Archive for the ‘Spain’ tag
Report on the International Status of Open Source Software 2010
The Spanish Open Source Software Observatory (Observatorio Nacional de Software de Fuentes Abiertas – CENATIC,, in Spanish), in keeping with its objective of raising awareness about open source technologies, regularly releases research reports that study the different aspects of open source software.
GUADEC: Open Source in Spain
GUADEC 2010 sits down with GNOME Open Desktop Day panelist José Félix Ontañón to talk about the Andalusian Government-back Guadalinfo project.
Sometimes the locals need to take things into their own hands. In this case, they built their own Linux distribution. Before 2003, in a proprietary society, towns in the Spanish region of Andalusia with less than 10,000 people were unable to connect to the internet. ISPs did not consider the areas to be profitable and software vendors weren’t interested in localization. With a population of 8 million people, the government of Andalusia made a bold move to catapult their region head-long into the information age by embracing open-source software.
Felavatták a világ első Szabad szoftver utcáját
Utcát neveztek el a szabad szoftverekről a spanyolországi Berga városában. A Szabad szoftver utcát – melynek neve katalánul és angolul is olvasható az utcatáblán – a hétvégén a város polgármestere és a konferencia-előadóként ott tartózkodó Richard Stallman, a nemzetközi hírű szabad szoftveres aktivista, a GNU projekt elindítója, a Free Software Foundation alapítója és elnöke avatta fel. A világon alighanem ez az első olyan utca, amely ezt a nevet viseli.
Basque government starts open source resource centre
The government of the Basque autonomous region in Spain will begin a resource centre on open source and open standards. The Ministry of Justice and Public Administration in November signed an agreement between the Basque Government and the Association of Free Software Euskadi (ESLE). The decision to sign this agreement was announced on 30 October. The resource centre will have an advisory body from representatives of ASOLIF (the National Association of Free Software), ESLE and the Basque Government.
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Andalusia to distribute open source laptops to schools
In the Spanish autonomous region of Andalusia, 190,500 students and teachers will start using open source laptops in January, Spanish newspapers reported earlier this month.
El Pais on 9 September quotes Mar Moreno, an adviser at the ministry of Education of the region, who explains that the laptop distribution is part of the central government’s Edu 2.0 project. This project starts with 5th grade school students, however to get up to speed, Andalusia will including the 6th graders.
Distributing the laptops will cost more than 80 million euro, El Pais reports. “Each laptop will cost around 290 euro. The government has decided to configure the laptops with free software, using the operating system Guadalinex and other free applications.” When they complete their studies, students will either be given the laptops for free or will be able to purchase them for a symbolical fee.
The Guadalinex plans were first announced in July during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. During this conference, the combination of the Akademy and Guadec open source desktop software meetings, Isotrol, a Spanish IT services provider, presented the prototype of the software and hardware that is going to be deployed in Andalusia.
Controversy
Spain’s Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s announcement in May to distribute about 450,000 laptops to schools in the country was criticised by his own party (PSOE). Zapatero wants these laptops to be fitted with Microsoft’s proprietary software. However, Leire Pajín, the party’s secretary said she wants these laptops to run only open source software.
More information:
Edu 2.0
Asolif
El Pais news item (in Spanish)
Earlier Osor item
09. 09. 2009
