open source - Page number 63

Poor words. As they get more popular, as we give them more love, we also keep trying to shove in new meaning to see if they can take it.

In the technology industry, this happens over and over. Take "cloud computing," which used to mean something pretty specific and now means essentially "on the Internet" as far as I can tell. Outside the technology industry, take "news," which also used to mean something, and now is a muddy mess of news/editorial/advertising. » Read more

Over the last few years, open source adoption has been growing within India's education system. Five years ago, the South Indian state of Kerala, pioneered open source in schools with its famous IT@Schools project, that now covers three million students from the 5th-10 standards, involves 200,000 teachers across 4071 schools. Since then, other Indian states like Karnataka, Gujarat, Assam, West Bengal and others have made open source a key part of their school education initiatives. » Read more

A while back, I wrote an article about why the term crowdsourcing bugs me. Another thing that drives me nuts? When people confuse crowdsourcing and open source. My friend David Burney wrote an interesting post on this subject a while back highlighting the differences.  » Read more

This semester, a colleague and I have been running a parallel set of freshman seminar courses. Darren Miller (a photography professor in the Art Department) is teaching a course titled Art and Activism, and mine is titled Technology and Activism. These topical courses are part of an Allegheny student's introduction to writing and presentation skills—and we decided to take that to another level this semester. » Read more

Do the cultures of proprietary companies impede innovation? Do open source companies need a different sort of leadership? I've got my theories, but I don't have much to compare it to from my own experiences. I've been at Red Hat, a very open culture, for seven years and did a two-year tour at Alcatel before that. So I caught up with Cheryl McKinnon, Chief Marketing Officer at Nuxeo, an open source enterprise content management company, to explore open culture, leadership, and history. » Read more

At teachingopensource.org, we think so, and we wrote a book to help.  The following excerpt comes from the Foreword of our new textbook, Practical Open Source Software Exploration, which is licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA-3.0.  It's a book that works like an open source software project.  In other words: patches welcome.
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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

The new community get-it-done handbook, "The Open Source Way," doesn't seek to be controversial, but with information that's distilled, brief, and to the point, contention is unavoidable. Especially where the book takes a hardline stance on how to act and not act; a stance that is derived from the years of experience of the contributors involved. » Read more

The battle for Open Standards in Europe

Today, people and groups around the world are celebrating Document Freedom Day. This is an international day to raise awareness of Open Standards and free document formats. As the event takes place for the third time, the previous focus on the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is broadening to include other free formats such as Ogg. » Read more