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
- Someone Expiring Certificates on the Day of the 9/11 Attacks is Not Someone I Would Want Controlling My PC (or Deciding What's Authorised for Booting)
- "social justice warriors"
- More Microsoft-Red Hat Cross-Pollination as the Company Loses a Managing Director
- some people move from Microsoft to Red Hat and some do the opposite
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- The Complaint About Brett Wilson LLP - Part II - UK SLAPPs for Americans, SLAPPs for Profit
- Brett Wilson LLP has a track record of this kind
- Cloudflare Gives Us All Another Reason to Boycott Cloudflare
- If Cloudflare wants to use its vast surveillance network (which is what it does as a CDN) to foist paywalls and maybe something worse (like DRM on top), then Cloudflare should be more widely rejected as a company
- Links 24/09/2025: "NASA Moving Out of Entire Buildings as It's Gutted" and Purge of Online Critics (Opposing Fascism Becomes Unlawful)
- Links for the day
- Science is Under Attack
- Oligarchy prefers a dumbed-down population
- The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Has Reportedly Failed People With Wrong Advice
- At the moment the SRA has a PR blunder
- The Man Suing Brett Wilson LLP and Gervase de Wilde (5RB)
- Now he's probably using the (almost) 200,000 pounds he's supposed to receive to sue Brett Wilson LLP and former colleagues/partners
- Slopwatch: A World Wide Web That's Rotting for Companies That Won't Even Exist in a Few Years
- some of the junk Google News is promoting
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 23, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, September 23, 2025
- Links 24/09/2025: Qt Creator 18 Beta, Microsoft Cannot Bail Out "ChatGPT" Anymore, China and US Intensify Censorship
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 24/09/2025: Gemlogs and Politics
- Links for the day
- Links 23/09/2025: Japan Limits Uses of Skinnerboxes ('Smartphones') With Toxic "Apps", Fentanylware (TikTok) Tapped by "MAGAts"
- Links for the day
- Brett Wilson LLP Has Just Been Sued (by Their Own Clients!)
- Vladimir and Alla Yanpolsky sued Brett Wilson LLP in BL-2025-001167 at the end of last week
- Mayday: Optus emergency calling crisis
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 23/09/2025: Massive Data Breach, Slop Versus Productivity, and Vista 11 Update Breaks Things Again
- Links for the day
- Code of Censorship
- Extortion is peace
- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has Un-cancelled the Best People, Just in Time for the Big 4-0
- Mr. Oliva should have been there all along (since 2019)
- Most "Modern" Technology Makes You Slower and Dumber
- Because proprietary software makes you worse off
- "What Comes After Free Software?" Wrongly Insinuates We've Reached the Goal (Prison is Not the Goal)
- The oil tycoons use similar tactics against environmentalists, giving them fake "wins"
- Making More Work Space
- I learned the hard way that less is more in circumstances where more means distraction
- MAHA is a Lie, Public Officials Never Valued Citizens' Health (They Still Value Private Businesses, Their Sponsors)
- Reject demagogues
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has a New Press Kit for the Weekend After Next Weekend (40th Anniversary)
- miles better than social [sic] media [sic] quips, moderated by narcissists and oil tycoons.
- Microsoft Had Two Waves of Mass Layoffs This Month (That We Know of) and It'll Get Worse for Microsoft Soon
- Will the axe fall again by month's end?
- Gemini Links 23/09/2025: Happy Equinox, Photronic Arts, and Perception Cognition
- Links for the day
- Lessons We've Learned After 17 Years of American Hosting
- GAFAM is "all-in" with the "Trump agenda"
- Back to Normal Now, We Plan to Do More In-Depth Series (or Multi-part Stories)
- Articles (or series thereof) that contain philosophy are important to us
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 22, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, September 22, 2025
- Microsoft Media is Panicking Amid Mass Layoffs Every Month, H-1B Fees, and "Seattle’s Tech Scene in Trouble"
- In "late stage Microsoft", copyleft becomes proprietary
- The Next Wave of IBM/Red Hat Layoffs Being Discussed Already
- Red Hat is sort of disappearing the way Tivoli did
- New Techrights Turns 2
- Today starts the third year of the SSG-based Techrights
- What Scares Them the Most is Independent News Sites That They Cannot Control and Censor
- Wikileaks was a good example of this
- If You Don't Control Your Online Platform, Then Someone Else is Controlling You
- be (or become) independent
- Oracle Started This Year With Slop. Then It Stopped.
- Passing fads are like this
- Distros That Run on PCs Made 20 Years Ago and Don't Use Systemd
- Betas for now
- The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Has a Policy on Racism and Sexism
- In then future we'll show the misogyny and racial slurs
- The Complaint About Brett Wilson LLP - Part I - Abusing British Women on Behalf of American Men Who Abuse American Women
- Transparency is important to us, so we've decided to make this series
- Slopwatch: Google News and the Evident Slopfarm Infestation
- This is what people get about Linux when they query Google for Linux
- Links 22/09/2025: Murdochs Might Join Fentanylware (TikTok) 'Investors' (Masters), United Kingdom Recognises Palestinian Statehood
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 22/09/2025: Esperanto Music History and Apps For Android
- Links for the day
- Links 22/09/2025: More American 'Censorship' (Retaliation for Journalism), Cheeto "Might Be Losing His Race Against Time"
- Links for the day
- The Blob Slop
- Give me more words, give me some text
- The 50-Pound Note Experiment and the "War on Cash"
- Britain is actually seeing a rebound in cash payments, and it's not a temporary phenomenon
- Slopwatch: Blaming the Victims for Microsoft's Failures and Plagiarising Phoronix
- That's what Google has been reduced to: slop and slopfarms
- Links 22/09/2025: Breaches, Windows TCO, and Arrests
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 22/09/2025: Rabbit Hole and DeGoogling Fairphone
- Links for the day
- Links 22/09/2025: Russian War Planes Invade NATO Airspace While Dihydroxyacetone Man Escalates Attack on Free Speech Because of Critics
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 21, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, September 21, 2025