Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Licensing / Legal
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Scoop News Group ☛ Software license purchases need better agency tracking, GAO says
The GAO’s study looked at software licenses purchased by the 24 Chief Financial Officers Act agencies, finding that 10 vendors made up the majority of the most widely used licenses. For fiscal year 2021, Microsoft held by far the largest share of vendors organized by the highest amounts paid (31.3%), followed by Adobe (10.43%) and Salesforce (8.7%).
While the GAO was able to identify and analyze vendors based on government spend, it was “unclear which products under those licenses are most widely used because of agencies’ inconsistent and incomplete data,” the report noted. “For example, multiple software products may be bundled into a single license with a vendor, and agencies may not have usage data for each product individually.”
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USGAO ☛ Federal Software License: Agencies Need to Take Action to Achieve Additional Savings
GAO is making 18 recommendations to nine agencies to consistently track software license usage and compare the inventories with purchased licenses. Eight agencies agreed with the recommendations and one neither agreed nor disagreed.
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Education
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Perl ☛ Perl & Raku Conference 2024 to Host a Science Track!
In the coming weeks, the SPC will begin to send out targeted calls for science paper-based talks to STEM organizations and professions. A general call for science paper-based talks will be included in the official Call for Papers that is traditionally made by the TPRC. This is to avoid any early confusion with deadlines and due dates.
If you're interested in submitting a science paper-based talk or serving as a paper reviewer as a subject matter expert, please start thinking about it now. Topics are not required to exclusively involve Perl or Raku, but should be germane to the technical interests of those attending the TPRC (Perl, Raku, Science).
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Troy Patterson ☛ Moodle Login
More and more schools are transitioning to using Oauth for logins. Moodle allows for Oauth logins. However, by default, the Moodle Login box appears first, above the button to login using a service.
This causes lots of people to enter their credentials into the box. In our case, they are entering the “wrong” credentials (i.e. they enter their Google username and password instead of their district account username and password). This leads to frustration on the end user’s part. Signing in is a really bad place to frustrate users.
Knowing that Moodle is customizable, I know there has to be a way to fix this. A little bit of research leads to a couple of different options: [...]
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Open Data
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Creative Commons ☛ Recommended Best Practices for Better Sharing of Climate Data
Creative Commons is happy to share our “Recommendations for Better Sharing of Climate Data,” a collaborative effort informed by major government and intergovernmental climate agencies including ECMWF, NASA, NOAA, and the World Resources Institute. These recommendations help public climate data-producing institutions to choose and use the most suitable legal terms and licenses, and use metadata that center the user experience around attribution, licensing, and provenance.
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Open Access/Content
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Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ The Second Digital Transformation
Scholarly publishing is in the midst of a substantial transition, from a model that was more centered on selection functions and editorial work, and towards a model in which funders and research producers seek services to distribute their research. In the most complete version of such a transition, one can imagine a publishing organization that serves essentially as a “white labeled” service provider for a research producer, but such a complete outcome may not be an end state we will see very often. Repository models are also another way to understand directionally where we might be headed. Today, publishing organizations fall into a variety of places along the spectrum of moving towards service provision, and the transition is occurring at a different pace in different parts of the sector.
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Ithaka S+R ☛ The Second Digital Transformation of Scholarly Publishing
In this project, we define shared infrastructure as broadly as possible, and we published a landscape review earlier in the project intended to show just how broad this sector has become.[2] Recognizing the vast array of standards, systems, and tools in many of the categories of shared infrastructure, in this paper, we examine only four critical categories of shared infrastructure in some depth, looking for successes, unmet needs, and opportunities in each. Given that many infrastructure services were designed to support the first digital transformation, it is no surprise that we find opportunities for structural and functional improvements in each of the four critical categories: [...]
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