Open Source Nonprofit Software

When two friends use similar programs, one open-source, one proprietary, a host of differences arise between the two types. Compared with a hard to reach, unresponsive technical support team, open-source developers are usually passionate and eager to improve the functionality of their work. Free software creators have a vested interest in their products [...]

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A grant from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development’s (DEED) Job Skills Partnership will be used to help several Minnesota businesses train workers to use open-source development code. The $171k grant will go to six local businesses, part of the Open Source Consortium, to fund training courses for software engineers, programmers, and other [...]

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According to Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, free open-source software (FOSS) is a bigger threat to Microsoft’s business model than Google is. Though competition between the two hugely successful technological behemoths is fierce, particularly in the wake of the failed Microsoft-Yahoo takeover negotiations.
However, says Ozzie, open-source software is a much more serious potential danger to [...]

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Microsoft recently developed an open-source tool that is capable of translating Word documents into a “talking” book format.  This tool was created in a project involving Sonata software and the Digital Accessible Information System (Daisy) consortium.  By translating OOXML files into Daisy format, other software programs such as Book Wizard Producer can read the documents [...]

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According to an exhaustive analysis of over 250 of the most popular open source software projects, the security of these widely-used programs and applications has made rapid improvements in recent years. Coverity’s Scan Report on Open Source Software 2008 and discovered the elimination of over 8,500 software defects within the last two years.
To date, the [...]

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