Sharing and Freedom: the Philosophy Spreads Beyond Software
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-20 16:34:19 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-20 16:35:01 UTC
Open Source City
An open source city, according to Jason Hibbets, project manager in Corporate Marketing at Red Hat, in his book ‘Foundation for an open source city’, is a blend of open culture, open government policies and economic development. It is an ecosystem made up of: a culture of citizen participation, effective open government policies and open data initiatives, open source user groups and conferences, and a hub for innovation and open source businesses.
Jason Hibbets is working to convince local governments to adapt open source ideas in their day to day operations. His book, “The Foundation for an Open Source City,” attempts to be a step by step guide for implementing open source ideas into government policies and solutions, based on his own experiences. He uses Raleigh, North Carolina, where he resides, as his example. He calls it the worlds first open source city. In a way, the small southern capital is his laboratory.
Optics
Optical technology is viewed as still, and likely to remain, a set of technologies in ferment - highly proprietary, tied up in intellectual property, fast changing and just not the sort of area you might try to discipline into open source standards - not at this stage..
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New user-vendor forum set to define and promote OpenFlow-based, merchant-optical networking solutions
Automobiles
“Today we manage a global community of engineers, consumers and designers that co-creates the product with us,” says Rogers, CEO of Local Motors. “Co-creation is about sharing ideas and working through the same problem together.”
Nicolas Perrinn is a firm believer in crowdsourced ideas, open source development, and fan-funded projects. What’s truly innovative about Nicolas’ choice of projects however is its scope — because Perrinn isn’t just talking about building an open source hybrid electric race car. Perrinn is talking about building an open source hybrid electric race car and pitting it against the best that industry giants Porsche, Toyota, and Audi have to offer.
Perrinn myTeam offers schoolchildren, students, engineers, enthusiasts and fans unprecedented access to contribute and share data and ideas for top flight Le Mans hybrid race car.
Libraries
Pew Research Center released a new study on Thursday showing that library users are more social than people who do not go to libraries. The report questioned 6,000 Americans, ages 16 and up, and found that more than two-thirds of Americans are actively using libraries. Along with actively using the library, users typically are more social than those who do not use the library. Library users also tend to be more active.
Sharing
The most popular items in Berlin's first "borrowing shop" are the electric drills. At least one of the local people who have registered with Leila – a little shop on Fehrbelliner Strasse, north-east of the city centre – seems to be continually fixing shelves or hanging pictures.
It's a transparent gun design powered by an Arduino board with colour-changing LEDs and a built-in screen to log essential information such as your kills, health, ammo, and anything else you might need. The Skirmos guns communicate via radio and infrared optics lets your game extend beyond the walls of your local laser tag death arena.
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The Shuttleworth Foundation has done me the honour of appointing me as a Fellow, starting today.
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It’s this ability to create communities that makes us different from our predecessors. As exemplars I look to my own immediate circle of electronic communities: Wikipedia, Mozilla, Open Knowledge Foundation, Creative Commons, Open Rights Group, Blue Obelisk …
Maps
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Back in 2005, a study in Nature concluded that Wikipedia — at the time, a free upstart just eking its way into the Google results — was about as good a source as the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica. Though it found Wikipedia had slightly more factual errors than the older reference, the study gave the website a major commendation when it needed one.
Open Data
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So, with much help from various community members, I am pleased to say we are starting to gear up for Open Data Day 2014 on February 22.
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Mapbox makes it easy for anyone to leverage the work of the hundreds of thousands of open source cartographers from all around the world who make their work available on OpenStreetMap (OSM). Contributing back to the community is part of their mission as well. With several FOSS projects in their inventory, Mapbox has already made a serious impact in the OSM community. Their efforts revolve around two development areas: parsing data and contributing data.
Open Hardware
Chris Clark is the IT director at SparkFun Electronics in Boulder, Colorado. He talked with Opensource.com community manager Jason Hibbets, late last year during the All Things Open conference about open hardware.
With traditional computer vendors' hardware sales in the proverbial toilet, one has to wonder: Where will data center hardware innovations come from? Worry not -- the fine folks at the Open Compute Project held the OCP Summit V in January 2014 in San Jose, Calif., and there was no lack of ingenuity on display.
