Java welcomes open source

The Java Community Process (JCP) is changing to adopt the influence of open source software and open source community practices, says eWeek.

Patrick Curran, chairman of the JCP programme at Sun, said the open source wave that has changed the software industry is having no less of an effect on the JCP.

"Open source and the effect it's having on the software industry is having a similar effect on the JCP, and we are likely to make changes in the process based on that," Curran said. "We like open source and the great benefits it has brought to the industry."

The UK is lagging in the use of open source, even though it is now established as the best way to produce and consume software, said speakers at the Open Source Forum, sponsored by Red Hat and its partners, in London, reports ZDNet.

Graham Taylor, director of industry body OpenForum Europe, blamed poor business decisions, which had led to vendor lock-in, particularly among public bodies.

"According to our research, up to 90% of public administrations have lost the ability to freely choose their next IT solution," he said. This is because they have committed to applications that are not supported on other operating systems, or have no way of moving their data to other applications.

Microsoft has helped develop an open source tool that translates Word files into a "talking" digital book format, which makes documents easily accessible for the 160 million people worldwide with impaired vision, says ZDNet.

The tool was developed in an open source project with Sonata software and the Digital Accessible Information System (Daisy) consortium. It translates OOXML files into the Daisy format, which can be used in software such as Book Wizard Producer and the Daisy pipeline, to create a talking book.

Listening to a Daisy audio file is different from an MP3. With an MP3, the listener can only navigate between tracks. But someone listening to a Daisy format file can do things a sighted person would do when reading a document, such as skip to specific page numbers, hear a table of contents and look up references in an index.