Open Source Observatory (OSOR)

Autonomy

24/10/2017

France’s Senate should start a commission of inquiry into a proprietary licence contract signed by the Ministry of Defence, says senator Joëlle Garriaud-Maylam. This summer, the ministry’s latest four…

Signed sealed & delivered

20/10/2017

Users of a recent version of LibreOffice (5.4.0 and up) on Linux workstations can now use OpenPGP to sign their documents, thanks to the 'Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik' (BSI, the…

Economic booster

18/10/2017

Governments should make the source code of their software solutions available as open source, says Gartner, a consultancy, in a report for the Dutch government published this week. Open sourcing of…

First two payments made

18/10/2017

Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Hochschule Luzern, HSLU ) in Switzerland is now accepting payments in Bitcoin . Customers of the institute — including students and employees — who…

Document friction

18/10/2017

Public services considering switching to alternatives for their office suites should make Open Document Format (ODF) the default for all office productivity tools from day one. This greatly reduces…

Currently not feasible

18/10/2017

The openness of source code is an important requirement of software for electronic voting systems . To guarantee the transparency, verifiability and integrity of these systems, anyone should be able…

Service integration

11/10/2017

The government of Galicia (Spain) is encouraging companies to use OpenESB: software that helps integrate business applications in a service-oriented IT architecture. On 17 October, Galicia’s Centro…

Resilient systems

06/10/2017

The European Parliament (EP) wants the European Commission to fund IT security research projects involving open source software. Using free and open source software can help prevent cybercrime and…

Contract Overhaul

06/10/2017

The city of Rome (Italy) is taking well-orchestrated steps to increase its use of free and open source software, aiming to reduce lock-in to IT vendors. A key change is an overhaul of the way IT…

Marine Objects Search

06/10/2017

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) is making available SUMO, open source software that can help detect ships engaged in illicit activities. The JRC hopes other software developers…

Digitisation & open source

05/10/2017

The government of the state of Schleswig-Holstein (Germany) aims to increase its use of free and open source software, according to German press reports. The aim is a "complete replacement" of…