A programmable test and measurement instrument which runs open source software developed by start-up Red Pitaya can be bought from RS later this year.
If you fancy owning your very own open source Enigma replica a new project has launched over on the Kickstarter crowd funding website that might interest you.
With this short guide we release today, we will explain you how to use your Arduino Yun to do something that was never accomplished before with a board of such family.
3D
Today, we have 3D modeling software that can pack an exponential cache of information, render designs visible with incredible fidelity, and make those designs easier to adapt. BIM technology (building information modeling) has entered the workplace, too, improving coordination and productivity of all trades involved in project construction, effectively revolutionizing the manufacturing sector. This is technology that, like CAD, has undeniably been pushed forward via the open development and integration of components.
Earlier this year, I shared my story about open source designs and my 3D printed prosthetic hand to a room of 4,600+ at Intel’s Annual International Sales Conference in Las Vegas. I joined Jon Schull on stage, the founder of e-NABLE, an online group dedicated to open source 3D printable assistive devices.
The word "open" is certainly a buzzword in 3D printing, but what does that really mean? While many are tossing around this phrase, few actually practice an open business and product philosophy. Open source hardware (or Libre hardware), notably led by the RepRap project, is experiencing rapid, cross-industry adoption. This philosophy empowers engineers, makers, builders, and creators with unprecedented freedom to change, update, and modify their products over time.
Misc.
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As a woman in open source, I have found that the values of community, open development, and flat organizational structure appeal equally to both men and women. The ability of local organizers to freely define what type of culture they are building allows them to adapt in order to appeal to the surrounding culture, while striving to improve access.
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At the Open Technology Institute (OTI), we've been working on opening our user feedback process as a way to improve our internal processes and collaboration, engage our user community more, promote non-developer contributions, and think more broadly about how open source process plays a role in the Commotion Wireless project, a free and open-source communication tool that uses mobile phones, computers, and other wireless devices to create decentralized mesh networks.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Turns Out LLMs for Code Don't Save Time and Don't Improve Quality
- Neither legal nor useful
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- Gemini Links 13/07/2025: Sonpo Museum of Art and FCEUX
- Links for the day
- Links 13/07/2025: UnitedHealth's Censorship Campaign, Australia Wary of China
- Links for the day
- Firing Away With Nonsense
- Or fighting fire with fire
- Links 13/07/2025: Climate Crisis, GAFAM Poisoning the Water
- Links for the day
- The Microsofters Will Have an Obligation to Compensate Us
- This story isn't just about Microsoft. It's also about corruption, there are many women victims, there is abject "abuse of process", and many more scandals to be illuminated in years to come.
- Reproducing at the EPO Instead of Producing Monopolies for Foreign Monopolies With Their Price-Fixing Cartels
- Does the EPO recognise the need of well-educated Europeans to bear kids?
- Valnet Inc. Dominates Real (Not LLM Slop) GNU/Linux Coverage in 2025
- And likely in prior years, too
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Fund Raiser Goes on
- Later this month we'll expose another OSI scandal
- EPO Staff Representatives Issue a Warning About Staff's Health and Inadequate Care
- Even the EPO's own stakeholders (money sources) are openly protesting against what the EPO became
- Links 13/07/2025: Partly Assorted News From Deutsche Welle and CBC
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 13/07/2025: Board Games and Battle Styles
- Gemini Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, July 12, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, July 12, 2025
- Plunder at the Second-Largest Institution in Europe
- cuts, neglect, health problems, even early deaths
- Links 12/07/2025: Political Developments, Attack on Opposition, Climate Actions
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 12/07/2025: Melodic Musings and Small Web July
- Links for the day
- Links 12/07/2025: Jail in China for Homoerotica, South Korea Discriminates Against Old Workers
- Links for the day
- If Only Everything Was Rewritten in Rust, We'd Have No More Security Issues?
- Nope.
