Open data simply means information (data) that is readily available and accessible at any point in time by the general public with no ( or little) restriction. When this idea is extended to government it is about taken the vast majority of government datasets and information which doesn’t have privacy or security issues, and putting… Read More »
Legislators have drafted a bill that will boost Free Software on multiple levels within the Russian Federation’s public sector. The draft, approved by the Russian Federation’s Duma (lower chamber) in mid-October, requires the public sector to prioritise Free Software over proprietary alternatives, gives precedence to local IT businesses that offer Free Software for public tenders,… Read More »
When Microsoft first started addressing market pressure toward open source, the company didn’t get it. Probably it’s more accurate to say Microsoft didn’t want to get it. Or wanted to pretend not to get it. A key exhibit was the Shared Source Initiative (SSI), an early 2000s initiative to allow certain parties to view… Read More »
Judy Gichoya is a medical doctor from Kenya who became a software developer after joining the open source medical records project, OpenMRS. The open source project creates medical informatics software that helps health professionals collect and present data to improve patient care in developing countries. After seeing how effective the open medical records system… Read More »
One thing that many newcomers to Linux discover when installing applications on their systems is that they’d always have to install directly from the internet – – most times. To add to the web of these technicalities, different distributions (distros) support different format for distributing and utilizing their applications (e.g. the .deb for Debian-based systems… Read More »
It is no longer news that Linux is not a popular operating system (OS) in Nigeria – at least to me – especially going by the data provided by the Statcounter website on computer OS usage in the country as at June. There wasn’t even a tab for Linux on the graph! Damn. I have… Read More »
Since software most of the time is written by somebody (like art: paintings, music, books) and hence it constitute a type of intellectual property that is usually governed by copyright laws. And some countries guide them by patent laws. For a software to be distributed, only the software author could specify the term to do… Read More »
What is FOSS? Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has become a household name in the world of technology. Moving from the edge to take its place in the front burner of not just how technology (software and hardware) are made but how government, health systems, education, businesses are designed and run. With its own… Read More »
