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A charitable organisation "gets it" |
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Virgin Money Giving is a not for profit organisation providing a new web service for charitable organisations to manage fundraising campaigns and their online presence among donors.
They have recognised the consistency arising from software without licence fees and better meeting their not-for-profit objectives: “As a not-for-profit business, Virgin Money Giving can work with companies such as Jaspersoft to ensure that a much larger percentage of donations go to the important causes donors choose.”
Of course they also realise that FOSS also enables "innovative business models, including the one we’re rolling out to support charitable giving in a responsible way.
As I blogged in 'Radio 4 "In Touch" and file formats' it turns out there consequences for a charity's client group arising from partnering with proprietary software companies. It's nice to see that others realise that too, Congratulations to Virgin Money Giving and let's hope we see more of this
-- Gerry Gavigan, OSC Chairman, 14 October 2009
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In case you needed to be told, the New South Wales Police were giving evidence at a public hearing on "cybercrime" last week.
The first rule, he said, was to never click on hyperlinks to the banking site and the second was to avoid Microsoft Windows.
In an earlier blog "delete Australia insert UK" I mused that the situation over there seemed remarkably similar to that here.
If that is universally true, then some size of the scale of the problem we face may be gleaned from his subsequent exchange with Australian MPs. In response to his suggestion that if one were using the internet for a commercial transaction one should "use a Linux boot up disk", MPs were enthusiatic but clueless: "You may need to explain further for us," said one MP, while another responded, "yes, we need to understand that".
As a well known British MP put it: "education, education education"...
-- Gerry Gavigan, OSC Chairman, 13 October 2009
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The London Stock Exchange has just hoofed out its trading platform based on Microsoft and .Net.
In a move (sort of) reminiscent of Sun's decision to buy a company making an alternative rather than renew its Microsoft Office licences, the LSE is buying an entire development company
I remember the delight expressed by Microsoft when the LSE went Microsoft (Catch it while you can), together with its "High Reliability Times" advertisements (scroll down) and videos which were as more than one person noted were a bit premature
-- Gerry Gavigan, OSC Chairman, 5 October 2009 |
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OSS and the Public Sector (again) |
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Red Hat and Alfresco complain that the Government's Action Plan for Open Source Software is not delivering.
I'm inclined to ask if they actually read it and what they were expecting it to deliver?. As action plans go, it doesn't even get to the starting gate of the UK Government's own Treasury guidelines for performance measurement.
Starting with Action 10 [Government] will engage with the Open Source community, back in February we wrote to the then Minister seeking to explore the narrow, technocratic perspective the report adopted. As we all know FOSS is not a product, it is an approach to development, quality, governance and freedom (of all kinds). We're still waiting and would love to hear from somebody.
We're a bunch of SMEs trying hard to get noticed, but if the large organisations don't talk up what really sets FOSS apart from proprietary software then how is your average public sector decision maker supposed to notice the difference? Perhaps they could start by reading the advice they give to others?
-- Gerry Gavigan, OSC Chairman, 25th September 2009
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Further melting of the permafrost |
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I've already written about my perception that the permafrost is melting (In Touch, Pigs are flying) and that people are beginning to look for alternatives to Microsoft or Apple, here's another example... |
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