Free Software: Europe, Bans, and Microsoft Censorship
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The future of law-making in the European Union – open source, of course!
Ms Deprez gave the keynote speech at the Legislation Editing Open Software (LEOS) webinar on 21 June. In her introduction, she anticipated that multilingualism and artificial intelligence will form part of the future of law-making tools in the European Union.
This insight is in line with the Commission’s open source strategy and is a great encouragement for us at the Open Source Programme Office (EC OSPO). Ms Deprez recognised the significance of the open source approach in LEOS, and highlighted its potential in the digital transformation of law-making for the Commission and beyond.
By establishing a working culture based on open source – the core aim of the strategy – other organisations can be partners in the design, development and roll-out of LEOS. This allows LEOS' development to go faster and creates a much richer solution in collaboration with Member States.
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Competition: Environmental Impact of Open-source (23 September 2022)
Take a look at Drupal, the open-source content management system. Based on Statista, there are 937,000 websites using this CMS. In 2018, the average server power consumption was 250 watts. Assuming that each Drupal website on average occupies 10% of such a server, the total energy consumption of all the Drupal side would be approximately 205.2 Million kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. If we can reduce the energy consumption of Drupal by making improvements to the core application by 1%, we could save 2 Million kWh per year, or as much as 187 single-person households consume per year (a US residential utility customer consumes on average 10,715 kilowatt hours per year).
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Why was VLC Banned?
For the past few days, the VLC media player ban has been the talk of the town. Some suggest it may be because Chinese hackers use it as a medium to hack into computers in India. However, some claim that the government has nothing to do with the ban. The truth is neither the government nor the people at Videolan are aware of what’s happened to VLC.
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‘Pirate’ App Developer Uses DMCA to Remove 'Stolen' Copy from GitHub
"Movies and Series Scraper" is a nifty tool that allows people to watch and download films and TV series without much hassle. The developer shares the code for free, but when he noticed that someone had "stolen" his work, he asked GitHub to remove the infringing copy from the platform.