The United Persons » Open source

Technology Neutral IT Procurement Decisions: U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy Dan Gordon and U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Cordinator Victoria Espinel issued a statement to Senior Procurement Executives and Chief Information Officers reminding them to select IT based on appropriate criteriawhile analyzing available alternatives including proprietary, open source and mixed source technologies. Click to enlarge.

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Kill Bill for Microsoft: Putin Orders Russian Government Move to Free Software

mazsa — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 19:03:27 +0000

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2010/12/putin-orders-russian-move-to-gnulinux.html

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“Tangible Bit is a project intending to …

mazsa — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:16:31 +0000

“Tangible Bit is a project intending to link together all aspects of digitial manufacturing through a series of datasets. The aim is to create a database of sites hosting manufacturing equipment or inventory, objects, materials, manufacturing processes and so on. [...]” http://tangiblebit.com/

Free Software has been around for a while, and Free Content is coming to be an integral part of our culture. Now we need Free Infrastructue. Tangible Bit is above all a Free Infrastructure project.

But it’s also a software project, so of course Tangible Bit is free software. It is developed and distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3.0. The datasets made available through Tangible Bit are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

The reason for this is simple: We believe that the stated goals cannot be acheived with competition for maximizing profit, but only with cooperation to minimize profit. In the current legal model it is all but impossible to encourage any form of cooperation within the production sector, but we believe that by adopting a copyright policy that allows for free sharing of information and code with the requisite demand that others contribute to the commons we can achieve our goals faster. [...]

We believe in the freedom of the individual, and we believe that the individual cannot be free while enslaved in the current industrial paradigm. Liberation from this is what we strive for.” http://tangiblebit.com/welcome/free-infrastructure/

“Industry 2.0 is the movement to redo the industrial revolution with humankind at its core and not the ownership of ideas. This provides an implicit promise for the reduction and demarketization of required work – the golden age of unemployment – and the elimination of artificial scarcity, which has for decades dithered and confused priorities regarding the manufacture of all products worldwide. [...]

Tangible Bit is an Industry 2.0 application in that it is built around the understanding that the current industrial model is unsustainable, and that only with a deep understanding of the world’s supply chains, materials economy and manufacturing methodology can we avert the demise of humanity. The goal of Tangible Bit is to make the world’s first global scale indstrial information system. No less.” http://tangiblebit.com/welcome/industry-2-0/

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Our genomes, unzipped: “Over the last ye…

mazsa — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 09:20:15 +0000

Our genomes, unzipped: “Over the last year, all the members of Genomes Unzipped have had genome scans performed by personal genomics company 23andMe; several of us have also had additional tests done by other genetic testing companies (Counsyl, deCODEme). From today, we’ll be making all of our raw genetic data and the reports generated from these tests freely available online. As the project proceeds, we aim to obtain data from an ever larger array of tests – ultimately extending to whole-genome sequencing – and release it openly. Right now you can freely download the 23andMe data from everyone in the project from this website http://www.genomesunzipped.org/data .”

http://www.genomesunzipped.org/2010/10/our-genomes-unzipped.php

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“[...] an influential lobby group is ask…

mazsa — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:19:40 +0000

“[...] an influential lobby group is asking the US government to basically consider open source as the equivalent of piracy – or even worse.

What?

It turns out that the International Intellectual Property Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its “Special 301 watchlist” because they use open source software.

What’s Special 301? It’s a report that examines the “adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights” around the planet – effectively the list of countries that the US government considers enemies of capitalism. It often gets wheeled out as a form of trading pressure – often around pharmaceuticals and counterfeited goods – to try and force governments to change their behaviours.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/feb/23/opensource-intellectual-property

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