Category: green (Page 1 of 1)

Philip Green report on Govt spending; UK Free Software

For a number of years, the discussion amongst UK-based free software professionals has been about how to do more with Government. The most active discussions happened around the time of the UK open-source, standards and re-use policy was developed (around 2004; it has been updated since): it wasn’t great before, and it hasn’t improved an awful lot since. In very similar ways people have bemoaned the accessibility of Government procurement processes for micro/small businesses, and it’s basically the same problem – the “big guys” tend to be pushing proprietary solutions.

Read More

Asay and Tiemann, mano a mano.

Matt Asay has written another entertaining blog piece on his particular theories of open source economics, and Red Hat’s Michael Tiemann and he have engaged in what is superficially a bit of “Is not!” “Is too!“. Looking a bit deeper, though, it’s not really the pragmatics vs. the Stallmanites, even though that’s how Asay frames it. Fundamentally, Tiemann is right on the money: a simplistic “supply and demand” view of how prices are set in a market place completely ignores the value that Red Hat offers to its customers.

Read More

Come on, Facebook – re-instate Tom Brake MP

Now, I’m not a huge one for using web applications as a means civic communication – I tend to believe that communicating with your representatives is much better done in a public space rather than a private one like Facebook. However, this story (on the face of it) is quite disturbing. Transport for London recently announced the removal of the N213 night bus service between Croydon and Sutton. For many people, particularly young people going out of a night in Croydon, although this service wasn’t overcrowded it was important.

Read More

Further to yesterday’s post on water…

… today is World Water Day. There is a flashy 2007 website too, not sure why.

Read More

Green energy

Planet Debian has been a trove of green discussion today. Russell Coker and MJ both linked to a story about Spain getting most of its energy from wind, for the first time. 27% of their energy came from wind, 22% came from nucular power and 16% from coal power (where the other third came from, I’m not totally clear on – possibly imported?). Overall, in the last year, almost 10% of their energy has come from wind.

Read More

Page 1 of 1