Free Software Linux

Martin Scheinin, a UN expert on human rights said that body scanners' use in the war on terror were both ineffective and an intrusion on individual privacy. He went on to say that it would be a violation to everyone, but more so to women, certain religions, and certain cultural backgrounds. He has previously reported on different types of detection technologies could better for human rights.

Airport body scans breach rights: UN expert, Agence France-Presse, March 10, 2010

The recently release v9.2 of Hyland Software’s (news, site) enterprise content management system continues the development of solutions both on-premise and SaaS and focuses this time on users that work remotely but still need full access to the OnBase ECM suite.

Erm, remember Google Wave? You know, that thing with all the things, and the chatting and the e-mailing, and the collaboration. Well, it just got more things. Google introduced the Google Wave Extensions Gallery bright and early this morning. Developers? For the sake of Wave, please get on this.  

Last year, Telerik (news, site) brought out betas of two new products. Now, those products have come out of beta, joining an updated .NET toolbox. There’s something here for every developer.

There are indications that e-books and the reading devices, like Kindle and the Nook, are becoming more mainstream and as a result they are having an interesting impact on the way we interact with content, both online and in print.

Maybe it’s because of the growing popularity of SaaS, but Virtual Moment, LLC has announced that it is changing its ‘Doing Business As. . ‘(DBA) name from Spitfire Photo Pro to WebDAM, and said it will concentrate its resources on SaaS digital asset management (DAM).

In 2002 I was working for Oculan, a company that founded an open source network management application platform called OpenNMS. Oculan used this platform as the basis for a network management appliance, but my job was to create a services and support business around the platform itself.

In May, just after the release of OpenNMS version 1.0, Oculan got new investors, who decided to focus on the appliance and to stop working on OpenNMS.

Perhaps a hint at the future non-free software to be made available via it coming a little sooner thane expected? Or just a small reassurance to new users that this is still software-libre? Time will tell... Conclusion ...

There's a great piece in the Washington Post with the headline "The MPAA says the movie business is great. Unless it's lousy." This rightly points out that there is something funny going on in the film industry's view of itself.

On the one hand:

I was asked by a colleague in Holland to explain Becta's Home Access scheme and give an update on how it was going. He was concerned that 'it had all gone a bit quiet' and he could not find out much about it.

As an (sorry, the only) accredited supplier of Free Open Source software to schools we had looked into tendering to become an accredited supplier of the Home Access Package so this presumably is why he thought we might know something.

My current interest in the topic was quite low but was given a fillip by two things:

for IT professionals Linux is only the kernel. Linux started in 1991, when its author, Linus Torvals, began his work on a free replacement of Minix. Developers of quite a few Linux system utilities used the source code from BSD, as both these systems started parallelly in about the same ... With a GPL-licensed program anybody can change the source code, but he or she MUST share it with the Open Source community to make sure that everybody will benefit from such a change. ...

W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the Decisions and Decision-Making Incubator Group, whose mission is to determine the requirements, use cases, and a representation of decisions and decision-making in a collaborative and networked environment suitable for leading to a potential standard for decision exchange, shared situational awareness, and measurement of the speed, effectiveness, and human factors of decision-making.. The following W3C Members have sponsored the charter for this group: DISA, MITRE, and CNR.