industryterm:free and open-source software

  • Un titre un peu trop enthousiaste ? Open Source is Taking Over Europe!
    https://itsfoss.com/open-source-adoption-europe

    he commune of Mappano (Italia) in the neighborhood or Turin, has decided to use free and open source software for its IT infrastructure and eGovernement services.

    If you follow It’s FOSS regularly, you remember earlier this year, we regretted Munich was turning its back on free software. Of course, Mappano is not Munich. It’s a municipally counting around 7000 inhabitants and established in 2013 from the reunion of several territories. What made that case interesting is, until recently, Mappano was temporarily administrated by a prefect. And it’s only in June 2017 the first Mappano municipality was elected.

    So, this is a rare case of a public administration having the opportunity to start its IT infrastructure from scratch. And it was one of the first decision of the newly elected council to build their infrastructure and the eGovernement services based on free and open-source software.

    Some might see in that news the sign free movement leadership has moved toward the south of Europa? Maybe. Maybe not. So I decided to investigate about the adoption of Open Source software in public administrations across the European Union.

  • Cory Doctorow’s ’Fully Automated Luxury Communist Civilization’ - Reason.com
    http://reason.com/archives/2017/07/12/cory-doctorows-fully-automated

    But I also think that prediction is way overrated. I like what Dante did to the fortune tellers. He put them in a pit of molten shit up to their nipples with their heads twisted around backwards, weeping into their own ass cracks for having pretended that the future was knowable. If the future is knowable then it’s inevitable. And if it’s inevitable, why are we even bothering? Why get out of bed if the future is going to happen no matter what we do? Except I guess you’re foreordained to.

    I’m not a fatalist. The reason I’m an activist is because I think that the future, at least in part, is up for grabs. I think that there are great forces that produce some outcomes that are deterministic or semi-deterministic. And there are other elements that are up for grabs.

    But I think Uber is normal and dystopian for a lot of people, too. All the dysfunctions of Uber’s reputation economics, where it’s one-sided—I can tank your business by giving you an unfair review. You have this weird, mannered kabuki in some Ubers where people are super obsequious to try and get you to five-star them

    Google runs this data center in Belgium in a place where two-thirds of the time it’s so cool that they don’t need the air conditioning, and the other third of the time they just turn [the data center] off. And their file system is so good at migrating data away from places that are shutting down and into places that are running that it doesn’t really matter.

    A lot of places that do aluminum smelting, because it’s so energy intensive, they use aluminum smelting as a kind of battery. They say: We need to smelt so many tons of this this year, and when we have lots of solar or lots of wind or lots of tidal power, and we don’t have anything to use it for, we smelt the aluminum then, and not at the moment when other people are trying to turn on their lights or run their air conditioning or run their Google data centers.

    That kind of coordination—where at the moment that something is needed, and at the moment where it’s cheap to do it, it’s done—is characteristic of the efficient-market hypothesis. It’s characteristic of planned economy theory. It’s the thing that everyone is shooting for.

    The thing that free and open-source software has given us is the ability to coordinate ourselves very efficiently without having to put up with a lot of hierarchy. To be able to take things that we’ve done together, where we’ve reached a breaking point, and split them in two and have each of us pursue it in our own direction, without having to pay too high a cost or even have a lot of acrimony.

    That’s the free software world I’m trying to imagine. What would it be like to build skyscrapers the way we make encyclopedias in the 21st century?

    #Cory_Doctorow #Science-fiction

  • DAVdroid : Manage your CardDAV address book and CalDAV calendars
    http://davdroid.bitfire.at/what-is-davdroid

    Manage your CardDAV address book and CalDAV calendars

    two-way-synchronization (server ↔ client)
    automatic time-zone conversion
    native Android 4+ implementation
    lightweight application, not cluttered with “features”
    flawless integration with device and address book/calendar apps
    simple to use
    high-performance algorithms
    free and open-source software (FOSS)

    disponible des les dépots #F-Droid