Councils Move to Open Source Software!

I don’t have the details to hand, but it was reported in the Evening Echo and Red FM yesterday, Cork City and County Councils are going to move (all?) their desktop systems to Linux and Open Office over the next few years. I meant to buy the paper but of course it completely slipped my mind. There’s a pdf of yesterday’s Echo on their website but it’ll disappear later today or tomorrow I guess.
The Council expects to save millions of Euro over the next few years but beyond that I don’t have any online links. Can anyone find some information on this?

The state of just about everything at OScon

This article is a good summary of keynotes at OScon.

Many 2.5/2.6 changes were put to the test recently when Linus Torvalds announced his move to the Open Source Development Network and the OSDN site was slashdotted. Thanks to improved efficiency in the kernel (especially the virtual memory management system), the system running their Web site stayed up through the onslaught…
But there is no doubt that Apple computers play a critical role at this conference. In fact, it’s loaded with Apple lovers. I haven’t tried to do an official count, but the silver laptops are gleaming out all over the place.

Open Source CRM software

Ken Guest started a conversation on IRC asking about an open source Goldmine clone. I’ve thought about this a lot in the past and even started on a web based interface to one, had the pop3 reading done, but then I lost interest in the project and the code has disappeared somewhere!
I searched and found this link directory listing lots of stuff.
I had the idea of using standard mail clients, along with some web interface to a db of users and email history. By using formail to capture outgoing mail, and procmail to capture incoming mail we could stuff that information into a database, maybe use LDAP as an address directory, or simply have “mailto” links on the web interface. The biggest problem is moving the email content from the web interface to the mail client as part of a reply..
This only addresses one aspect of CRM software of course, but it’s the most obvious one I can think of.

The Usability of Open Source S …

The Usability of Open Source Software “They just don’t like to do the boring stuff for the stupid people!” (Sterling, 2002)

Open source communities have successfully developed a great deal of software although most computer users only use proprietary applications. The usability of open source software is often regarded as one reason for this limited distribution. In this paper we review the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discuss how the characteristics of open source development influence usability. We describe how existing human-computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities, of developers and users, to address issues of usability.