Image: “Keep calm and use open source” (MedithIT/CC by)
CitéLibre, free software created and distributed by the City of Paris
The City of Paris announced, during the OW2 online conference on June 8, its publication of a free software suite, called CitéLibre, reports La Gazette des communes. Two software programs are currently available, CitéLibre Agenda, for making appointments for the public with the services of the organizing authority, and CitéLibre Forms, for creating and processing forms. These are the software used internally by Paris, but “white label, that is to say free of any logo of the capital”, indicates La Gazette.
Philippe Bareille, digital project manager and Open Source Officer at the city of Paris, explained: “We have pre-selected the most used uses in Paris and we can seize them without coding. Ultimately, the goal is to offer a complete suite where all you have to do is check off the solutions you want to put in place”. These will be solutions already used by City services and town halls (Paris has 17 district town halls in addition to the central town hall), “more than 200 Parisian applications” which will gradually be added to CitéLibre (including the site would benefit from not being in English only, by the way).
The Ministry of National Education, user and contributor of free software
Reputed to be too addicted to proprietary solutions, the Ministry of National Education also harbors many free projects at the base. Notable index of the evolution of this administration: its participation in the improvement of PeerTube, which now allows the modification of videos from its web interface. YouTube’s decentralized competitor, developed with support from Framasoft, clarifies:
“This feature was developed with the financial support of the Digital Department of the Ministry of National Education, Youth and Sports. It meets a need of the team in charge of the apps.education.fr platform, which offers National Education agents tools (free!) to work remotely. Thanks to them!”
Turkish City Says It Saved $1 Million by Switching to GNU/Linux
The migration of 285 PCs from the Turkish municipality of Eyupsultan, which began in 2015, “went well, even if there are still a few bottlenecks,” reports Developpez.com. “Pardus Linux is a Debian-based Linux distribution and is suitable for Turkish users. It is officially developed by “Ulakbim”, which is a government research institute, subsidiary of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK). Pardus Linux has been in development since 2005, and comes in GNOME and Xfce flavors that can be installed on user machines just like any other Linux distribution. The latest version of Pardus is based on Debian 11, and can be downloaded from the official website.
“Hüseyin Güç, System Administrator at Eyupsultan Municipality and also head of the migration project reports that the operation saved $1 million in Windows licensing costs for the operating system and the Office office suite.»
Microsoft donates $10,000 to GNOME
Each month, the Microsoft FOSS Fund donates $10,000 to an open source project chosen by its engineers. In May, noted NextInpact, “after systemd, curl, QEMU, or OpenStreetMap, this is clearly the case for GNOME”. The donation being without any consideration, we can salute the gesture. Evil spirits will calculate what it represents for Microsoft, which in 2021 achieved a turnover of 168 billion dollars with a net profit of 60.651 billion (if my calculations are correct, this alms represents a little more of 5 seconds of benefit).
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