Why aren’t schools using open source software?

The BBC asked a similar question as they covered the British Education Training and Technology show.

With Open Source Software (OSS) freely available, covering almost every requirement in the national curriculum, a question has to be asked why schools do not back it more fully, possibly saving millions of pounds…In the education sector, OSS is promoted and used by only a handful of self-motivated technologists looking to stretch their technology budget.

Critics say Becta - the government agency that oversees the procurement of all technology for schools - has not done enough to promote OSS.

In the States, the use of open source software often feels actively discouraged; it certainly wouldn’t be encouraged or promoted by a government agency. However, Europe as a whole generally tends to be more pro-open source than the US.

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Microsoft releases Web Sandbox under open source

Microsoft's technology for securing Web content is being offered under Apache license

Microsoft has made source code for its Live Labs Web Sandbox project for securing Web content through isolation available via open source under the Apache License 2.0, according to a report this week on Microsoft's Port 25 site.

Web Sandbox features technology for mashing up code while maintaining process isolation, quality of service protection, and security. It is intended to address a problem in which Web gadgets, mash up components, advertisements, and other third-party content on Web sites either will run full trust alongside content or are isolated inside of IFrames. This results in many Web applications being intrinsically insecure with unpredictable service quality.

Since announcing the technology preview at Professional Developer Conference 2008 in Los Angeles in October, Microsoft has open-sourced the Web Sandbox framework and is partnering with industry leaders to evolve Web Sandbox into an industry-wide solution, Microsoft said.

Microsoft is looking for developers to experiment with Web Sandbox, even including samples so developers can try to break the Sandbox.

"Since the initial release of Web Sandbox we have received a great deal of feedback from the Web security community. We have also been collaborating with a number of customers, partners, and the standards communities that would like to adopt the technology when it is ready. Our goal is to achieve widespread adoption of Web Sandbox and to help foster interoperability with complementary technologies like script frameworks," Microsoft Live Labs said on its Web Sandbox Web page.

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Mozilla gives £70k grant for open-source video

The Mozilla Foundation, which oversees Firefox and other open-source projects, has given a $100,000 (£70,000) grant towards development of the Theora open video technology.

Theora is a lossy video compression layer used in Ogg, which is an open container format used for streaming and multimedia. The most popular audio layer used in Ogg is Vorbis. Theora's main proprietary competitors are Mpeg-4 and WMV, while Vorbis competes with MP3 and others.

In a blog post on Monday, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver, said Theora was "the best path available today for truly open, truly free video on the internet".

"We also believe that [Theora] can be improved in video quality, in performance, and in quality of implementation, and Mozilla is proud to be supporting the development of Theora software with a $100k grant," Shaver wrote. "Administered by the Wikimedia Foundation, this grant will be used to support development of improved Theora encoders and more powerful playback libraries."

Mozilla's director of evangelism, Christopher Blizzard, wrote in his blog on Monday: "Anyone can have an impact and anyone can affect the technology direction of the web", but said video remains an exception, as it is tied to proprietary formats.

"More often than not, [video formats] are subject to per-unit royalties, large up-front fees and creating content in those formats [is] often so expensive as to be prohibitive to all but only the deepest-pocketed corporations or well-funded start-ups," Blizzard wrote.

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