carrying an article on an approach to Open Standards in Europe that it classes as a "must read". The article itself is available here and is being published by the European Journal of ePractice.

It's worth it for the background read and there are lots of links to various bits of research... what is not mentioned on the front page of the website (but is on the pdf) is that the authors work for Oracle and IBM so if you are going to wave it at people be prepared to answer any 'vested interest' counterclaims.

I was collecting emails to try and put together a write up of the talk Lessig gave in Auckland last week. Fortunately Public Address has pulled in Matthew Poole to do this task.

Excellent description here.

There is a lot in the write up of interest, but for me the money quote is this:

According to Rolf Schuster, a diplomat at the German Embassy in Madrid and the former head of IT at the German Foreign Ministry, Open Source desktops are cheaper to maintain by far than proprietary equivalents. "The Foreign Ministry is running desktops in many far away and some very difficult locations. Yet we invest only one thousand euro per desktop per year. That is far lower than other ministries, that on average invest more than 3000 euro per desktop per year," he said.

Google have at long last opened their Android operating system under the Apache 2.0 Open Source licence. This Linux-based mobile phone operating system seems to be catching on, with HTC having already launched their device. Motorola and Kyocera have both also announced that they have Android phones in the works.

Well the old joke about if Operating Systems were Airlines comes one step closer...

An entertaining article from Computerworld...

I'll stop now...

According to the Computerworld article "the MoE is willing to investigate situations it has not already covered"...

Sounds like a plan to me...

Colin Jackson wrote a report on a meeting held on Monday between the Government ministers responsible for the Copyright Act and ICT (Judith Tizard and David Cunliffe) and the ICT industry. Colin represented the NZOSS but in reality our views are pretty much mainstream.

It makes for a very sorry read. The tone of the meeting sounds awful and I am amazed at the disdain shown for our sector's concerns.