The Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI) posted an open letter to President Barack Obama Tuesday on the topic of open source software. The letter urged him to mandate that the United States government consider open source software for federal IT initiatives.
Sonic Foundry has released a new module for Moodle called the Mediasite Content Module for Moodle. The new software provides integration between the open source learning management system and Sonic Foundry's Mediasite classroom capture and Webcasting suite.
Moodle has released updates to four of its most recent branches. The latest point update, 1.9.4, addresses security vulnerabilities and includes a number of minor fixes and enhancements. This round of upgrades also marks the end of development for the 1.6.x and 1.7.x branches.
Microsoft announced the release last week of Web Sandbox on its Port25 open source community Web site. The company has made the source code available under the Apache 2.0 open source license, the site reported.
The Association of Research Libraries has a new report that looks at digital repository services and research libraries.
Third Brigade has launched Third Brigade Deep Security 6, which provides server and application security. The latest release adds three product enhancements to complement the existing Deep Security host intrusion prevention system and firewall.
Sun Microsystems and St. Paul College have announced the opening of a new Sun Center of Excellence for Open Virtual Worlds.
A consortium of colleges and universities in Taiwan has launched the "Open Course Ware Consortium," with the goal of sharing its resources with the public. The program is modeled after the OpenCourseWare Consortium originally developed by an MIT faculty committee wishing to share their course materials openly on the Web and now involving 200 institutions and organizations.
The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia has gone public with deployment of virtualization software from Virtual Iron Software. Virtualization enables IT administrators to streamline the IT infrastructure by running multiple applications and operating systems on a single server.
The Khronos Group has ratified and released OpenCL 1.0, an open specification aimed at enabling parallel programming across multi-core CPUs and GPUs. GPU heavyweights AMD and Nvidia came out immediately with support for the spec Tuesday, along with plans for products to support developers. AMD said it's backing OpenCL 1.0 and will "integrate a compliant compiler and runtime into the free ATI Stream Software Development Kit." Nvidia, meanwhile, said its CUDA parallel computing technology will "seamlessly run OpenCL."