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	<title>librarian.net &#187; howardcounty</title>
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		<title>learn to FLOSS @ your library</title>
		<link>http://www.librarian.net/stax/1868/learn-to-floss-your-library/</link>
		<comments>http://www.librarian.net/stax/1868/learn-to-floss-your-library/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:55:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>jessamyn</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA['puters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[floss]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[howardcounty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[opensource]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[web4lib]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[FLOSS is an acronym standing for Free/Libre Open Source Software and it&#8217;s the term people use when they&#8217;re trying to describe the intersection of what&#8217;s free and what&#8217;s open source. Eric Goldhagen gave a great talk about FLOSS (ppt) at the Simmons Skillshare and sent us off with a list of FLOSS tools that can [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOSS">FLOSS</a> is an acronym standing for Free/Libre Open Source Software and it&#8217;s the term people use when they&#8217;re trying to describe the intersection of what&#8217;s free and what&#8217;s open source. Eric Goldhagen gave <a href="http://radicalreference.info/documents/opensource_for_librarians_rutgers.ppt">a great talk about FLOSS</a> (ppt) at the Simmons Skillshare and sent us off with a list of FLOSS tools that can replace what we&#8217;re already using in libraries, from Open Source IM clients to whole free operating systems. It made me happy, then, to read about <a href="http://www.howa.lib.md.us/">Howard County Library</a> in Maryland moving to <a href="http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.education.web4lib/6426">a user experience on their computers that they call Groovix</a>. This <a href="http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.education.web4lib/6426">web4lib post has the details</a> but it&#8217;s an ubuntu-based system that covers all the bases of what people use PACs for using free (not always open source) tools. They end their post with this note </p>
<blockquote><p>Howard County Library is a pioneer in Maryland in using Open Source software on public and staff machines. Because Open Source software is available free or at a very modest cost, the Library can provide public computers at a fraction of  the cost using comparable commercially-available software.</p></blockquote>
<p>Sounds neat, doesn&#8217;t it? I&#8217;ve often though, and said in my talks, that a lot of software problems are management issues disguised as money issues. We say we can&#8217;t afford to change, when what we mean is that we don&#8217;t know how. FLOSS-curious? Check out this <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Free_software">Wikipedia Free Software portal</a>. Yeah I said Wikipedia, for all of its flaws, at least they&#8217;re not trying to sell you anything.</p>
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