issa's blog

What do Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have in common? All of them are giant social media websites, but the companies behind them are releasing more and more open source tools. Issa Mahasneh listed the most important ones that marked the last year.

Jordan's government wants to sign an agreement with Microsoft to implement a cloud computing system for Jordan, Issa Mahasneh raises some concerns about privacy of citizens, Internet freedom and other important issues related to the project.

This post has been updated to include some clarifications click here to read them.

Open Source is about respecting others' efforts, not copying and stealing. In this post, Issa Mahasneh shows how several Palestinian open source Facebook pages are copy-pasting content from the Jordan Open Source Association not only without attribution, but claiming they did JOSA's work and making stupid mistakes.

The combination of open source methodology, open data and innovative technologies makes solving critical and huge problems extremely fast (and funny). Jordan's own problems are not different and Issa Mahasneh here suggests to boost anti-corruption efforts by using mobile-based games.

If you are in Jordan you've probably heard about the new HSPA+ service of Zain, after some discussions on Twitter on whether the dongle provided with the service will work on Linux and some reviews deniying it is supported, I have asked Zain about this issue and they replied that their Huawei dongle is supported. I have tried it tonight on my Ubuntu 10.10 and it was the easiest thing ever, a piece of cake!

Slim Amamou is one of the main figures of the Tunisian Open Source community, first arrested for his activism against the Tunisian regime during the last revolution, later appointed as Minister of Youth after the Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s fall. Issa Mahasneh asks in this blog post: "Should the Arab World need revolutions to have Open-Source-friendly ministers?".

Journalism is witnessing the same revolution software had in the 80's, will Jordan convert its traditionally closed news publishing to an innovative open-source-like industry? Issa Mahasneh explains what is happening in Jordan's online media in this blog post.

Jordanian Internet users are facing some problems accessing blogspot blogs.

(CC-BY Lordcolus)

Well-known blogger Osama Romoh reported on a recent post that Blogger.com and its hosted blogs are not accessible anymore in the kingdom. Clients of major ISPs, namely Orange, WiTribe and Zain all have issues when trying to visit blogspost sites.

If you want to know the state of the Arabic Linux User Groups just have a short visit to their websites. They are not only unwilling/unable to have some community activities, but -even online- they are not able to create a virtual space for Linux fans, professionals or newbies.
These are some screenshots of the home pages of these groups, ordered from the biggest #FAIL to the biggest #OK :)

Linux Arabia (http://www.linuxarabia.com)

Dinar after Dinar the poor Jordanian citizen is paying money to big multinational Software vendors; companies that provide most of the times proprietary and closed source software to our government and public administration.

(CC-BY stuartpilbrow)