As part of the migration from Plone to Wordpress and related pieces of software, the old mailing lists have been extracted from Plone and archived. Hereafter, mailing lists will be organised as follows:

ossg-committee@ossg.bcs.org

This list is used for discussing committee business. The archives are open but only committee members may join the list.

ossg-announcements@ossg.bcs.org

This is a low-traffic list used for OSSG event announcements. Posting is restricted to committee members.

ossg-members@ossg.bcs.org

A members discussion list, though we would prefer members to discuss issues using the blog comment pages.

The old mailing list archives may be found here:

Committee Forum

Committee discussion

Business

Discussion of issues surround business and open source.

Member Forum

Member event announcements

Licensing

Licensing discussion

eGovernment and Open Source

Discussion of Open Source in eGovernment

Knowledge Management and Open Source

Using open source for knowledge management

Agile Methods and Open Source

Relationship between Agile Methods and Open Source

Legal Issues surrounding Open Source

Discussion of legal issues involvng Open Source

Accessibility and Open Source

Discussion of Accessiblity in Open Source

Education and Open Source

Use of Open Source in Education

Apologies for any duplicate messages etc. The archives were produced by screen-scraping the old Plone site. Not ideal.

The BCS Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) annouce a combined event with BCS Hants. A presentation by Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer, Sun Microsystems, Inc: “The Zen of Free: Why Open Source is not a passing fad”. This event, as usual, is open to non-members (although non-BCS Hants members cannot vote at the BCS Hants AGM being held prior to the combined event), is CPD assessed, free and requires no booking. Date: 22nd June 2006 Time: 7pm (Finger Buffet 6.30pm) Venue: Chilworth Manor Hotel, Chilworth, Southampton, Hampshire SO16 7PT.

Talk abstract: “With companies like Sun, Novell and IBM switching to Open Source, it’s clearly about more than just “free stuff”. Hear about “social production”, how software gets written, where the money comes from and why this is just the first wave of a series of revolutions that will change society profoundly and permanently.” Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer, Sun Microsystems, has global responsibility for Sun’s Free/Open Source software strategy including OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris and more. He has a deep interest in the nature and impact of networks and the social change they produce. Prior to his current role, he helped create blogs.sun.com and get Sun’s President blogging, worked at IBM Hursley where he helped introduce Java and XML, and has worked on video conferencing, X.25, run a Windows software business and programmed everything from PDAs to mainframes. Find out more at http://www.webmink.net/

For further information please contact Mark Elkins by email at mark_elkins@bcs.org or phone 023 80 319560

For location details of the Chilworth Manor Hotel please visit: http://www.chilworth-manor.co.uk

The BCS OSSG Annual General Meeting was held as planned on Tuesday 30th May 2006 in London. A new committee was elected and was followed by an interesting “Question Time” event featuring Alan Cox, Glyn Moody, Mark Taylor and Andrew Katz.

For full details of the panellists, please see the AGM announcement

Points raised in the panel discussion included the enforceability of the GPL; the impact of GPL version 3; the problems and successes of Open Source software in the media; the impact of the Office of Government Commerce gateway reports on the deployment of Open Source in the public sector; issues surrounding the use of the term “Intellectual Property Rights”; the relationship between Open Access (in science and academia) and Open Source plus much more. A recording (podcast?) of this event is available.

From left, Alan Cox, Mark Taylor, Glyn Moody and Andrew Katz

The new committee is composed as follows:

Chair

Paul Adams

Vice-Chair

Peter Murray

Secretary

Malcolm Kendall

Treasurer

Mark Elkins

Webmaster

David Nutter

Without Portfolio

Graham Oakes, Andy Halsall and Conrad Taylor

Unfortunately an Events Coordinator was not elected at this meeting.