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SA govt officials meet to thrash out OSS progress
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| The South African State IT Agency’s (SITA) Free and Open Source Software
| Programme Office (FPO) will host the second annual chief information officers
| (CIO) workshop on February 24.
|
| The one-day workshop will bring together all government IT decision makers to
| share ideas and experiences regarding FOSS implementation in government.
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http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=3926
Recent:
Should software be patented, or free to the public?
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| Application software, which is what most people think of first when the word
| software is mentioned, is commonly written using advanced programming
| software tools, which ease the task of converting a desired function into
| code. High-level human-readable code, whether produced in this way or written
| directly in a programming language, is known as source code and can be
| analysed by software programmers to understand the techniques used in the
| software. The source code must be compiled (converted to machine code) or
| interpreted to be run on a computer.
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http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/industryinsight/software/devilliers090113.asp?S=Software&A=SFT&O=google
Out of Africa Something New - and Bad
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| Despite the fact that South Africa is at the forefront of open source usage,
| it seems to be taking a very bad turn as far as open knowledge is concerned:
|
| The Intellectual Property from Publicly Financed Research Bill was signed
| into law yesterday.
|
| This stems from a mistaken belief that:
|
| the best way to get research re-used for the benefit of the economy is to
| lock it down, and award a monopoly to one person, rather than opening it
| to everyone.
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http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/01/out-of-africa-something-new-and-bad.html
Microsoft muscles in on Unisa students
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| Students at the correspondence-based University of South Africa (Unisa) will
| be required to sign up for a Microsoft-provided email address before they are
| able to receive correspondence from the university.
|
| The required email address is part of the first phase to build the MyLife
| portal to foster a “sense of belonging” among students, the university says.
|
| Phase two of the project will see the university encouraging students to use
| other “Microsoft live services such as social networking facilities … online
| file storage, and Office Live workspace”.
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http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=3736
We’re more committed to ODF than ever: SA government
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| Open standards are critical in ensuring that the South African government
| both avoids vendor lock-in and promotes democracy. This is according to South
| Africa’s minister of home affairs, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula.
|
| In a prepared speech for the opening of the recent Second International ODF
| conference in Pretoria, Mapisa-Nqakula said that the department of home
| affairs was “forging ahead to make open standards a priority” to ensure
| future ability to process and share documents “using formats which have
| significant impact on the efficiency, interoperability and accessibility of
| public services”.
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http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=3502
ODF Workshop in South Africa
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| I attended last week’s ODF Workshop in South Africa, and I really enjoyed the
| event. It was an excellent opportunity to meet people who work with ODF in
| governments around the world, exchange experiences on migration, talk about
| the new features on ODF 1.2 and talk a lot about other things that I really
| appreciate as interoperability and open standards adoption worldwide.
|
| Brazil was represented by Paul Maia, from Caixa Economica Federal and Carlos
| Machado of SERPRO. I had the opportunity to make a brief presentation about
| the main features of ODF 1.2 that we’re developing at the OASIS ODF TC.
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http://homembit.com/2008/10/odf-workshop-in-south-africa.html
Pretoria ODF Users Workshop
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| What always strikes me at such gatherings is the passion of those who have
| committed to adopting ODF. You get people who have decided for all the usual
| reasons that ODF makes sense for their use, or that of their department, or
| their agency, or their government. We’re seeing interesting and varying
| bottom up, top down, and middle out patterns of adoption in different parts
| of the world.
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http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=2671
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