Open Source News
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Open Educational Resources Paying Off for Some Colleges
"Instead of using a traditional textbook, which costs $124 in its loose-leaf format, Fox decided to search for suitable open educational resources, or OER, so that students could access the course materials for free. ... The effort evidently paid off. Fox reports a 10 percent increase in successful completion of the course over the previous semester in both sections. “And the reason was students actually got the book,” says Matt Reed, vice president for learning at Brookdale Community College, a Lincroft, New Jersey-based institution where 40 percent of the students are Pell Grant eligible." Open Source Education "The state of Virginia pilots a physics FlexBook, providing students with real-time information and affording teachers ultimate flexibility." Open Educational Resources: Transforming the Classroom Experience "Revolutionary. That’s how Erin English, Director of Blended and Online Learning and principal of Vista Visions Academy in the Vista Unified School District of California, describes her district’s use of Open Educational Resources (OER)." Teaching students the value of open source "Open source is not just about making something publicly accessible. It is a set of values—a way of working that practices open collaboration between a community to build or maintain something. On the basis of these values, today we can observe a vibrant and thriving open source community responsible for many of the great successes in many industries." Linux Foundation Launches Open Mainframe Project "It’s 2015 and you might think of the mainframe as a vestige of an earlier computing era, but these mega machines still play a role inside large institutions running intensive workloads. And as though to prove its ongoing utility, The Linux Foundation announced it was launching the Open Mainframe Project today, an open source endeavor devoted to helping companies using mainframe computers. The new venture was driven in large part by IBM, a primary supplier of these machines. In fact, it’s not a coincidence that it announced a partnership with Canonical today to build a Linux mainframe running Ubuntu Linux." A Major Advance For The Open Source Economy "Linux inventor Linus Torvalds predicted that Linux would become a major factor in the computing world not all at once, but by increments. People might forget about it for a while, but suddenly they’d realize that it was all around them. Well, that prediction has come true, not just for Linux, but for all of open source software. The open source revolution has transformed the Internet data center and sparked the explosive growth of social networking, cloud computing and mobile apps. But it’s also a mainstay in corporations and government. Seventy-eight percent of corporations use open source software to run all or part of their business. That’s a 100 percent increase since 2010, according to the 2015 Future of Open Source Survey." IBM Introduces Two Open-Source-Only Mainframes in Hardware Push "IBM is introducing two mainframe servers that run only on the open-source Linux operating system. The new hardware will make it easier to run technology like the MongoDB database and the open-source software Spark, International Business Machines Corp. said. Spark is a free information-storing framework that IBM has said it is spending “hundreds of millions” to develop." Open source, digital strategy, and more news for IT pros "In this week's edition of news for CIOs and IT pros, we bring you stories on open source, and the importance of strategy and leadership in digital transformation. Opening up to open source American Cancer Society CIO Jay Ferro recently discussed the growing appeal of open source on The Enterprisers Project, and, indeed, it's a trend that we continue to see gain momentum with companies large and small. This week, three major tech companies announced plans to embrace open source in new ways." Microsoft Moves Toward Open Source as Linux Fills Its Cloud This week, Russinovich, now the chief technology officer of Microsoft Azure, spent the day at Docker headquarters in San Francisco, and as part of Microsoft’s ongoing effort to show that it has fully embraced Linux—after years of stiff-arming the open source OS—he and Solomon Hykes, the brain behind Docker, chatted about the Docker-Microsoft partnership with various reporters and analysts. Some have asked whether Microsoft might acquire Docker, and though that seems unlikely, Hykes and Russinovich are certainly pushing for a world where businesses and developers can run Docker containers on both Linux and Windows—something that seemed like a contradiction in terms just a few months ago." Finally: UK Open Standards are RF, not FRAND "In a huge win for open standards, open source and the public, the long-awaited UK government definition of open standards has come down firmly on the side of RF, not FRAND. The UK government's approach is enshrined in an important new document defining what it calls Open Standards Principles. Annex 1 provides definitions and a glossary, including the following crucial definition of what is required for a standard to be considered open: rights essential to implementation of the standard, and for interfacing with other implementations which have adopted that same standard, are licensed on a royalty free basis that is compatible with both open source and proprietary licensed solutions. These rights should be irrevocable unless there is a breach of licence conditions." WordPress Powers 1 in 6 Websites Without an Office "WordPress is something of a dark secret on the Internet. The blogging platform, which is nearly a decade old, powers an incredible one-sixth of the Internet (including this blog)... “[Open source] is the most powerful philosophy I have ever been exposed to in my life,” he told the audience. “The more I give away, the more I get back. It is more work, it is much harder… But it [being successful] comes down to your competitive advantage. Less and less that is about your software, and more about user experience, the service, quality, the brand, marketing.”" Open source software use grows "There are many business advantages of vendor-supported open source software over proprietary software, such as greater business flexibility due to no vendor lock-in and better business support... “This trend is changing as we speak,” says Shannon Moodley, GM of Linux Warehouse. “...Our figures show an average year-on-year growth in excess of 50% over the last three years for the vendor channels we represent.” |
