open source software - Page number 4

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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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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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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"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

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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Talend, a licensor of open source enterprise software, has recently received a ruling from the U.S. Customs Service corroborating that its software complies with the Trade Agreements Act of 1979 (19 USC 2511 et seq.) Open source software adoption by the U.S. Federal government must comply with many regulations, some of which can be difficult given the nature of modern software development. And these rules are frequently used as a barrier, or a bar, to the use of FOSS in federal government procurement. One of these issues is the ability of the FOSS company to certify compliance with the TAA which requires a product to be manufactured or substantially transformed in the United States or a designated country. » Read more

The arrival of the ten-year anniversary of Creative Commons is an opportunity to express gratitude to an organization that has done so much to promote the sharing of cultural works and to challenge traditional assumptions about the appropriate use of copyright. » Read more

Here’s a fun experiment (if, like me, you’re a huge nerd): take an open source policy from your agency, company, whatever, and strike out the words "open source." Bam, you now have a much more sensible and reasonable "software" policy. » Read more

Back in March of this year, the University of Albany Student Chapter of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) organized its second Open Source Festival. The event brought together enthusiasts of open source from industry, government, and academia in the New York-Albany area. There, I shared my experience of teaching an open source class at RPI and the work that OSEHRA was doing on further promoting the use of open source software in healthcare. Among other topics of discussion was the need to educate college students on the basic concepts of NoSQL databases. » Read more

France is the latest government to move from open source-friendly to open source-active, to paraphrase the European Commission's aspirational reference to Cloud Computing.

In late September, French Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, signed a guideline (in French here and a rough translation here) urging the country's public administrations to not only make a thorough and systematic review of free alternatives when building and revising ICT infrastructure and applications, but also to use the savings realized by using OSS to develop expertise and engage upstream communities.

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