A new Web site, Open Educational Resources Center for California, brings together information on free and open textbooks and course materials in one location. Though the Web site was designed for California’s community-college faculty members, it could be a useful resource for anyone trying to find learning materials in the public domain.

California Assembly Bill 2261, which was signed into law in the fall of 2008, authorized the center as a statewide pilot program for California’s 112 community colleges “to provide faculty and staff from community-college districts around the state with the information, methods, and instructional materials to establish open education resource centers.” The center is managed by Foothill College, in Los Altos Hills, Calif.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

In the spirit of transparency and community, the Library of Congress has established an internal process to create open source software. This will make it easier for software developers and sponsors within the Library to produce software that can be freely redistributed to users worldwide. “The overall effect will be to clarify and streamline the process for releasing software as open source,” said Michelle Springer, a digital initiatives project manager at the Library, “allowing the Library and its partners to more fully participate in the open source development community.” The Library has been especially active in developing tools that support digital preservation processes, including the secure transfer of digital files. This includes the release of a full suite of digital content transfer tools that support the Bagit specification.

» Library of Congress

A $2.38 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Indiana University will be used to develop software created specifically for the management of print and electronic collections for academic and research libraries around the world.

» via OLE Project

Whether you’re an open-source advocate or not, you likely run open-source applications on your laptop or desktop. From Firefox to VLC to Handbrake to Adium, some of the best applications for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux are open source.

The iPhone, however, is a relative wasteland for open source. Should Apple care?

» via CNET news

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is closing a grant program that financed a series of high-profile university software projects, leaving some worried about a vacuum of support for open-source ventures.

Mellon’s decade-old Research in Information Technology program, or RIT, helped bankroll a catalog of freely available software that includes Sakai, a course-management system used by Stanford University and the University of Michigan; Kuali, a financial-management program recently rolled out at Colorado State University; and Zotero, a program for managing research sources used by millions.

Now the foundation plans to eliminate the RIT program as a stand-alone entity, a move that was scheduled to take effect Monday, according to a December letter to grantees obtained by The Chronicle.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

“In the current economic context, all companies are looking for cost-effective I.T. solutions, and systems based on open-source software are increasingly emerging as viable alternatives to proprietary solutions,” said the European Commission’s competition chief, Neelie Kroes, in a recent statement. “The commission has to ensure that such alternatives would continue to be available.”

Seen at The New York Times (free subscription may be required)

For those who have fret about Microsoft fighting against open source, I have news for you: Microsoft’s impact on open source may be worse as a friend than as an enemy.

Over the past few years, Microsoft has steadily warmed to open source, to the point that it now hosts its own open-source code repository and has seen its Microsoft Public License used more often than venerable licenses like the Mozilla Public License or the Eclipse Public License, according to new data released by Black Duck Software.

The open-source world should be worried.

Seen at cnet news

One in every four people on the Internet are now using Mozilla’s open-source Firefox browser, a Web metrics company said this week.

Firefox reached the 25% milestone on Sunday, said Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of California-based Net Applications, which measures browser usage by tracking the machines that visit the 40,000 sites it monitors for clients.

“We always thought that Firefox would be in a great position to compete with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer if it made 10%,” Vizzaccaro said today. “Now one in four people globally are browsing the Internet with Firefox.”

Seen at ComputerWorld

computereze:

craftyspace:

Drupal has won best open source PHP Content Management System for the second year in a row in the Packt Publishing 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Drupal won by popular vote and a critical selection by a panel of judges. This award reflects the strong support of the Drupal community and our focus on quality which leads to critical acclaim and rapid adoption for large, high quality projects. Drupal won best overall open source CMS in 2007 and 2008.

Red Hat, like Google, is in the business of providing services to customers, services enabled by software but which are much more dependent on IT operations and overall efficiency of execution.

And while both companies rely on open-source software to fuel those operations, Google, more than Red Hat, realizes that the conversation has moved on from open-source licenses to higher-order value, a theme that is going mainstream. Cloudera CEO Mike Olson captures this theme well:

The license terms attached to products have become secondary to the value it offers. People now are much more rational about how they adopt technology across the board. Open source is a detail, not a defining characteristic. At Sleepy Cat, we were proud to be an open source company. At Cloudera, I think of us as an enterprise software company that happens to be built on open source software.

Such sentiment would resonate well within the walls of Google’s Mountain View headquarters, I suspect.

Seen at cnet news

For years, open-source advocates have been praying for someone to free us from Microsoft’s proprietary grasp. We’ve prayed in vain as Linux, OpenOffice, and other open-source software programs have failed to dent Microsoft’s dominance.

Until now.

Google, not Red Hat or Sun, appears to be the long-awaited redeemer of both personal computers and servers, and has even staked a credible claim in the mobile world, as well. Google achieves this, in part, by writing copious lines of open-source code, but pays for this “generosity” with insanely profitable proprietary services, services that have long appealed to consumers but increasingly appeal to enterprises, too.

Google, in other words, is arguably not the open-source savior we were expecting, but it’s probably the one we deserve.

Seen at cnet news

Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine.

This move is obviously a big win for open source. As John Scott of Open Source for America (a group advocating open source adoption by government, to which I am an advisor) noted in an email to me: “This is great news not only for the use of open source software, but the validation of the open source development model. The White House’s adoption of community-based software provides a great example for the rest of the government to follow.”

Seen at O’Reilly Radar

It boggles the mind, but it’s apparently true: nearly half of enterprises think a software purchase is successful if the software is installed/deployed, according to a new study. If ever there was reason to believe there’s room for improvement in enterprise IT, and billions of dollars to go with it, this is it.

Working software should be the starting point, not an end point.

According to a study recently released by Neochange, Sandhill Group, and the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), 45.3 percent of the 353 IT professionals surveyed call a software purchase successful if “the software is deployed/installed.”

No, this isn’t enterprise IT’s only criterion for software success. After all, 75.4 percent pegged their aspirations a bit higher: “Business benefits realization (cost reduction, revenue generation, etc.).” (Note: respondents could choose more than one answer; hence, the results don’t add up to 100 percent.)

But it’s scary that the software industry has conditioned IT buyers to expect so little. No one should claim victory on the basis of getting software installed, and we should be hitting close to 100 percent actually getting tangible business value for their software investments.

But then, more than half the survey’s respondents admitted to not even measuring success criteria. Could this be a sign that IT executives, like the sign greeting Dante on his descent into Hell, have abandoned all hope of getting real value for their software spend?

Seen at cnet news

“On September 30th, the ‘Open College Textbook Act of 2009’ was introduced to the Senate and referred to committee. The bill proposes that all educational materials published or produced using federal funds need to be published under open licenses. The reasoning behind it takes into account the changing way information is distributed because of the Internet, the high price of college and textbooks, and the dangerously low college graduation rates in the US. Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?”

Seen at Using Coconuts