Showing headlines posted by mfioretti

Fermi is a high school that isn't afraid of experiments. This year, besides a project to build a mini-rocket to be launched in 2011 and setting up a photovoltaic lab, they're trying to solve with open licenses a problem that costs every italian students from 300 to 500 Euros each year, the cost of textbooks, and are inviting other schools to participate.

The Italian ICT industry is in dire straits. In order to save it, Assinform (association of the bigger Italian ICT companies, whose members include Microsoft Italy and many other multinationals) just proposed a public incentives program to "finance the replacement of obsolete software with advanced applications made to order for the actual needs of the "Made in Italy" companies" No, thanks. Unless you do it in a way that does bring lots of work to Italian programmers and make their customers and all taxpayers save much more money than any other incentive program: mandating the adoption of non proprietary formats and protocols.

Six months ago I got a request to check what Microsoft had said in a report about Italian public administrations rejecting OpenDocument as mandatory format, so I tried to contact MS Italy to know more. Since I'm still waiting for them, and in general Microsoft asking for "file format neutrality" is a bit ridiculous, I've decided to ask again, in public

More than 100 candidates to Italian regional elections that will take place at the end of this month officially support Free Software and have committed to actively promote it if elected. Many of them are in smaller parties with smaller probability to get a seat, but for Italy it's a good result anyway.

A course set up by a Junior High public school in Monza, Northern Italy, involves students who find difficult to focus on theoretical, talk-only lessons by teaching them how to build their own computer and install Ubuntu on it. A few participants went back to Windows after the course, but the majority liked Ubuntu so much to stick to it.

I sent a formal complaint against my Chamber of Commerce to the regional Ombudsman! Why do they insists on forcing Businesses to buy proprietary software with their own money, even when the Open Source alternative work just fine and some of those proprietary software programs are sold by Companies who invoice abroad, in ways that redistribute almost none of those profits in our Country?

when a Public Administration uses it to reform the way it works, to solve the problem it actually has instead of those authors of proprietary software _think_ it has

A mother explains how and why her and her autistic son really like Ubuntu, but are still forced to use Windows in certain moments

Italian law proposal to defend Net Neutrality and promote Free Software has a hole that would make impossible for Public Administrations and Universities to get rid of proprietary file formats and software, even if they wanted to do it

No, really. As trollish and dumb as they may seem, you still get such reactions. And the problem is that they may damage Free Software more now than ten years ago, when almost nobody knew what Free Software is anyway, so here are a few recent facts. http://stop.zona-m.net/node/87

Free Software is widely used in education due to its lower cost and huge flexibility. Homeschooling is relatively popular in the USA and other countries. One would expect Free Software to be very popular among homeschoolers, due to their own philosophy: how could an homeschooling advocate not love software that is all about being "free as in freedom" and doing things by yourself?

Kosova is a country with many serious problem and one of the highest percentages of young people. Some of them are using and advocating Free Software and Open geographic data as a tool to give young Kosovars more opportunities and a brighter future.

Getting upset because less and less FOSS users contribute to FOSS in any way is not just a totally unrealistic reaction, it can be counterproductive. The article explains why.

OOo4Kids is a fork of OpenOffice that can run in much less RAM and has a much simpler user interface. This is an interview to one of the developers

Last week I visited a Nepali primary school which is using the OLPC laptop. Here is what I found out.

October 24th, 2009, will be Linux Day in Italy. You may think that such events are only relevant for software geeks, but that's not the case at all.

Almost 70% of released inmates end up returning to prison. A new project uses Linux and cooperative development techniques to train ex-inmates for personal and family life.

Accessibility is crucial for FOSS to succeed. Here is a practical proposal for all FOSS supporters worldwide.