SiriusBlog

Today marks the seventeenth birthday for Debian, a free operating system based on Linux and GNU.

Debian has successfully grown and developed into being one of the strongest Open Source Operating Systems available. For a distribution which is produced by volunteers rather than with commercial backing, this is a great achievement, and a testament to Open Source development,

Sections 11–18 of the Act were pushed forward on the basis of questionable figures and assumptions, will not significantly achieve their stated ob jectives of reducing copyright infringement, and are liable to have serious unintended consequences.

It has been a busy year for the team, with a new customer service centre and some new faces. It felt like a good time for us to get out of the office, away from emails and phones and have some time to bond as a team – with the launch of the new customer service centre and the company expanding we are now set on two floors so it's easy to go days without seeing much of your lovely colleagues on the other floor, what better way to get further acquainted than encouraging each other to...

As the UK's new Government settles into power the direction in which it is taking ICT policy is becoming clear, the only question is how the admittedly great ideas will be implemented in practice.

Much informed analysis has indentified that despite the counter-intuitive pairing of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, they are in fact closely compatible in many policy areas.

ICT policy is one such area, and by far the majority of the excellent policy ideas from both party's...

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...

This post follows swiftly on from last week's blog in which I touted BECTA's demise, things in edu-world this weekend are looking much worse if you believe Ed Balls the Labour Secretary of State for Education and Michael Gove the Shadow Secretary.

Only one topic in town this week and that's bullying …

This post however was originally inspired by Glynn Moody's unrelated latest blog (in Computer World) which broadly was a treatise on the simile between organising Open Source folk on any large scale and herding cats...

...this activity is, as we all imagine, a futile pastime ... and moreover transposed into an office context, represents for a manager of 'cats' a role of terrifying proportions.

At a click of a button on Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 (and only on Microsoft Internet Explorer 8) a secret code is launched which reports an individual to a Government organisation called CEOPS which in turn accesses the Police databases.

What exactly does this button do?

I have no idea.

I never do know exactly what proprietary software is doing so this button is no exception, but nor do the developers of Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Who are CEOPs and why are they...

Symbian, the giant maker of that well known operating system for cell phones is an inspiration. By announcing that it was going to release 'billions of pounds worth of Intellectual Property' as Open Source software it made the BBC news.

Hoorah! Symbian will join the likes of Android OS and Linux, thereby making OSS the dominant software of the phone market. Good luck to them I say...hmm, but hang on I've heard this story somewhere before.

Gene Splicing trumps Creationism.