- Links 12/07/2025: Birdwatching and Fake/Misleading Wall Street 'Valuation' Figures
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 12/07/2025: How to Avoid Writing, Apps for Android
- Links for the day
- Using SLAPPs to Cover Up Sexual Abuse and Strangulation
- The exact same legal team of the Serial Strangler from Microsoft and Garrett already has a history fighting against "metoo"
- EPO Staff Committee on Harassment in the Workplace
- slides
- Adding the Voice of Writers to UK SLAPP Reform
- The journey to repair antiquated (monarchy era) laws will likely be long
- EPO Takes More Money From Staff for Speculation (Pensions), Actuarial Study Explains the Impact
- "The key change in this year’s Actuarial Study, due to cascading the new “risk appetite” from the financial study, is a significant increase of the total pension contribution rate of 5.7 percentage points, up to a total of 37.8%. This is driven by an unprecedented decrease in the discount rate of 105 bps down to 2.2%."
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, July 11, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, July 11, 2025
- Microsoft - Like IBM - Does the "Relocation" Tricks (Start Over Elsewhere, Then Get Sacked by Microsoft)
- It is a "low blow" or a "dick move"
- After the Free Software Foundation's Campaign to Raise Money Let's See Campaigns to Finish Off Microsoft (Vista 11, GitHub etc.)
- Microsoft is in effect collapsing
- Your Publications Have No Major Impact Unless or Until You "Get Some Heat"
- we're on the right track
- Slopwatch: A Cause for Hope, the Hype is Dying
- For about a month we showed that becoming a slopfarm - for several weeks - resulted in utter failure and ruin for BetaNews
- Links 11/07/2025: Censorship Worsening, 3D Printing Success Stories, UK and France Unite Around Nukes
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 11/07/2025: Zorin OS and Scriptonite Updates
- Links for the day
- Links 11/07/2025: Hardware, Russia, and China
- Links for the day
- Links 11/07/2025: Intel Collapsing and Microsoft Resorts to Bribery to Push Slop Via Obligatory Education
- Links for the day
- The EFF Sided With the Team That Strangles Women and Tells Women to Kill Themselves
- They say that apathy and inaction are a form of a "stance"
- "Nat [Friedman] and [the Serial Strangler From Microsoft] Were Always Exceptionally Close," Says Former Housemate and Colleague
- Now Alex (hiding behind another name when that suits him) not only attacks women but also people who merely report what he did to women
- Exemplary List of Things That Are Not Artificial Intelligence or Even Intelligence
- The "age of AI" or "era of AI" or "AI revolution" mostly boils down to rebranding, just like "the cloud"
- New Letter From the European Patent Office Explains How the Office Plots to Grant Many Illegal Patents, a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of 'Growth'
- Open letter to Mr Rowan (VP1) and Mr Aledo Lopez (COO)
- Abuse of Process
- 5RB is employing people who help violent men
- What Microsoft's Nat Friedman and Microsoft Lunduke Have in Common
- "Get in da car; No time to explain, loser"
- Microsoft and IBM Don't Have Much of a Future (They Mostly Pretend at This Point)
- IBM and Microsoft are in some ways alike but in many ways different
- It's Not Just Twitter (or X.com) That's Dying, Microsoft's Equivalent is Dying Also
- Unable to find a business model
- GitHub Copilot Can Cause the Bankruptcy of GitHub to Come Sooner and GitHub to be Shut Down Just Like Skype
- Some publicly available information suggests that even for each paid subscriber for plagiarism (LLM 'coding') GitHub Copilot still loses more money than it makes
- Wayland is Bad for the Planet
- If you use Wayland, it'll take you longer to accomplish tasks and you will consume more energy (or battery life)
- Legitimising Those Who Sabotage You
- Microsoft is a very malicious company
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, July 10, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, July 10, 2025
- On Microsoft Layoffs
- we might be looking at about 60,000 Microsoft layoffs since 2023
- EPO Management Already Breaks Its Own Promise (Lie) on "Bringing Teams Together"
- This gut-punching move happened just 2 days ago
- Gemini Links 11/07/2025: Occupation of 2025 and "Old Man Yells At Soundcloud"
- Links for the day
- Our Lawsuits Against the 'Cancel Mob' (Ringleaders) Helped Reduce Anti-Free Software Online Abuse
- That's not to say that lawsuits are the best way to handle terrible people. But that can help.