“Taking into consideration the current stage of utilization of OSS in the Albanian public administration, the local ICT business experience and capacities and the current education system, it is strongly recommended to the Albanian government to start implementing initially the neutral approach combined with some enabling initiatives, thus recognizing, guaranteeing and ensuring fair and equal competition of OSS with other proprietary software.”

Albania's Minister of Social Welfare and Youth is supporting the country's first open source conference, taking place this weekend in the capital Tirana. Albania's new government is strongly influenced by the free software and open data movement, explains Minister Erion Veliaj, who will inaugurate the conference on Saturday.

Those challenges could become more important as the software spreads to other uses. Unlike applicators like Democracy OS or Liquid Feedback, Loomio isn’t really designed for large scale political decision making. But it’s already been used for at least one government initiative. Last year, the Wellington City Council used Loomio to gather ideas and feedback from the public for new alcohol policies. The ideas floated included closing bars at midnight — which was shot down — and limiting the hours of operation of 24 hour liquor stores.

One of the distinctive elements of the open source software movement are open development projects. These are the projects where software is developed cooperatively (not collaboratively, necessarily) in public, often by people contributing from multiple organizations. All the processes that lead to the creation and release of software—design, development, testing, planning—happen using publicly visible tools. Projects also actively try to grow their contributor base.

Of all the politicians newly elected in France's municipal elections 143 have pledged their support for free software. The new councillors signed the Free Software Pact, a support campaign organised by April, an advocacy group. Signatories include the mayor of the city of Dijon, François Rebsamen, appointed Minister for Employment in France's new government on 2 April.
In the first round of the municipal elections, on 23 March, already 49 of the pro-free software candidates were elected councillors. In the second round, on 30 March, another 94 were elected councillor. In total 285 candidates participating in the elections signed April's Free Software Pact. More than 80 volunteers helped the advocacy group to contact candidates, informing them about the importance of free software and requesting them to sign the pact.

“Whether you’re aware of it or not, Linux is practically everywhere. It’s invisible, yet ubiquitous.”

And unlike today’s big software companies, no organisation can claim ownership of Linux because its development is mainly driven by a huge following of open and like-minded developer communities.

Adobe Photoshop is considered to be the ultimate photo editor. Certainly it’s great, but it can be replaced. We all heard about GIMP and if you wonder “Can it compete with Photoshop?”, the answer is “Yes.” It may require some adjustments, you’ll need a separate converter for RAWs and some time to get used to its shortcuts, but ultimately you can switch to GIMP. No subscription required – it’s free, powerful and cross-platform.

Spain's largest hospital chain, Quirón, will be piloting a portal based on the Openstack open source cloud computing solution, to provide patients with access to their radiology data. The pilot is one part of a three-year research project called Coco Cloud, which in 2013 received a 2.8 million euro grant from the European Commission's FP7 funding programme. Some of the requirements for the secure cloud-computing environment will be formulated by Italy's governmental ICT resource centre, the Agenzia per l'Italia Digitale (AGID).

Open source delivers safe, efficient and modern e-health services to Warsaw's university hospital. Its integrated medical system is based completely on open source and, according to project leader and medical specialist Radosław Rzepka, is shaping the future of Poland's medical databases.

The OSI is thrilled to announce the launch of the International Competition in Free and Open Source Software Multimedia (ICOM). Organized by the Sena Primary School (SK Sena), Malaysia and Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP) along with the state government of Perlis, Malaysia and the Ministry of Education Malaysia the video competition is open to students from around the world: from primary school children to those attending institutions of higher learning. The main objectives of ICOM are as follows...

The significant savings gained by using free and open source software in the school of the Swiss town of Villmergen are used to enhance the curriculum. Switching to free and open source has led to an increase in computers, motivating teachers to create their own courses. "Ubuntu Linux PCs are very easy to use and maintain, giving teachers more time to work with their students," says Martin Lang, the school's IT administrator.

The move to hassle-free software has created a virtuous circle, Lang says. Since most of the educational-applications created by the school are browser-based, teachers encourage students to bring their own computers. This again increases the number of PCs per classroom, making computer-aided teaching more attractive.

All teachers at the school can work with Ubuntu Linux, says Lang. "Changing their computer habits takes some effort, but they are motivated because of the increase in teaching possibilities."

NGINX, the company focused on the widely used web server platform of the same name, announced this week that it now powers a whopping 146 million websites. That’s 52 percent more sites than the 96 million reported a year ago. It's more evidence--along with the continuing success of Apache's offerings--that open source projects have had an enormous impact on the web server arena, and the rise of the web itself.

NGINX is touting its entry in this space as "the fastest growing web server technology on the planet."

Last week, I explored some of the important issues raised by the discovery of a major flaw in the widely-used open source program OpenSSL, and how that might be addressed. Since then, a couple of things have happened.

Ever since the Raspberry Pi burst onto the scene in 2012, open source hardware projects have been promoting their Linux-ready hacker boards as offering faster, more capable alternatives. Considering the Pi's 700MHz ARM11 processor and relatively modest feature set, that's not such a stretch, but matching the $35 price is another story. If you can't match the price, what you really need to get the attention of Pi-lovers looking for a bit more oomph is to look and act like a Pi.

To that end, EFF is evaluating the feasibility of offering a prize for the first usable, secure, and private end-to-end encrypted communication tool. We believe a prize based on objective usability metrics (such as the percentage of users who were able to install and start using the tool within a few minutes, and the percentage who survived simulated impersonation or man-in-the-middle attacks) might be an effective way to determine which project or projects are best delivering communication security to vulnerable user communities; to promote and energize those tools; and to encourage interaction between developers, interaction designers and academics interested in this space.

“We are expanding the work we already do for the Linux kernel to other projects that may need support,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “Our global economy is built on top of many open source projects. Just as The Linux Foundation has funded Linus Torvalds to be able to focus 100% on Linux development, we will now be able to support additional developers and maintainers to work full-time supporting other essential open source projects. We are thankful for these industry leaders’ commitment to ensuring the continued growth and reliability of critical open source projects such as OpenSSL.”

Already in 2014 it has won a major joint-tender contract from a consortium of Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales' Electoral Commissions, that will see the company provide 5100 tablets for vote counting purposes at each state's forthcoming elections. All of these Acer branded devices will run Android, and deployment begins shortly.

Open source is propelling the United Kingdom's PatientView, a web-based solution written in Java that displays laboratory results, medicine information, correspondence and explanations of test results, diagnoses and treatment. PatientView is already implemented by 60 of the UK's 70 renal clinics and is used by more than 20,000 of their patients. The solution is increasingly used by other health care disciplines, says Jenny Ure, a researcher at the Centre for Inflammation Research at the University of Edinburgh.

"PatientView is not only providing patients with access to their records", Dr Ure says. "It is a very useful communication tool for multidisciplinary teams, working in different hospitals and health clinics", she said at the Medetel conference, in Luxembourg on 10 April.

I had a chance to catch up with David A. Wheeler, a long-time leader in advising and working with the US government on issues related to open source software. As early as the late 1990s, David was demonstrating why open source software was integral to the US goverment IT architecture, and his personal webpage is a frequently cited source on open standards, open source software, and computer security.

The education sector in the Basque Region is increasingly switching to free and open source, reports ESLE, an industry trade group representing free software IT service providers in the autonomous region in Spain. This type of software is helping schools in computing, mobile learning, open data and 3D printing, ESLE writes in a first strategic review, published in December.