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Software Foundation (FSF) announced the winners of the annual free software awards during the GNU/Linux conference LibrePlanet, held on March 21-22 at Harvard Science Center in Cambridge, MA. Creative Commons was honored with the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, and Wietse Venema was honored with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Presenting the awards was FSF founder and president Richard Stallman.

A site advocating use of Open Source Solutions in UK Schools

Open Source Schools is here to share information about open source software in schools. Our aim is to help you decide whether open source software might offer benefits for learning, teaching, engaging pupils and parents, managing information and resources, or school administration. The website provides information and articles about open source software, advice on getting started, case studies of its adoption in schools, a directory for exploring what is available, and a glossary.

I have the court documents for you in the i4i v. Microsoft case, the judgment, the permanent injunction, and the memorandum and order, which explains the legal reasoning in support of the order. I also got for you the original complaint by i4i, Microsoft's answer with counterclaim, and i4i's reply to the counterclaim, so you can understand what it was all about. The law firm that won has put out a press release. Microsoft, of course, will appeal. It has 60 days to do so. You probably think I am delighted. I am not. I hate software patents. And this is precisely why. It is karmic that this happened to Microsoft, who bullies Linux with patent threats and just got an XML patent of its own on August 4th that could, presumably, be used against the entire market. How stupid do we have to be to grant patents on software? On software *standards*? This is what happens. Now do you see it?

This course provides an overview of the historical and modern context and operation of free and open source software (FOSS) communities and associated software projects. The practical objective of the course is to teach students how they can begin to participate in a FOSS project in order to contribute to and improve aspects of the software that they feel are wrong. Students will learn some important FOSS tools and techniques for contributing to projects and how to set up their own FOSS projects.

Good series of tertiary lectures.

The Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe is proud to announce its latest initiative: pdfreaders.org, a site providing information about PDF with links to Free Software PDF readers for all major operating systems.

Home page for immersive and collaborative primary and elementary school learning software.

The award-winning Sugar Learning Platform promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities that encourage critical thinking, the heart of a quality education. Designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers an alternative to traditional "office-desktop" software.

The commission did not assess a fine, but it ordered Comcast to stop cutting off transfers of large data files among customers who use a special type of file-sharing software. [(free) registration needed to read the whole article]

Are you tired of constantly being prompted to download proprietary software and plugins to play the videos and listen to the music you want?

This conference has been designed by school leaders and others in the Open Source Schools' community to showcase to school leadership teams the best of educational free and open source software whether used alone or blended with proprietary software.

The Swiss government agency for Building and Logistics (BBL) has signed a software licence agreement with Microsoft worth 42 million CHF (about 27,8 million euro) without a request for tender, the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported on Tuesday.

The author of the software in question, titled Kindlepid.py, is listed as Igor Skochinsky, a hardware hacker who performed a remarkable analysis of the Kindle and described in December 2007 how he was able to gain access to the device. It's unclear why Amazon waited so long to respond with a legal threat, and why the company targeted MobileRead.com: Skochinsky's original blog post about Kindlepid.py is dated December 2007, and the copy of the Kindlepid.py software hosted at the Googlepages.com Web-page posting site is still available for download at http://skochinsky.googlepages.com/azw-0.2.zip

"Here are the various documents available for "Top 10 Free and Open Source Software in Education" :"

What impact will the $10 notebooks have on education? or Is it really possible to produce a useful notebook for $10? See also Harry Keller's "It's not the hardware; it's the software!" comment

This initiative originated in the Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). The coordinators of this initiative are Hannes Hauswedell and Jan-Hendrik Peters

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a popular format to publish formatted text and documents. There are several different versions of it, some qualifying as an Open Standard, some certified by ISO and some encumbered by software patents. You might want to promote the versions that are Open Standards, because Open Standards guarantee interoperability, competition and choice

Creative Commons vice president Mike Linksvayer accepted the award saying, "It's an incredible honor. Creative Commons should be giving an award to the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman, because what Creative Commons is doing would not be possible without them."

The SIF Certification Program has been designed to certify SIF-enabled software applications. A SIF-certified application is one that meets the conformance requirements and has been certified as conformant through the SIF certification program. As a condition of participation in the program, the applicant must warrant and represent that their product meets the applicable conformance requirements, which include conformance to the applicable SIF Implementation specification(s) as interpreted by SIFA from time to time, and a passing result from a current version of the SIF-approved test suite(s).

A graphic map depicting the epic struggle of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) against the Empire of Microsoft.

Interesting + informative + a little extreme humor

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.