The Public Software Foundation has been created with the goal of making quality publicly licensed software available at Public lending institutions, including School and Public Libraries, and non-profit organizations.
This site is separated into 4 distinctive sections to allow you to completely immerse yourself in topic specific information. Check it out at http://publicsoftwarefoundation.org/
- The Welcome Tab contains the business end of the website.
- Resources is our learning guide
- Libraries includes information designed to help patrons and staff decide if offering software is right the right choice.
- Community is for our many volunteers to meet, get news, and get inspired to do great things.
An absolutely great idea
Most public libraries are running of of free Open Source General Licence software anyway, using some for of Linux along with content management software most recently Drupal. This software makes it possible for libraries and other organizations to create public communities for the exchange of information, without being bound by the expense of software developed by private for profit corporations. Personally I have found free software like Drupal much more flexible and usable than things like Front Page, or Dreamweaver to develop blogs or user groups, and WampServer much better than IIS as development environment. The free software initiative has done more for the Internet and information exchange than the private sector has. ASP, Microsofts standard for server side web sites has been completely disaplced by PHP. SQL is now a the standard, not any of the privately sold database programs designed to use on active Web Pages. Apache is has certainly replaced any of the “for profit” software alternatives.
This is where the communal, not for profit, model overwhelms the private sector. Most web site, commercial and professional, have been developed using free open source software, not the standard Microsoft boxed stuff.
And the public library was on this bandwagon quite early. This is a natural progression