What malice lurks?
Malo Leche
With all the recent news
about identity theft, stolen credit card and
personal information, maybe the attempt at illegally taking money
from GNOME Foundation's bank account should not be such a surprise.
Yet malice
still comes as a shock.
What happened?
Forged bank drafts, with a counterfeit heading that included
"The Free Desktop Project" on the corner of the check, were presented
to the foundation's bank last week. Attempted deposits in two states
were quickly spotted by the bank and an investigation begun.
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Modernismo
Barcelona's waves of architectural expression include the 1992 Olympics and the modernism period at the end of the 19th Century into the beginning decade of the 20th. It was the monarchy that commissioned the grandeur around Ciutadella Park for the 1929 World's Fair. This is in this
area where the 2006 GNOME Users and Developers European Conference will take
place. Known for its artists and sense of design and innovation, it is only
fitting that a free desktop conference visit the capital of Catalunya.
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When statistician John Williams asked about
estimating the number of GNOME users, we turned to Dan Kusnetzky at
IDC to find out
their estimate of
Linux client operating environment
shipments. IDC projects in 2004 there were approximately 4.1 million revenue
producing copies of Linux delivered.
"If one considers the installed
base
(shipments minus retirements), then the paid Linux client operating
environment software population is 7.8 million copies" Mr. Kusnetsky
told us. Non-paid
copies, he said, are likely to add about 2.5 million to that total installed base.
While there is no available count
of those users running GNOME in the IDC figures, there are
known reference deployments - telecentros in Brazil, school and govenment offices in Spain, police and
animation houses in the U.S. Retail and financial companies (some on thin clients) are said to be using GNOME, but have asked their vendors not to publicize names.
With a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of
25% for Linux on the desktop and a differential for OpenSolaris, we'll leave it to the statisticians to verify which way the wind is blowing.
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"Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government."
- Morten Andreas Meyer, Norwegian Minister of Modernization
After her speech urging people to influence the information society at GUADEC last year in Kristiansand, Eva Hildrum, Director General at the Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications, heard an earful about the government's use of proprietary standards from Norwegian members of the audience.
Ms. Hildrum's keynote was followed by a roundtable
called Defining Open Standards moderated by Bob Stack,
who was instrumental in implementing the
open standards policy in Massachusetts while
he was Chief Technology Officer for the state.
The session, arranged by Danish FLOSS advocate Anne Østergaard,
included Bruce Perens (USA), Brahim Souabi (NL), Egon Troles (DE), Vemund Riiser (NO) & Thomas Myrup Kristensen (DK) and contributed to the
discussion of open standards in Norway.
It is always encouraging to hear follow-up reports from countries that
have hosted a GNOME Users and Developers European Conference.
Norway's new digital government framework
calls for open standards and government agency
plans for open source software. The plan (Norwegian PDF) is called e-Norge 2009. Chalk another one up for free information access
and technology.
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