The Need to Fund Open Source Software Research and Development to Enhance ICT for Development and ICT for Dollars

I owe part of my IT education to the Open Source Community. I enhanced my programming skills using open source programming languages; I garnered a better understanding of operating systems through my study and research of the Linux kernel; I understood the inner workings of software by having access to their code; and in college, I used learning materials from computer science classes made available by MIT Open Courseware. But this article is not about how I benefited from open source software. I only mentioned my experience with open source software to illustrate that if I can benefit from it, every Liberian can do the same. Therefore, this article is about how open source software can benefit Liberia as a developing country. It is also a call to both private and public organizations to invest in open source software in order to enhance Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D) and Information and Communications Technology for Dollars (ICT4$). Liberia’s ICT sector has achieved a lot since the end of the civil war. The creation of a liberal market, the advent and deployment of the ACE subsea cable and several other achievements have been the factors that have driven Liberia’ ICT revolution. Again, this article is not intended to delineate all of Liberia’s ICT achievements; it’s about the benefits we can get from investing in open source software. Before going further into this discussion, permit me to briefly discuss the difference between the two types of software. Open source software is software whose source code is openly published, is available at no charge, and can freely be modified and distributed. Proprietary software is software that is generally licensed for a fee and its source code is kept secret. It is often developed by software firms or companies such as Microsoft.

Call for Oman Free and Open Source Software Platform

• Call for Oman Free and Open Source Software Platform

  The participants of the Free and Open Source Software Conference 2019 commended the efforts of government agencies and academic institutions in supporting free and open source software in the Sultanate. It was recommended to strengthen these efforts and raise awareness of this software in various educational institutions and in public and private institutions. The participants commended the good organisation of the conference and its success and they called for its continuation every two years to increase awareness of free and open source software and its role in modern digital technologies to keep up with the developments during the Fourth Industrial Revolution. They also commended the Oman Free and Open Source Software Platform, which was announced at the opening of the conference.

• 'IT localisation vital for future'

  Under the theme of “FOSS as Driver for Technology Transfer, Innovation & Entrepreneurship”, the fourth edition of the Free and Open Source Conference FOSSC was launched yesterday at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) Conference Hall under the patronage of Dr. Abdulmounim bin Mansoor Al Hassani, Minister of Information and in the presence of academics, researchers and students along with international guests. The two-day conference, the first-of-its-kind in the Mena region, is jointly organised by the Communication and Information Research centre (CIRC) at SQU and the Information Technology Authority (ITA), represented by the Digital Society Development Division to support the Free and Open Source Initiative (FOSS).

KDE Usability & Productivity

• This week in Usability & Productivity, part 58

  The System Settings Window Decorations page has been completely rewritten, bringing it into greater conformance with the modern visual style and fixing a huge number of bugs in the process (Valerio Pilo, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)...

• KDE Continues Overhauling System Settings, More Discover Improvements

  Sunday mornings mean another weekly recap of the KDE improvements made, thanks to the great analysis by KDE developer Nathan Graham. While Plasma 5.15 was released this week, the KDE developers are already hard at work on KDE Plasma 5.16.