open source software - Page number 3

Open source tackles city permit process with OpenCounter

liberate docs

The City of Santa Cruz is the smallest community to ever partner with Code for America, but it had one of the largest problems to solve: how to make it easier to take an idea for a small business from conception to reality. From a concept to a permit.

They created an online permitting portal OpenCounter. The portal launched on Wednesday January 9, after an intense year of development, testing, and refinement. So how did they do it?

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Event report: FOSDEM introduces science-focused devroom

on the scene

FOSDEM, held annually in Brussels, Belgium, is a free event for open source communities to meet, share ideas, and collaborate. It offers a mix of focused devrooms and themed main track talks, with no requirement for registration. It has a reputation of being highly developer-focused, this year brought together over 5,000 geeks from around the world.

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Get your business in open source shape

Starting off on the right foot

It should not surprise you that year after year the most common resolution people make is a combination of lose weight, eat healthier, and get in better shape. This, along with my own resolutions, prompted me to think about what it means to get a company in open source shape.

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Which open source software license should I use?

MPL GPL APACHE

I’ve recently been involved in several discussions that are variations on, "Which open source or free software license should I choose for my project?" Here is my way of looking at the large and growing collection of licenses in the wild. First, let's make sure we all understand that I Am Not A Lawyer. This is not legal advice. Depending upon your needs and your comfort with risk around your software, you'll want to confirm your legal choices with counsel in your jurisdiction.

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Why some governments are struggling with open source implementation

Tug of war

Observing the open source public policy landscape over the past several months, one couldn’t be blamed for feeling optimistic. Government after government, it seemed, was stepping up and laying the ground work for public-sector adoption and private-sector growth of open standards and open source software (see articles on France, the UK, Portugal, and the US). Even the Vice President of the European Commission, Neelie Kroes, gave a full-throated endorsement of open source in late December.

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What artists want in software: An ode to Dream Studio

open source why

I am an artist and the sole maintainer of Dream Studio, a free and open source creative system (on SourceForge). Though most of the software is maintained by others who maintain their own Ubuntu PPAs, which are included with Dream Studio by default (which is, itself, based on standard desktop Ubuntu), I create the default themes and overall look of Dream Studio, package the various multimedia categories, create the installer disc (and Dream Studio for Ubuntu), and write a couple of the programs and scripts included with the distribution.

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One man takes his medical records public to cure his brain cancer

rx open source

Salvatore Iaconesi has brain cancer. And he's doing something about it that most don't: taking it into his own hands. And the hands of hundreds of others, as they all work together to cure his disease (and offer hope to others).

The project is called The Cure, and at it's apex as many as 200 people—doctors, surgeons, traditional practitioners, shamans, artists, designers, hackers, software engineers, ex-patients—were working simultaneously (and voluntarily) to contact people, arrange appointments, send out documentation and ask for opinions, and then collect all of the resulting information and classify it. They used pre-exisiting software tools and even produced and assembled some themselves.

Today, Salvatore uses all of this critical information to form a personal strategy, which he says is showing positive results. In this interview find out how open source software and concepts power this fantastic exploration into self-managed therapy.

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How open source is driving the future of cloud computing

open source cloud computing

In 1998, Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. The lecture he gave, titled "The Possibility of Social Choice," succinctly captured both the subject of his work (generalizing economic theory to cover social groups of disparate actors rather than just individuals or corporations) and his irrepressible sense of humor (because the generalization applied to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem). Sen's crucial insight (for me) is this (emphasis mine):

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Abolishing patents: Too soon or too late?

patent stop sign

"Patents are here to stay." This is the sort of statement that makes me uneasy. I guess in the 17th century the common wisdom was "slavery is here to stay." In the 18th century giving voting rights to women seemed absurd and foreseeing open borders between France and German was crazy talk in 1945. At a certain point, fortunately, those things changed for the better. Is it time to change the common wisdom on patents as well? Is the time ripe—will it ever be?—to utter the frightening word abolition? I do not have the privilege to know the answer, but I regard the question as a legitimate one. According to some patent experts, however, questioning the very existence of patents seems blasphemous. » Read more

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OpenPhoto: Elegant photo hosting in an open source package

your image here

Think of all the photos and videos you've stored on various devices and social networks over the years. Enter: OpenPhoto, a new, open source platform all about gathering them into one place and never losing them. Their software imports your photos from Flickr, Facebook, and Instagram, and there's an app for the iPhone (Android coming soon).

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