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The importance of Document Freedom Day explained by Microsoft job offer
March 31st, 2010, is “Document Freedom Day (DFD), a global day for document liberation”. Local events have been organized all over the world to “educate the public about the importance of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general”.
Textbooks are too expensive, so Italian high school tries to produce them in house
Every year italian families must spend hundreds of Euros in textbooks for every child, while the cost limits set by the government are regularly violated in spite of denounces and warnings from consumer associations.
Cash for software clunkers? No, thanks, unless it promotes Free Software
The italian Information & Communications Technology (ICT) industry is in dire straits. On March 10, 2010, Assinform, the association of the bigger italian ICT companies, announced that their 2010 forecast includes an estimate of 8000 lost jobs, after the 16000 already lost in 2009. One of the solutions Assinform proposes to fight the crisis is what you may call a “cash for software clunkers” program: state-financed discounts for all companies that replace with newer applications obsolete software that isn’t working well anymore. At first sight, this looks like a dumb, or at least useless, idea, for the reasons explained below, but it could do well, after all, if implemented in the right way.
Italian Government fails to shut down one of its websites
Normattiva (“active norm/law”) is a new online portal from the Italian Government that “using innovative software technologies creates a reliable, free and complete information service about Italian laws”. Normattiva opened to the public in March 2010. I first heard about it on March 19th. Three days later, on March 22nd, 2010, I saw a post from Flavia Marzano that said: "(now that) Normattiva is online, normeinrete is offline".
Microsoft, where did you get those data about OpenDocument?
I already explained in another article that open file formats are essential to save money in Public Administrations and make them more efficient and that the right choice for office document is the OpenDocument Format (ODF).