gov2

I had the opportunity to sit down with Larry Lessig last week.  Co-founder of Creative Commons, law professor, author, and copyright guru, Lessig is a visionary of law and technology policy.

In the FLOSS community, Lessig is best known for his book Free Culture and work on copyright policy. In his view, attitudes towards copyright started to change when we saw kids and grandmothers sued for file sharing. Lessig has never argued for abolishment of copyright, but he has always argued that there needs to be balance―a more permissive society that allows artists to reserve the rights they need, while allowing others to remix and improve without fear of prosecution.

But two years ago, Lessig moved away from the copyright field to invest more time researching institutional corruption and citizen-funded elections. » Read more

Towards the end of 2009, the office of the DoD CIO issued a memo clarifying their position on open source software. There were some misconceptions, misunderstandings, and just plain FUD surrounding their stance previously, and they wanted to make it clear that they considered open source just as viable for development as any other type of software.

We tracked down some very smart people--software security expert David A. Wheeler and Dan Risacher, who authored the memo in question--to help explain how the memo came to be, and what it means for the Government sector moving forward. » Read more

I always look forward to my conversations with Jan Wildeboer. Simply put, he helps me look at the world a little differently. A little more.... openly.  » Read more

With Document Freedom Day 2010 approaching, this is a good opportunity to consider the reasons why the public sector has increasingly opted for ODF, the document freedom that it enables, and why ODF is an essential feature of any “open” eGovernment strategy. » Read more

An acquaintance emailed me a .docx file last week that my older word processor wouldn't open on the first try.  Before you start sending me fixes, don't worry.  I got it open eventually after much grumbling about proprietary formats that aren't really standards.  But I digress.
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If you use open source, you have no respect for intellectual property. Or at least, that’s what the International Intellectual Property Alliance seems to think. According to this article, the lobbying group is asking the US Trade Representative to put Indonesia on its "Special 301 Priority Watch List,” in part because of its policy encouraging the adoption of open source software by government agencies. » Read more