Peter Galli

African governments need to work with the private sector to set up innovative and affordable broadband security infrastructures, the Information and Communication Technology Best Practices forum held earlier in June in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, has recommended. The forum was organized jointly by Microsoft Africa, the government of Burkina Faso, the African Development Bank, and the […]

Microsofts Windows Vista team is eating crow after flip-flopping on its on-again, off-again decision to allow cheaper versions of Vista to be used in virtualized machines. The company was all set to announce June 20 that the lower-cost Vista Home Basic ($199) and Vista Home Premium ($249) versions could be used in virtual machines, and […]

As Microsoft continues to try to build a bridge between its proprietary products and those of the open-source community, it has entered into a broad technical co-operation and patent agreement with desktop Linux company Linspire. Under the agreement, announced June 14, the two companies will work together to advance office document compatibility, enhance instant messaging […]

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso, West Africa—The Information and Communications Technology Best Practices Forum held June 7-9 here saw a number of plenary panel discussions about the many challenges facing West and Central Africa, and how best to address these. One of the most urgent challenges for the region is giving its children a competitive education as […]

OAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso, West Africa—A veritable whos who of West and Central African governments are starting to arrive in this small West African country for the regions first Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Best Practices Forum. The conference, which is being hosted over June 6 through 8 by Blaise Compaoré, the president of Burkina Faso, […]

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso—Microsoft has signed a strategic partnership agreement with the government of this West African nation to invest in building its Information and Communication Technology capacities, and to support broader e-government initiatives to strengthen Burkina Fasos knowledge-driven economy. To that end, Microsoft and local partners launched the ICT Best Practices Forum – West and […]

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso—The United Nations Industrial Development Organization and Microsoft have announced a partnership to set up PC refurbishment centers in Africa. These centers are designed to help address the hardware, software and training needs of entrepreneurs with small and midsize businesses, with the ultimate goal of producing a refurbishment model that can be used […]

Microsoft, shrugging off licensing moves to prevent it from repeating its controversial patent deal with Novell, has signed a set of broad collaboration agreements with Linux provider Xandros that include an intellectual property assurance under which Microsoft will provide patent covenants for Xandros customers. These covenants, which are almost identical to the patent agreement and […]

Novell has welcomed the provisions of the fourth, and final, draft of the upcoming GNU General Public License 3.0, which allow it to include technologies under this license in SUSE Linux Enterprise, OpenSUSE and other Novell offerings. On May 31, the Free Software Foundation released the fourth and final draft of GPL Version 3, referred […]

The final version of the GNU General Public License 3.0 should be published before the end of June, bringing to an end some 18 months of discussions around the new license, the Free Software Foundation said on May 31. The FSF also released the fourth and final draft of GPL version 3 on May 31, […]