On Satuday  July 18th, 14:00 (GMT -4), the popular Radio Show ‘Papia Digital’ will have an item about Open Office, and Open Source in general.

Presentator Percy Pinedo will interview a guest about the upcoming Open Office courses with Solveig Haughland, who will come to Curaçao in August.

More information on the website of Papia Digital, which transmits via Z86  on AM 860. The show was originally planned 11th July, but got postponed due to the Little League Games!

During the “Marshe pa Empresario”, organised by the Curaçao Chamber of Commerce, 22-24 April 2009, a presentation titled “Business Intelligence for Small to Medium sized businesses” was held. Kencurth Richardson, owner of BiHive, delivered insight into the world of Business Intelligence (BI).

BiHive uses Open Source in most or all of its products, from the Linux Operating System, through MySQL and KETTLE to Pentaho and OpenWorkbench.

Spin webdesign is looking for a PHP Programmer.

FIT IT Solutions is active on Curacao since 2007 and specializes in Virtualization, Server Based Computing and Open Source. FIT is not against Closed Source but believes Open and Closed Source can be integrated, depending on the specific situation and budget.

FIT believes that Open Source can reduce costs for Small and Medium Businesses.

See the website of FIT IT Solutions (Dutch).

On Monday 6th of April 2009, the fourth preparation meeting of the Curaçao Open Source Association took place. The bylaws where discussed, as wel as the Program for 2009 and the general purpose of COSA. About 8 people attended.

More information: kencurth@gmail.com

Kadanz Recruiment Solutions posted this job description in the Amigoe (16-03-2009): ICT-person (HBO) with a lot of experience with PHP (open source), Javascript and Flashscript. Experience with the open source template engine Smarty will be an advantage.

The project AMI (Abilidat Maximo saka for di mi Identidat), executed by Splikami and funded by the Minister of Education of the Netherlands Antilles aims at giving young people a second chance at becoming an ‘ICT-assistant level 2′. The project, also known as ‘A Computer for Every House’ includes lessons in Open Source, given by a local Open Source expert during February and March 2009. In the first lesson, the students (age 18-22) learned to install Ubuntu 8.10 and to create a Wordpress Blog. In the second lesson, they installed several programs from the OpenDisc project, like Blender, the GIMP, OpenOffice, Audacity (for editing music) and Pidgin (for Instant Messaging). In the third and fourth lesson, the pupils will learn to program Ruby from Hackety Hack and the last lesson will be dedicated to an evaluation of  the learned skills.

It is amazing how fast the youngsters pick up Open Source software and how easy it is to install. The students immediately began to make copies of Ubuntu and the OpenDisc and installed them at home and gave copies to their friends. 2 of the students where very enthusiastic about programming and they quickly followed the lessons provided by the interactive Hackety Hack tutor.

The Dutch CPB (Central Planning Bureau) issued a report named Competition, innovation and intellectual property rights in software markets (download pdf here). “This study analyzes under which circumstances it may be desirable for the government to
stimulate open source software as a response to market failures in software markets. [...] Our most important finding is that directly stimulating open source software, e.g. by acting as a lead customer, can improve dynamic efficiency if (i) there is a serious customer lock-in problem, while (ii) to develop the software, there is no need to purchase specific, complementary inputs at a substantial cost, and (iii) follow-on innovations are socially valuable but there are impediments to contractual agreements between developers that aim at realizing such innovations.”

Barracuda Networks solutions deliver easy to use, comprehensive security, networking, and data protection products. Combining its own award-winning technology with powerful open source software. United ICT Group and Barracuda Networks have organized an IT Seminar where Mr. Ismael Toscano will be presenting security solutions that target E-mail Protection, SPAM Filtering and Web & Content Filtering.

Date: Monday, 9 March 2009

On Monday 9th of March 2009, the third preparation meeting of the Curaçao Open Source Association took place at Stimul-IT building, Mortiersweg 5, 17:45-19:15. More information: kencurth@gmail.com