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France's higher education institutes must offer their digital services and learning resource materials primarily as free software, the country's parliament decided Tuesday afternoon. A new law on higher education and research comes with an article giving priority to free software.

What if your pen could warn you about spelling mistakes, just like your word processor? Lernstift — German for “learning pen” — is a Linux-based smart pen that not only corrects spelling, but can also help students, or anyone else, improve their handwriting.

Applying the European Commission's 'Guide for the procurement of standards-based ICT' will not be enough for public administrations to get rid of IT vendor lock-in, says Jutta Kreyss, IT-architect for the German city of Munich. "Standards alone are insufficient for any non-simple IT project. To get out of the vendor-lock in, one has to use standards and open source."

We designed Mozilla Japan’s new office, MOZILLA FACTORY, based on the idea of Open Source. Mozilla Japan is one of the part of the Mozilla Foundation which have promoted the idea of open source and open source software. “Open Source” is a kind of movement to open the source code of software. It enable everyone to be able to use that software and participate in improving. This movement has made it possible software is continually being improved, and develop high-quality software on a budget. This office constructed by the common product, such as corner module or plastic pallet. Therefore, our design might also be able to call the “open source furniture”so to speak. Because general products used and all drawings uploaded to the web, it is possible for everyone to make these functional office furnitures inexpensively.

Imagine 15,000 people, all desperately wanting to use your product – so much so that they take time out of their day to sign a petition. That’s the case for Google: a Change.org petition demanding a Linux version of Google Drive is rapidly approaching its goal of 15,000 signatures. Google Drive is two things: the highly anticipated sync service from the web giant, and the name for the web service once called Google Docs. Linux users can currently use Google’s web products without issue, but not the syncing service – there’s no official client for the open source operating system.

Members of the European Parliament and public administrations working with free and open source software solutions are getting together at the Libre Software Meeting, taking place in Brussels between 8 and 11 July. One of the session actually takes place at the European Parliament, on 9 July, as a meeting of the Legal Affairs parliamentary committee.

The administration of the city of Munich in Germany has completed the switch to the open source desktop, says Peter Hofmann, head of the migration project last week Wednesday. The IT department is now securing the strategy, to make sure it can be maintained by the city and to sustainably support interactions with citizens, businesses and other public authorities.

GNU Health, an free software hospital information system, medical record system and health information system, is rapidly becoming popular in hospitals around the world, says one of its developers, Sebastian Marro. "This project has the potential to grow really large."

Article is a few days old but of interest to our readers I believe. - Scott

Chris Knott, director of technology at Icewarp said, "What it depends on is the customer, they have to be open to change. Some customers are only looking to replace their Exchange server but keep everything Microsoft. "Once they see there is another world out there outside of Microsoft, they see that and a lot of companies are driven towards Linux because there is a certain stability, more security, faster file systems and some of these other options and a lot of companies contact us and they want to move there but they don't have really a Linux plan." Knott said that while big brands such as Microsoft will have a goodwill advantage, the trick is to get customers to see what alternatives such as its Icewarp software can do. The firm boasts an impressive roster of customers including the British Army, the US Navy and Cisco.

Members Equity Bank has claimed that the long term cost of using Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 will be cheaper than a Linux alternative, which the company claims would cost AU$100,000 more. The bank, which is one of Australia's smaller banks with 250,000 customers, does not have any bank branches. It is currently undertaking an AU$57 million technology transformation program.

It is one of the world's largest governmental projects to switch to an open source desktop operating system. It is Europe's second largest governmental desktop migration, after the French Gendarmerie, which is migrating some 90,000 desktops. Europe's third largest project is the German city of Munich, which has to date switched 13,000 PCs. Extremadura in 2012 completed the inventory of all the software applications and computers used by its civil servants. It also tailored a Linux distribution, Sysgobex, to meet the majority of requirements of government tasks. It has already migrated to open source some 150 PCs at several ministries, including those for Development, Culture and Employment.

President Obama has backed open standards for an integrated electronic health record system to serve the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments since his first term, but Pentagon plans to acquire commercial software to replace the department’s current EHR are “manifestly inconsistent” with that approach, J. Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation wrote in a blistering memo. Gilmore noted that Defense has resisted open standards and software for years.

A developer by the name of "threewater" has posted a video showcasing a device powered by the ARM-based AllWinner A10 booting Linux in just 1.2 seconds. As CNX Software notes, the actual boot is 0.85s, weighing in at 1.2 seconds with a Qt app.

Intel has used the Chinese leg of its IDF (Intel Developer Forum) event to lift the wraps on its new HTML5 Development Environment. The environment is available free of licensing fees and other costs.

The news was quickly picked up by Groklaw's esteemed Pamela Jones as well as PCWorld. The story also ran in Computerworld and Linux Advocates and beyond. What began as a groan quickly erupted into a mixture of hilarity and disbelief. Then the dispensing of libations moved into high gear, further fueling the conversational flames.

A new single board mini PC which is a cross between a Raspberry Pi and Arduino board, has been unveiled this week in the form of the new UDOO mini PC. The UDOO mini PC is a single-board Arduino-compatible computer equipped with a faster processor than is currently provided by the Raspberry Pi mini PC and comes with support for both Android and Linux operating systems. Watch the video after the jump to learn more about the UDOO mini PC project and see it in action.

Independent developer Larian Studios created a Kickstarter campaign for their open-world, traditional RPG Divinity: Original Sin, and it raised over $400,000 in less than two weeks. That guarantees OS X and Linux versions, which the developers hope to ship simultaneously with the PC version, currently estimated for July 2013.

By providing a stable, virus-resistant platform for BSE’s core business systems, the deployment of Linux has offered BSE better availability and reliability as compared to what it was using previously for business.

There's nothing like digging into your first Linux distribution, whether you're a tech-savvy user looking to branch out or whether you're installing it on a friend's computer. But which distribution is actually better for beginners? Here, we'll delve into the differences between Ubuntu and Mint, the two most popular beginner distros, and perform a little experiment to see what new users prefer.

A Spanish group that represents open source software users has accused Microsoft of using an "obstruction mechanism" to prevent buyers of Windows 8 computers from installing Linux-based operating systems.