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The Government first set out its policy on the use of open source in 2004. This was restated in both 2009 and 2010. The Government ICT Strategy states that "Where appropriate, Government will procure open source solutions."  To support this, Action 3 of the Strategy says that "To create a level playing field for the use of innovative ICT solutions, the Government will publish a toolkit for procurers on best practice for evaluating the use of open source solutions." The following set of documents make up that toolkit: All About Open Source - including FAQs  ICT Advice Note - Procurement of Open Source  Procurement Policy Note on Open Source  OSS Options  CESG Guidance on Open Source - for Government users only Publically accessible summary of the security guidance Total Cost of Ownership  Total cost of ownership of open source software: a report for the UK Cabinet Office supported by OpenForum Europe PPN Open Source The purpose of this toolkit is to ensure that there is a level playing field for open source and proprietary software and that some of the myths associated with open source are dispelled. 

Les signaux s'accumulent. L'industrie « traditionnelle » serait de plus en plus tentée par l'open source. C'était déjà le cas dans l'électronique, avec notamment la carte Arduino. La santé et l'automobile y trouveraient aussi aujourd'hui un relais d'innovation crédible, voir incontournable. Un article de The Economist intitulé « When code can kill or cure » (dans le cahier spécial technologie du N° du 2 juin 2012) explique qu'utiliser un modèle « open source » à la conception des équipements médicaux promet d'accroître la sécurité et l'innovation. Basés aujourd'hui sur des systèmes ultra-propriétaires, les équipements médicaux, défibrillateurs, pompes à insulines sont parfois soumis à des défaillances bien plus graves qu'un simple plantage d'ordinateur. Sans parler des tentations des hackers de prouver la vulnérabilité de ces systèmes au piratage.

Software is just the beginning … open source is doing for mass innovation what the assembly line did for mass production. Get ready for the era when collaboration replaces the corporation.

Open clouds, OpenStack being just one, are following a similar development trajectory to Linux and open source databases. In phase one, the technology is for early adopters and not at all comparable with proprietary offerings. Early adopters and companies that take a long view and/or have a good reason to disrupt the market deploy and contribute to the projects to push them toward maturity.

"After offering its own online course, Power Searching with Google, the search giant is releasing the technology it used to support the class as an open source online learning project. The Course Builder software lets anyone with basic technical expertise to create an online class."

Researchers can find and read papers online, rather than having to manually track down print copies.  Machines  (computers) can index the papers and extract the details (titles,  keywords etc.) in order to alert scientists to relevant material.  In addition, computers can extract factual data and meaning by "mining" the content, opening  up the possibility that machines could be used to make connections (and  even scientific discoveries) that might otherwise remain invisible to  researchers. However,  it is not generally possible today for computers to mine the content in papers due to constraints imposed by publishers.  While Open Access (OA) is improving the ability for researchers to read papers (by removing  access barriers), still only around 20% of scholarly papers are OA. The  remainder are locked  behind paywalls. As per the vast majority of subscription contracts, Subscribers may read paywalled papers, but they may not mine them. Content  mining is the way that modern technology locates digital information. Because digitized scientific information comes from hundreds of  thousands of different sources in today's globally connected scientific  community [2] and because current data sets can be measured in  terabytes,[1] it is often no longer possible to simply read a scholarly  summary in order to make scientifically significant use of such  information.[3]  A researcher must be able to copy information,  recombine it with other data and otherwise "re-use" it so as to produce  truly helpful results.  Not only is it a deductive tool to analyze  research data, it is how search engines operate to allow discovery of content. To prevent mining is therefore to force scientists into blind  alleys and silos where only limited knowledge is accessible.  Science  does not progress if it cannot incorporate the most recent findings and  move forward from there.

"Marcin Jakubowski est le fondateur d'Open Source Ecology (évoqué la première fois ici sur notre blog) C'est l'un des projets les plus enthousiasmants qui soit : disposer d'un kit de machines pour bâtir en toute autonomie les bases d'un village, d'une communauté ou d'une… civilisation ! Et là où tout ceci devient passionnant c'est que ces machines sont libres, permettant à tout un chacun de reprendre les plans pour s'en aller poser la première pierre de sa propre future communauté. Si vous ne connaissez pas bien, nous vous suggérons de commencer par cette conférence TED de Marcin sous-titrée en français. Et pour aller plus loin, nous vous proposons ci-dessous la traduction d'un récent entretien donné par Marcin Jakubowski au blog du site TED."

Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, Missouri farmer Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step he's taking to write instruction sets for an entire self-sustaining farm operation with equipment costs of under $10,000.

Un des métiers en pleine mutation (et pas sans difficultés) et le journalisme. Ce qui évidemment présente un impact direct comme indirect sur l'activité de veille : qualification des sources, temporalité, recoupement surtout qu'il est bouleversé par le Web. Alan Rusbridger, éminent directeur de rédaction du The Guardian est revenu dans une sélection de tweets sur sa conception de ce que serait un Open Journalism. Des propos simples, pertinents et fondamentalement novateurs pour un métier en pleine tempête et recherche de renouveau.  

Used by millions for research, teaching, and learning. With more than a thousand academic journals and over 1 million images, letters, and other primary sources, JSTOR is one of the world's most trusted sources for academic content. JSTOR connects libraries, researchers, teachers, and students around the world with vital scholarly content in more than 50 disciplines.

Or is this open source 'cloud operating system' just a launching pad for a million new cloud businesses? Either way, the excitement is contagious

Medical technology: Applying the "open source" model to the design of medical devices promises to increase safety and spur innovation

Earlier today, Harvard and MIT announced edX, an open-source technology platform designed to deliver online courses. Now, anyone from around the world with an Internet connection can have access to, what MIT President Susan Hockfield called, "one of the best kept secrets of Cambridge and the entire higher education community" - the "richness of collaborations" between Harvard and MIT.

MIT and Harvard, two neighboring universities which often compete for top students, are now collaborating on free online courseware technology. Starting next fall, both schools will offer free courses using a platform based on MIT's previously announced MITx technology.  MITx enables the creation of online classes that knit together video segments, embedded quizzes, interactive feedback, online labs and student-ranked Q&A.

"Health care costs rise as doctors try batches of treatments that don't work in search of one that does. Meanwhile, drug companies spend billions on developing each drug and increasingly end up with nothing to show for their pains. This is the alarming state of medical science today. Shahid Shah, device developer and system integrator, sees a different paradigm emerging. In this interview at the Open Source convention, Shah talks about how technologies and new ways of working can open up medical research."

A growing number of IT organizations plan to build a private cloud -- and OpenStack, an open source cloud infrastructure platform, is emerging as the foundation of choice

I have always been intrigued by the promise of online education. It is easy to see how geographic and economic boundaries can be overcome through technology. Educational institutions can compete for students well beyond their traditional local boundaries, growing nationally and internationally while bringing down their per-seat costs. Schools no longer need expensive classrooms and dormitories to grow. Small, innovative institutions can grow globally and as rapidly as they dare to dream. High-quality teaching faculty can be recruited from anywhere on the planet -- to teach thousands of students simultaneously. Students can study anytime and attend classes from anywhere. In addition, growth of free, high-quality education sites such as Khan Academy and open-source courses such as Opencourseware at MIT, along with global satellite and broadband communications networks, have removed economic, social, and geographic barriers to high-quality education.

The world of digital textbooks is more than heating up. It's on fire. Amazon just launched a digital rental option for textbooks. Companies like Chegg are becoming academic hubs that can improve your education experience through more than just textbook rentals. But all of the options to use digital textbooks have cost money. And teachers as well as students simply don't have much. Until now. Boundless just launched the public beta version of its brand new site. What is Boundless? It's a way to easily turn all of the open source information that exists in the world into a simple easy-to-use digital textbook. And it's free. This is one of the most exciting announcements that came across my inbox over the past few weeks. Boundless is shaping up to truly disrupt the digital textbook industry and the newly launched tools are robust enough to do just that. But enough hyperbole and hot air, here's what you should know:

The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

"Arduino is probably the world's most popular open source physical computing platform. The little microcontrollers show up in everything from wild art projects to serious home automation efforts. It's great and all, but couldn't it be … smaller? Electrical engineer Ken Burns thought so, and got to work on the TinyDuino."