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The Canadian government has an RFI concerning Free and Open Source Software (" No Charge Licensed Software "): This is not a bid solicitation. Canada is seeking feedback from the Industry with respect to No Charge Licensed Software.... Canada has a Request for Information (RFI) related to No-Charge Licensed Software (typically referred to as Free and Open Source Software or FOSS and also applicable to freeware).... The purpose of the RFI is to help the Government of Canada (GC) put together guidelines related to the planning, acquisition, use and disposal of No Charge Licensed Software (NCLS). While there is already significant interest for No Charge Licensed Software within the Government of Canada there are many questions being asked, see below. There exists operationally a requirement to produce common guidelines that are fair, open and transparent and can be applied consistently across departments.... In the Overview, the Crown provided a definition for No Charge Licensed...

Tom Brzustowski (ex-NSERC president, now University of Ottawa RBC Financial Group Professor in the Commercialization of Innovation and Chair of the board Institute for Quantum Computing , Waterloo) is giving a talk this Friday January 16 entitled " Looking for Suggestive Patterns in Canadian Industrial R&D Spending ". Abstract: R&D spending is an imperfect, but widely used, measure of innovation. This paper describes the search for suggestive patterns in Canadian industrial R&D spending, as reported in the data published annually by Re$earch Infosource Inc. A very important feature of this proprietary data base is that the companies involved are named, and thus the data can be combined with information from other sources. The discussion has three parts. The first deals with the "calibration" of the data base, and a discussion of its limitations, beginning with the reporting of R&D spending. The second describes and explains the performance of a...

From a letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education : Wired Campus , in response to a Tech Therapy podcast: " Episode 33: Libraries vs. IT Departments ": Our experience at Indiana University shows that librarians and IT departments cannot only coexist, and do it successfully, but also that we must become assertive partners in order to achieve the results our users now expect. It’s time to move beyond the rift that apparently separates many libraries and IT departments. None of the compelling issues facing academic libraries today can be accomplished without strong support from IT departments. Among them: establishing robust institutional repositories; supporting e-science and data curation services; providing metadata and e-text consultation; growing a virtual reference community; and developing course management systems. The list goes on.