Opportunities for cooperation between business and UK universities using Open Source that might benefit the UK economy - London 15/04/08
Wed, Mar 19th 2008 12:12 Posted by markelkins
A workshop style event will be held on Tuesday 15th April 2008 from 1100 hours by the British Computer Society (BCS) Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) regarding opportunities for cooperation between the business world and UK universities in projects and ventures involving Open Source software and methodology that might benefit the UK economy. If you would like to participate in this event then please contact Mark Elkins at mark_elkins@bcs.org
Participants will include:
Aidan McGuire of Blue Fountain Systems Ltd http://www.bluefountain.com/ Supply2Gov Award Winner 2007, BCS Award Winner 2006.
Dave Crossland currently undertaking the MA Typeface Design programme at the University of Reading and plans to pioneer a “free software foundry” business when he graduates.
Cornelia Boldyreff Ph.D., FBCS Professor of Software Engineering, Department of Computing and Informatics, Lincoln University and OSSG Events Co-ordinator.
Andrew Back MIEEE MBCS CITP of BT Osmosoft http://www.osmosoft.com an Open Source innovation unit within BT. Andrew is an Open Systems Engineer and a Member of OSSG.
Peter Merchant Programme Leader, BSc Business Information Systems Management, Bournemouth University.
Mike Trotman of Datalucid Limited who is a member of UKUUG, BCS, and the Association of Survey Computing (ASC) Committee.
Mark Elkins MSc MBCS who is studying for a PhD at Solent University and is the Treasurer of OSSG.
Other participants are expected from the BBC and RedHat.
Venue: BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA
Map & directions: http://www.epsg.org.uk/locations/bcsss-guide.html
Time: 1100 to 1730 hours
To book a place to attend this event please email your name to the events coordinator.
Free buffet lunch and refreshments including wine available.
For further information please contact Mark Elkins at mark_elkins@bcs.org
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Vista, Open Source, procurement, and the environment
Sun, Apr 22nd 2007 11:17 Posted by markelkins
With the advent of Microsoft Vista it seems to me that there are now some particularly good environmental reasons (which ought to be of critical importance given the Government’s climate change led commitments) to choose/procure Open Source alternatives such as the Ubuntu Linux Operating System. Reason’s for this include:
(1) Vista’s heavy hardware requirements, which means that more powerful machines are needed. These tend to consume more power.
(2) The manufacture of new machines needed to run Vista, which by its very nature means some environmental impact will be felt.
It could be argued that this is a pertinent example of where the environment and the goals of capitalism conflict. This is because capitalism is constantly seeking growth and thus computer hardware manufacturers will like any other business tend to seek growth, which is something shareholders (including pension funds) generally push for . Thus some form of environmental restraint is required by business as we currently know it, but the way the system is stacked this is not likely to have a good impact on such things as the pensions crisis. Of course Open Source ways of achieving things might actually be better than what capitalism can achieve, but I guess this can be discussed another time. However, (if you have the time and inclination) please feel free to browse some on my past thoughts around this on this website at:
http://ossg.bcs.org/category/business/
and
(3) The environmental impact of disposing of machines that are unable to run Vista.
Outside of the above environmental arguments are the timeless considerations of cost. That is the savings that can be leveraged by using lower specification machines that consume less power, not having to buy new equipment, and not having to pay for the disposal of Vista redundant machines. The latter point includes the security issue of making sure that information on the hard drives of such machines is removed, which can be of very high importance given some of the sensitive information stored on public sector machines.
Mark Elkins
Posted in Business | No Comments » | Permalink »
Open Source Software and the Business Context - a survey
Thu, Jul 13th 2006 12:27 Posted by paulhussain
Please contribute to a better understanding of the professional use of open source software, through a straightforward, online questionnaire.
The questionnaire will feed into a Westminster University research project, and can be be completed at http://www.oss-survey.org/ - thank you in advance!
NB. This survey has also been advertised in the eBCS bulletin dated 12 July 2006, under the title of Open source software - hype or reality? .
Posted in Business | No Comments » | Permalink »
Archived mailing lists
Thu, Jun 15th 2006 18:02 Posted by webmaster
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.
Posted in Accessibility, Agile Methods, Business, E-Government, Education, Knowledge, Legal, Licensing | No Comments » | Permalink »
Open Source Software Hardware Requirements and Environmental Waste
Mon, Jul 18th 2005 15:31 Posted by markelkins
Several million Pentium PCs currently end up in UK landfill sites each year. At the same time the minimum hardware requirements for much Open Source Software continues to increase. For example in 2002 there were then several current packaged releases of Linux that had no difficulty running on a Pentium II PC or equivalent. Today in 2005 it might be possible to install some of the current releases on such a machine, but only someone who has an interest in slow-motion would appreciate the end result at run-time. Also unlike an older car or computer monitor an older PC generally uses less not more power than a newer one.
Although an older version of Linux is still fairly secure compared to some other operating systems it is not likely to have the level of support enjoyed by more recent versions. It can for example become an extremely time consuming business to get drivers for some hardware using older releases and dependency problems between releases are common. On the plus side it could be argued that because the code is open a user has in theory a chance to overcome such problems. However that kind of user will almost certainly need above average technical skills to do this, which means that most users will go for the easiest option of upgrading the hardware to match or exceed the minimum requirements of the latest software.
In some cases it maybe possible to get a reasonable run-time result using the latest Open Source Software on older hardware by adding more memory. Other upgrades such as adding a more powerful processor to an older board can only be taken so far, but in any event this leaves the environmental problem of what to do with the replaced component.
I might suggest that there is money to be made from a potential market need to develop Open Source Software that successfully tackles minimum hardware requirements in the most environmentally friendly way. There are many who claim that the use of Open Source Software is already extending the life of computer hardware, but in my view there is considerable potential to do more.
Mark Elkins
Posted in Business | 3 Comments » | Permalink »
