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Thursday, January 18, 2007

OPEN SOURCE - THE END OF THE RAINBOW FOR PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE?

Some events unwittingly spell doom for unacceptable situations. Could the following be the beginning of such an innovative step in the right direction? Let's see:

[ Last Updated: Wednesday, 17 January 2007, 15:49 GMT

Open source gets European boost

The European Commission has added its voice to the debate about the use of open source software.

A report funded by the Commission concludes that the software could offer considerable savings to organisations with little effect on their business.

The report found that in "almost all" cases long-term costs could be reduced by switching from proprietary software produced by firms such as Microsoft.

However, it warned that a move to open source could increase short term costs.

This would be largely be due to increased training for users of the software, said the authors of the report who are based at the United Nations University in Maastricht.

But some proprietary manufacturers such as Microsoft do not believe that open source always means cheaper. In 2004 the company launched a campaign called Get The Facts that gave examples of where its software was cheaper and more reliable than open source products.

Voluntary contribution

Open source software refers to software where the underlying programming code is made available to users to read, alter and improve. This is in contrast to proprietary software where a company controls the source code to prevent changes being made.

A great deal of open source software is produced and distributed for free by volunteer programmers, although some companies, such as Red Hat, do sell open source products and associated services to get them up and running.

The study estimates that just one-third of open source programs are produced by businesses in Europe.

Software made by volunteers includes operating systems, such as Linux, and Microsoft Office-like programs such as OpenOffice.org.

Open source programs are already used by many companies particularly to run web servers, the computers that store and deliver web pages.

According to the study, the number of existing open source programs already available would have cost firms 12 billion Euros (£8 billion) to produce.

It estimates that the available programs represent the equivalent of 131,000 programmer years.

"This represents at least 800 million Euros (£525 million) in voluntary contributions from programmers alone each year," the report said.

At the moment, the report said, public organisations were the dominant beneficiaries of this work.

To continue this uptake, the report recommends "correcting current policies and practices that implicitly or explicitly favour proprietary software".

As well as providing incentives to the open source industry it also recommends that schools start to introduce more of the software.

This would instil "an attitude towards information technology that favours the ability to create and actively participate rather than just consume," the report said.

This view echoes those of 111 UK MPs who signed an early day motion in December 2006 to support the use of open source in schools.

The motion also criticised the "outdated" methods used to purchase software for schools that locked them into buying proprietary software. ]


SOURCE: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6270657.stm



WHO DOESN'T WISH TO BE A COMPUTER CODE WIZARD, EVEN IF ONLY AT HOME?

Posted by Okonkwo O. Awa at 10:35:00 PM

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Greenville, Rhode Island bakery owned by the Cavanagh family, which uses the plant to produce church communion bread from just water and bread. That business is known to produce about 850 million sacramental wafers annually and to supply 80% of the Holy Communion bread used in American, Australian, Canadian, and British churches. The only middlemen in the supply chain are nuns living in convents! Now they want to expand to West Africa with their Christian sacramental ware for Pentecostal, Catholic, 'New Wave', and Orthodox church offerings. I make reference to the so-called New Wave churches - my term for those churches that broke away from the orthodoxy of the Protestant fold, just as the latter roke off from the Catholic church by virtue of the exploits of Martin Luther centuries ago. Many new-wave and other church goers in the generally undeveloped West African subregion of Africa pay more to religious organizations in monthly tithes and offerings than they do to their government in personal income and value added taxes. Now, that last fact is quite interesting because it is an admission that a bakery in Rhode Island has seen a huge market in the center of Black Africa for small white perfectly laminated and non-crumbly holy wheat bread, reportedly costing "less than a penny" apiece, for the use of both the bible-reading and the bible-believing religious organizations. However, the picture from the Cavanagh's factory floor speaks volumes, in my own opinion, about the need for the company to watch its business ethics and to treat all customers equally irrespective of location, creed, or other discriminatory demographic information or criteria. So, I just hope and pray that the wafers falling off the conveyor belt and by the way side are not destined for West Africa and that the actual wafers delivered will be wheat bread and water, and not just glutamate-free bread and 'pure' water, if you get my point, even if so requested by some shady, greedy, and unethical businessmen over in West Africa. Posted by Okonkwo O. Awa on Sunday, December 28, 2008.

In the summer of 2007, Pope Benedict XVI (BXVI) encouraged The Church to reach out to young people using new technologies, as he himself learned to send out cellphone text messages to the faithful. So in obedience, a tech savvy evangelizing Catholic priest got some help from a Web designer in order to write all the daily books of prayers into a low-cost computer software application downloadable onto the iPhone. Rev. Paolo Padrini's iTunes prayer book was officially approved by The Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications in December 2008. Of course, all proceeds from the electronic prayer book venture will go to charity. Speaking of charitable behavior, The Holy See has seen it fit after 400 years to honor Galileo Galilei in 2009 as the "patron" of the non-mutual exclusivity of the faith versus reason dichotomy. That is very appropriate in this age of new technology, even though The Church still smarts from its error of judgment in calling the famous astronomer a heretic after he publicly embarrassed The Church by reporting that his scientific observations in Astronomy with his unique telescope had led him inexorably to believe that the Earth actually revolved around the sun, in direct opposition to the teaching of The Church at the time that Planet Earth was the center of the universe. In seeking to paint the Church in a new light of worldly knowledge by distancing itself from a past of imbibing pure dogma, The Vatican may have ventured to cross the final frontier and boundary between Science and Christianity by acknowledging recently that there could be life on planets other than the Earth! Posted by O. O. Awa on Wednesday, December 24, 2008.
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