5 reasons why local government needs open source "2. By its very nature, open sources fosters creative and original thinking - exactly what is needed during deep budget cuts. Plus it brings with it the potential for cost savings not just through collaborative working, but by ensuring other departments or councils who are working on a similar project can utilise the market/vendor research and even some of the tech platforms." Open source textbook bill passes state Legislature "A set of bills that would create an online library of free electronic textbooks was passed by the state Legislature last week — an effort aimed at alleviating the burden of rising textbook prices for students at California’s public postsecondary institutions. Senate bills 1052 and 1053, which are awaiting approval by Gov. Jerry Brown, legislate the development of an open source library of electronic textbooks for 50 of the state’s most popular courses. The bills were introduced in February by state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, and has been formally endorsed by the University of California." Open-source textbook bills head to Gov. Jerry Brown "California lawmakers are sending Gov. Jerry Brown a package of bills that would allow college students to choose free online textbooks instead of costly printed ones for common undergraduate courses. Senate Bills 1052 and 1053 by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg cleared the Legislature today, when the state Senate approved them with final votes. The bills would create an online library of digital textbooks for the 50 most widely-taken lower division courses at the University of California, California State University and the state's community colleges. The project would get under way when state or private funding becomes available." How a NASA Open Source Startup Could Change the IT Universe "Chris Kemp, the first CTO of IT at NASA, helped to lead an effort at the U.S. space agency to create a cloud compute platform. The original 9,000 lines of code, known as Nova, have become the cornerstone of the OpenStack cloud project. OpenStack now has the backing of major IT vendors, including IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, AT&T and Intel. Kemp left NASA in 2011 and is currently the CEO of Nebula, a startup that is set to deliver commercially supported OpenStack gear..." Open Source Data Solutions Offer Enterprises More than Cost Savings "Here’s what’s interesting... It’s not just about the cost of open source. No, it’s also about the transparency of open source, according to Imran Ahmad, a data scientist who developed his own grid-computing algorithm called Bileg, which competes with Hadoop. He used an open source toolkit, because, he explains, open source platforms allow you to see the underlying mathematical basis, which, in turn, can help you evaluate the results of your data analysis. "If it's in open-source, you can dig down and see why I'm getting these results, why these results are the optimal ones," Ahmad told PC World. Proprietary analytics software doesn’t let you see the why of your results — which is fine until you have questionable results." New phase of CERN openlab to tackle exascale IT challenges for science "... CERN openlab is a unique public-private partnership between CERN and leading information technology companies HP, Intel, Oracle, Siemens, with contribution from Huawei for this new phase. Its mission is to accelerate the development of cutting-edge solutions to be used by the worldwide community working on LHC data." Open Source Coders are Fresher, Forrester Says ""When looking at your talent, ask software developers if they work with open source. Even if it is outside their work, they're probably keeping their skills set up," said Kyle McNabb, vice president and practice leader of application development and delivery at Forrester, at a recent Forrester event." Utah Schools Start Adopting Open Source Textbooks "Pilot programs provided printed open textbooks to more than 3,800 Utah high school students at a cost of $5 per book, down from an average cost of $80 for a science book." Yahoo Unloads Extreme Irony With Latest Facebook Attack "“I just want to make sure that the world of openness doesn’t end,” he told us this week at an Open Compute meeting in San Antonio, Texas. “This is just like people working on Linux. They contribute to the bigger cause. That’s what I’m doing.”" IBM set to replace Siebel with open-source SugarCRM "SugarCRM distributes its software through 400 resellers worldwide and generates revenue by offering services wrapped around the open-source code." Is Open Source Safe? "The IT Department where Daniel Toth works won't let him use open source software because they believe it's a security risk. Is it? No. If anything, open-source software has the potential to be safer. An open-source program is one whose source code is open to anyone who wishes to study it--or improve upon it. Open-source software is usually free and often public domain. Popular open-source programs include Linux, OpenOffice, and a program you're quite likely using to read this blog post: Mozilla Firefox." Stock market whiz-kid to launch academy ""It's still too early to start charging because my viewers still need that educational boost... Using open source education software, Bin Braik's investment academy will go live this week and is offering visitors the first level of the course, written by him, for free." |
