Topic: GNU / GPL

After many years now of the dominance that Uncle Bill has placed on the UK, especially since "New" Labour came to power, it finally looks like the powers that be (no doubt lead on by the goings on recently in Europe) have started to see sense.

In a parlimentary answer Douglas Alexander (Home Office) said that they would be looking into the benefits of open source as opposed to propriatory (closed) applications (our mates at ElReg have more here)

The interesting points for all of these are

1. What will happen over GCHQ and the "oh look, let's entrust the security of the nation to a company who's idea of security at it's best is 'OE'"
   
2. The reply given was that the best value for money would be the option of choice. Given the advances in OpenSource desktops and office products, can this be further doom and gloom for M$?
   
3. More importantly, if RISC OS was to go open source, would it enable us to claw our way back in as not only being faster and more efficient than just about anything out there, it's a hell of a lot more stable and friendly to use than anything out there.
   

It certainly has been an eventful time on the porting side of the RISC OS world. Peter Naulls has updated his Unix ports page with what looks to be some fantastic work.

That's not all though, a little birdy has pointed something quite interesting on the AcornUsers hosted CBSA website in the GNU section with what looks to be ports of GLib, iconv, GTK/GDK and quite a few other libraries contained within (in various states of being).

Note: Thanks to Iconbar for such a cracking thread!

In a bold move (as first spotted by /.) the Office of the e-Envoy (OeE) have released a policy on Open Source Software (OSS) usage within Government!

There is currently a consultation document that is quite aware of the issues involved.

Note: Definition of Open Source Software or preferably visit the UK Mirror of the same document

GCC is a free collection of compilers that provide the user with a powerful tool for translating C, C++ and Fortran source into fast ARM assembler that is suitable for execution on RISC OS.

GCCSDK is a portable build environment for creating ARM executables to be run natively on RISC OS. The build environment is designed to be hosted on a Unix-like system, such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris.

This is the first proper release of GCC since 2.7.2.1 back in 1997 though there have been experimental versions of 2.95.2 available since 1999.