"... a model of open source school computing is emerging which could save the UK taxpayer billions of pounds...The Government does not produce figures for the total cost of ICT in schools. [R]esearch shows however that when staffing and power use are included a typical secondary school will spend between £100,000 - £200,000 per year on ICT. Scale this figure for the whole UK and it approximates to over £½ billion per year.

"A roadmap for the adoption of open technologies was released last year by the deputy under secretary of defense for advanced systems and concepts. That paper proposed adopting open source infrastructure and technologies and applying open source to collaborative technologies being implemented by DoD. Still, the adoption of open source by the military remains a slapdash endeavor rather than a concerted effort. A survey conducted by DISA several years ago found a surprisingly high level of open source technology in use.

Three examples (French Gendarmerie, City of Munich and and Peugeot Citroën) of large-scale desktop Linux installations "... which if successful, could light the way for others."

URL: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d637fe7a-8c95-11dc-b887-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=...

Open Source Software in Government: Innovation and Shared Experience

This seminar provides agencies with the latest information on Open Source Software, its usage and penetration within the government.

Venue: Telstra Theatre, Australian War Memorial, Treloar Crescent, Campbell.

Date: Thursday, 1 November 2007.

Time: 9.00 am - 12.15 pm. Registration commences at 8.30 am.

For more details and registration, visit: http://www.agimo.gov.au/practice/delivery/events/2007/nov_oss

Commercial software advantages over open source:

1. vendor support
2. "easier to adopt in organisation" (aka ICT politics)
3. automated updates
4. lower support overheads
5. better functionality

Open source advantages over commercial software:

1. price
2. source code access
3. community code review
4. "don't know" (!)
5. bug fix turnaround

URL: http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9789275-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2...

"One study...about retraining Windows users on Linux concluded that 80% of the people who switched to Linux needed only about one week to retrain themselves to use Linux properly for their needed job. That does raise the question about how long the remaining 20% took to adjust, and even if it wasn’t a significantly greater length of time, it does indicate that retraining isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all job... In the end, though, the only truly accurate and useful TCO study for comparing Windows to Linux is the one you conduct yourself.

"[U.S.] job ads requesting open source skills,..[have] seen the following growth since Jan [2007]...

• AJAX: 100%
• PHP: Practically "doubled since January, [2007]"...
• Python: 72%
• MySQL: 50%
• Ruby on Rails: 121%.
• Perl: 22%. Perl,.. 'is not so sexy, but it makes the Web go 'round.'"

More: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/career/article.php/3697896

"OpenProj is a free, open source project management solution. OpenProj is a complete replacement of Microsoft Project and other commercial project solutions."

Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=199315

12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally
http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/07/24/12-ways-to-use-facebook-professiona...

Using Facebook to Manage Professional Contacts [.flv]
http://webcommunityforum.com/2007/08/how-can-business-people-use-faceboo...