In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at Google's Fuchsia mobile operating system, open source software in European governments, and more.
Google's Fuchsia operating system gets a GUI
Ars Technica published an overview of Google's Fuchsia operating system for smartphones and tablets. Last August, when the first information about Fuchsia came out, it did not have a working graphic user interface. Now there is a system user interface, code named Armadillo, that, while far from fully functional, provides an early look at how the Fuchsia operating system might work. The Ars Technica article explores this user interface in detail. The article also provides a good overview of other notable aspects of the Fuchsia project (e.g., moving away from the Linux kernel and the GPL). Since Google has made no official comments on what its plans for Fuchsia are, it is hard to say what might be next for the project, but Ars Technica's article attempts to cover many of the possibilities.
Open source software adoption in European governments
Various governmental agencies in France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and other European countries have transitioned to using open source software. A recent article published by ComputerWeekly.com explores the experiences various governmental units had during their transition to open source solutions and the issues they face with continuing to use open source. For example, the article looks at the political reasons behind the push for the city of Munich, Germany, to return to using Microsoft products. From an open source perspective, not all the news it great, but the article provides an excellent broad overview of the current state of open source in European governments.
Wake County School System drop textbooks for open educational resources
The Wake County School System in North Carolina, USA, will switch from traditional textbooks to open educational resources for math and language arts classes, according to an article published by The News & Observer. The school system will adopt open educational resources from EL Education and the Mathematics Vision Project to replace traditional textbooks. The resources will be phased in over the next several years. The transition comes in part from dealing with massive funding cuts during the recession, when state funding for textbooks plummeted from $111.2 million in the 2009-10 fiscal year to $2.5 million the following year. (Funding for the current year is $71.5 million.) Switching to open educational resources will save the district money, which the district says it can use to train people in how to use the materials instead of buying textbooks.
Latest ScummVM daily builds add support for another generation of classic adventure games
The latest daily builds of ScummVM add 32-bit DOS/Windows Sierra adventure games to the already long list of games supported by ScummVM. According to the announcement on the ScummVM blog, the daily builds add support for Gabriel Knight, Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within, King's Quest VII, King's Questions, Leisure Suit Larry 6 (hi-res), Phantasmagoria, Police Quest 4, Shivers, Space Quest 6, and Torin's Passage. Because the support for these games is in the daily builds, not the stable releases, the games can still be buggy, which is why the ScummVM developers are asking people who own those games to test them out.
In other news
- A digital-age hardware Renaissance grows in U.S. cities
- Study finds gender bias in open source programming
- Court upholds enforceability of open source licenses
- "Forget Windows Use Linux" (FWUL) — A Linux distro For Android enthusiasts
- Google's Fuzz bot exposes over 1,000 open source bugs
Thanks, as always, to Opensource.com staff members and moderators for their help this week. Make sure to check out our event calendar to see what's happening next week in open source.
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