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Nordic Countries to Promote Open Source
Nordic Avenger writes "The Nordic countries have launched a website to promote open source software to consumers and small businesses. People can submit open source software links as well as exchange information in the forums section. As the website states: 'Nordicos.org is a project of the Nordic Ministerial Council, and addresses the need for a comprehensive overview of open source software available for consumers'. Now, anybody eager to make good suggestions about software that normal people could find useful and live happily ever after in the open source world?"
-jim
Another step in the right direction for humankind.
Open source does not have enough a coordinated information (and marketing) websites that have enough clout. This effort, as long it is kept up and improved with time, would be a precious resource for the average citizen and consumer.
Having finally installed Mandrake over my windows partition on my computer, I have to say; What Software?
I mean, Under M$ WIndows, I had to find:
An Office Suite (replaced by Open-office)
A Programming Environment (Replaced by QT Designer)
and about 30 small shareware/freeware managers for Zipfiles, PDF files, MP3's, Instant Messaging, IRC, Decent FTP Client, and A News reader.
Everything was Included in the ISO's for Mandrake I burned. The only problem people switching over will have is trying to understand that whatever it is they need, it's (Usually) already installed!
I'm a concientious
One of the first thing these guys need, like som many other sites is a descriptive title! "Welcome to nordicos.org" is *not* a good title - when are people gonna learn that?
"Nordicos.org - Nordic open source software", or if you have to, "Welcome to Nordicos.org - Nordic open source software" is the title to have. Why? Well, not only because it makes for much better tabs, and better bookmarks, but because this is what you see in a search engine.
And search engines also pay quite some attention to the title, especially when it comes to comparing to content and meta tags. Consistency.
Please, ffs, do the world a favour and use informative titles! How hard can it be... sigh.
You're of course inferring the extensive governmental support for open source in, say, the US?
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
Business is business. Competition is good. Suck it up and deal! That's the American way, right?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Would you be referring to the DARPA support (some of the BSD projects have had DARPA support for instance, linux too--in case you didn't know, Rob Watson, core FreeBSD member and on Fbsd Foudation board of directors is a DARPA Principal Investigator ), NSA funding, or something else?
Yesterday as I was restocking my kitchen, I thought, "hey, I want the kind of software that supermarkets use" (possibly without the RDIF tags, though whenever my cousin visits, bottles of gin mysteriously vanish, so even those might be a good idea).
Then, why not a serious financial management package for my money (the $232 that I've managed to save since the dot-com boom, and which has not yet been converted into gin)?
The list goes on. Even "huge" packages like SAP are basically just dumb data-entry applications with lots, lots, and lots of options. It used to be that the entry point for building something like this was huge. You needed:
- serious hardware
- licenses for the OS, for tools,...
- Oracle or something similar
- dozens of developers
- huge management structures
I know, I've worked in many companies that produced this kind of software.
Now, today, almost all of these costs have been eliminated, even the huge management structures, as developers have learned how to use tools like CVS, wiki, and even simple email.
It's now feasible (and has been for several years) to foresee a possible next step for OSS, namely to provide domestic/personal/small-business versions of software applications that until today have been considered only "big business".
I'm thinking of stuff like accounting systems, stock-control systems, ERP systems, financial planning systems, currency management, and so on. I'm sure you can add your own favourites: content management.
I'm not quite sure whether I want my fridge to be equipped with a "supply chain management system", but that might be the best tool for the job.
OK, I _know_ that one day, maybe ten years from now, Siebel Systems, or SAP, or PeopleSoft will decide to donate their source code to OSS, much as Sun donated StarOffice. Maybe it's simplest to wait.
But this seems to me to be one of the greatest gaps in today's OSS offering, and one that it should be relatively easy to fill, given modest state support.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
>> IRC telnet =P
> Oh boy you're the best I mean why not use telnet and let everyone using a sniffer see my
> information coming down the pipes. Can I have your rocket science knowledge?
Ah, I think I also need some of that rocket science knowledge to understand how using telnet to connect to an IRC server would somehow be more sniffable than using a real IRC client.
Does Windows' telnet.exe send a copy of all transmitted data to Microsoft, or do you just have a problem seeing the difference between client programs and protocols?
And why would people in the nordic countries even bother careing about that? It is not the responsibility of the nordic goverments to make sure you has a job - it is the responsibility of your goverment. Despite how much you may wish for it, it the world isn't here to provide the softwaregiants of the US with a ready marked for their badly translated programs.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
It is NOT a generic term. The nordic countries is a very old term and means Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland -- the Western Europe countries surrounding the Baltic Sea.
Scandinavia is a broader term, including all the Nordic countries plus Iceland, Groenland and the Faeroe Islands... (though I'm guessing the spelling of the last ones)
We currently distribute a collection like this, called FOSS for Windows
Scandinavia is just the three countries, Iceland is not part of it and Icelandish is definitely a very different language from the the three others -- it is quite similar to what the Scandinavian languages used to be a thousand years ago. The Icelanders can read the old sagas, we Danes/Norwegians/Swedes cannot (unless we learn the language).