Award for Linux Access to Governmental E-Mail in Czech Republic
According to an announcement by the European OSOR information service, a group of Czech companies and individuals has offered a roughly 3,200 euro award to develop platform-independent access to the mandatory "Data boxes" email service used by government agencies.
The Czech Republic officially introduced the Datove schranky (Data boxes) electronic message service for public administrations halfway through 2009. These public administrations should use the service to supply each other and citizens with news and documents about themselves in a secure way. According to the Open Source Observatory and Repository Europe (OSOR) platform of the European Commission, Czech firms are required to use the Datove schranky service as of November 1, 2009.
Data boxes usage also requires the XMLfiller plugin that can be downloaded free from the developer site. The plugin currently supports Windows up to Vista and as RPM for Linux and Mac OS X. However, Czech users and companies argue that the non-Windows versions gravitate toward Wine and are unsatisfactory. The plugin is also limited to 32-bit operating systems.
A group of 25 Czech companies and individuals, according to OSOR, has now offered prize money of 85,000 CZK (about $4,442 in current exchange) to open source projects to make the Data boxes into platform-independent implementations. Currently two of these projects, Libisds and Java ISDS are vying over software libraries in C and Java to develop user desktop applications. ISDS is short for Informacní systém datových schránek (Data boxes information system). OSOR also reports that a third open source project, Dsgui, is working on making Datove schranky access available on Maemo smartphones.
Issue 222/2019
Buy this issue as a PDF
News
-
Black Hole Image Has an Open Source Connection
Two imaging libraries responsible for the image are fully open source.
-
Linux Mint Founder Calls for Better Developer Support
Usually cheerful Clement ‘Clem’ Lefebvre says he "hasn't enjoyed" this development cycle.
-
Software Freedom Conservancy Announces End to VMware Lawsuit
VMware agrees to remove the offending code in a future release.
-
Chef Goes All Open Source
The company behind the popular DevOps automation tool is releasing those proprietary add-ons built around the open source core.
-
SUSE Spins off from Parent Company
While IBM has acquired Red Hat, SUSE goes solo.
-
Gnome 3.32 Released
New release of the Gnu desktop comes with many improvements.
-
VMware Rolls Out Essential PKS
Virtualization vendor brings commercial support to upstream Kubernetes.
-
Linux 5.0 Is Here
Linus says don't get excited, but the new release contains some significant updates.
-
Kali Linux 2019.1 Released
The favorite Linux distro of Mr. Robot gets the first update of 2019.
-
Linux Foundation Releases a New Draft of OpenChain Spec
OpenChain provides a standard for open source compliance throughout the software supply chain.