EU to probe Microsoft's ISO claim over Office software file format

BRUSSELS, Feb. 8, 2008 (Thomson Financial delivered by Newstex) -- European regulators are examining whether Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Corp violated antitrust laws during a struggle last year to ratify its Office software file format as an international standard, the Wall Street Journal reported.

more at cnn.com

Australian open source workers earn more money

Interesting article about how IT open source professionals in Australia earn more than regular IT people, I would say the answer is quiet easy, open source people are better professionals :)

IT workers who specialise in free and open source software are earning more than the national average for IT, according to the results of Australia's first open source census.

more at itnews.com.au

23,000 Linux PCs forge education revolution in Philippines

Providing high school students with PCs is seen as a first step to
preparing them for a technology-literate future, but in the Philippines
many schools cannot afford to provide computing facilities so after a
successful deployment of 13,000 Fedora Linux systems from a government
grant, plans are underway to roll out another 10,000 based on Ubuntu.

read the story at computerworld.com.au

EUPL released under 22 languages of EU

EUPL, European Union Public Licence is a Open Source like licence, developed by the European Commission for usage in the public sector of member states.

Why Open Source like? Well, by the meaning it is open source but it wasn't approved by Open Source Initiative in US, actually no one even submitted it.

You can reach the licence in 22 languages here.

Wikidot released under GNU Affero General Public License v3

The Wikidot Team is happy to announce the open-source release of the Wikidot software. We are opening both the Version 1 codebase that currently powers Wikidot.com and the new development code for Wikidot 2, our next generation wiki platform, both under GNU Affero General Public License version 3.

more at wikidot.com

Open Source in science and education conference

We will have a one day Open Source event durring the Aplimat 2008, which is 7^th International Conference on Applied Mathematics hosted every year in Bratislava. Our Open Source day started last year durring the 6th year of this conference and we officially started the openacademy.eu project there. Openacademy.eu focus on developing Open Source project for their usage in education in Slovakia, and we are planning to make the project available for more European countries in the future.

http://www.aplimat.com/
http://sk.openacademy.eu/node/157

Slovakia wants to host OpenOffice.org developer conference 2008

OpenOffice.org developer conference brings OO.o people from around the world to discuss the future of the open source office suite. This year Slovakia (SKOSI) is also running for hosting this event. We already started the preparation in December 2007, which did receive a huge popularity among our small European country. Sun, Novell, New Media Group, and few other companies pledged for help in organization, also the Slovak open source community is getting involved from different projects.

We are also playing with the Idea of making a co-event during the OpenOffice.org conference, which will be something like a Open Source Week, organizing smaller one day events durring the week, one day can be for the government, another for education and we can finish it with Software Freedom Day 2008 which will happen 4th time in Slovakia.

Right now the core team is around 10 people and we also have around 20 volunteers.

Wish is luck to see such great event happen in eastern Europe, nothing similar was here ever, this can be the first time...

OpenOffice.org dismisses pro-OOXML report

OpenOffice.org has dismissed an analyst report from Burton Group which claims that Microsoft's Office Open XML document format is preferable to the OpenDocument Format.

zdnet.com

Sun acquires MySQL

After all the industry speculation about MySQL being a “hot 2008 IPO”, this probably takes most of us by surprise — users, community members, customers, partners, and employees. And for all of these stakeholders, it may take some time to digest what this means. Depending on one’s relationship to MySQL, the immediate reaction upon hearing the news may be a mixture of various feelings, including excitement, pride, disbelief and satisfaction, but also anxiety.

Being part of the group planning this announcement for the last few weeks, I have had the fortune to contemplate the consequences during several partially sleepless nights (I usually sleep like a log). And over the coming days and weeks, I’ll provide a series of blogs with various viewpoints of the deal.

First of all, let’s point out a couple of facts about Sun Microsystems — since all MySQL stakeholders may not be fully up to speed about Sun.

more at mysql blog