Image: “Keep calm and use open source” (MedithIT/CC by)
A Mastodon instance for teachers
LeLibreEdu, it was until now a twitter account of the Direction du Numérique pour l’Éducation “dedicated to free educational software and resources and digital commons”. It is now also present on Mastodon, on the instance of the Free Software skills center of the Ministry of National Education.
And above all, in these times when the future of Twitter under the control of Elon Musk looks very uncertain, Alexis Kauffmann, project manager software and free educational resources and diversity in the digital sectors at the Digital Department of National Education, offers teachers to come to Mastodon by benefiting from the hosting of this same body.
Smile “body and soul” in open source
“It has now been 20 years since the Smile Group has invested body and soul in the world of open source”, reports Marc Palazon, in a press release titled “The Smile Group, open source and Europe”. And the CEO of the group stresses that “Smile is a company which was created in 1991, and which therefore had a ‘life’ before its love marriage with the free world. So why open source? It’s quite simple, Smile has always wanted to provide its customers with alternative solutions to mainstream solutions (often cumbersome, expensive and not very innovative) in order to enable them to differentiate themselves and perform better.
(…) The third [ère de Smile], it’s open source! Why, quite simply because open source, by nature, offers its users (therefore our customers) openness, non-lock-in, durability, security and finally innovation with unrivaled R&D power thanks in particular to to communities. The Smile Group has thus been developing its uniqueness for 20 years now, first in France and then in Europe for the past ten years, having become the undisputed market leader.”
The CEO of Smile then explains, in three points, why his company has left its national borders: France’s leading position in terms of open source (according to the CNLL), technologies that are international in nature, and asks customers who also extend abroad.
Matt Hicks, CEO of Red Hat, explains his strategy
The new boss of Red Hat explains, in an interview with MagIT, his strategy. For Matt Hicks, who has been running the IBM subsidiary since July, “OpenShift should be seen as an extension of RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] hybrid cloud scale. Its open source model would remain the safest way to innovate, towards edge and AI, while avoiding risks”, note our colleagues.
Matt Hicks comments thus:
“If you look at the needs of modern applications – and I’ve been working in this field for over 20 years – they now far exceed the resources of a single computer. And in many cases, these needs far exceed the resources of a dozen, a hundred or a thousand computers. OpenShift is like going from a single bee to a swarm of bees. OpenShift brings all the innovation of RHEL by allowing you to operate hundreds or thousands of these machines as a single unit. This creates a new class of applications.”
Nonfiction and its “collective wager on free software”
The news site for ideas and book reviews Nonfiction (which counted among its co-founders Philippe Aigrain, freelance activist and co-founder of La Quadrature du Net who died in 2021) is 15 years old, and on this occasion its president Grégory Lévis “returns to its relationship with the site.
“Having an engineering background, I initially took charge of the management of the development team for the technical infrastructure of Nonfiction, which had to be based on the same convictions as the project itself. Thus, the strong bias was that of a sustainable IT development (at a time when the disposable was still very much the rule on the web, perhaps it is still very much unfortunately!), independent of software publishers and which requires few maintenance and hosting resources.
This collective bet of free software seems successful since 15 years later, Nonfiction still works on the same initial infrastructure, which allows it to absorb changes as the life of the project progresses. This technical conviction, around the common good, is still at the heart of Nonfiction’s IT choices, today driven with great involvement and availability by Nicolas Weeger.
Read also
Where does Red Hat go from here? – July 20, 2022
Free and open source express: CitéLibre de Paris, National Education and PeerTube, migration to GNU/Linux, Microsoft and GNOME – June 30, 2022
European institutions arrive on Mastodon and PeerTube, alternatives to Twitter and YouTube – May 8, 2022
Libre express: looting by Gafam, handicap hackathon, OpenStack, Smile-Alter Way – February 20, 2022