Links: Free Software/Open Source Miscellany, Open Data, HTML5 Tidbits, and WordPress Suing
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-07-21 16:29:28 UTC
- Modified: 2010-07-21 16:29:28 UTC
Summary: Grouping of recent news on Free software, including the hotly-debated WordPress controversy
Project London movie is the triumph of community spirit, togetherness or whatever you call it over money. A team of online volunteers using free software, created the movie, Project London, with as many as 650 VFX shots! Isn't that awesome?
While thinking of the next article for the Open Sound Series, I was listening to some music via Ampache. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ampache, it is simply a piece of software that allows you to upload, download, and stream music (and now videos) from a collection of media residing on a server. It features the ability to have multiple catalogs, ratings of songs and videos, playlist creation (including "democratic playlists" that users vote for), tag editing, album art and streaming various formats of music. While most software designed to listen to music does many of the same things, Ampache is then able to take it a step further by adding the idea of concurrent users of a single instance of the software.
Canonical has gathered open source enthusiasts to help Ubuntu make its mark on the business landscape in the UK.
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Mozilla
For the last couple of years I’ve been responsible for our wonderful Evangelism group at Mozilla. We’ve been responsible for a combination of developer relations, standards work and outbound developer-focused communications. If you’ve followed our work on hacks and devmo, especially around the release of 3.5 and 3.6 then you’ve familiar with the pretty amazing work of this team.
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Licensing
If there is any failing on the part of the GPL here, it is not in the eyes of the second party – that person doesn’t want to share his code anyway. If there is a failing it is that the GPL has failed to enforce the terms that the first party expected – which I think are in line with the expectations of Free Software.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
The new coalition government’s commitment to transparency heralds an exciting time for the possibilities of open data. The data release movement is relatively new and it’s difficult to predict its full economic impact in advance.
The US leads the way in encouraging and financially incentivising the software community to develop new apps based on publicly available data. The first round of the Apps for Democracy competition in Washington DC saw 50 new apps created in 30 days. The city gained $2.5m in development work outlaying just $50,000 in prize money for the winner. The Californian government introduced a transparency website costing $21k with $40k annual operational costs. As a result of citizens reporting on unnecessary spending the state saved a whopping $20m in a few short months. A similar website in Texas saw $5m savings, again within a few months of operation according to an EU e-gov survey.
Technology has placed vast amounts of medical information literally a mouse click away. Yet what often may be central – a doctor’s notes about a patient visit – has traditionally not been part of the discussion. In effect, such records have long been out of bounds.
Apparently, when it's been released under a freedom of information (FOI) request!
This is not, I imagine, the answer you, gentle reader, expected:)
Pangloss was recently asked by an acquantance, X, if he ran any legal risk by publishing on a website some emails he had obtained from the local council, as part of a local campaign against certain alleged illicit acts by that council. According to X, the emails could destroy the reputation of certain local councillors involved, and that they had had great difficulty extracting the emails, but finally succeeded. Obviously the value to the public in terms of access to the facts - surely the whole point of FOI legislation - would be massively enhanced if the obtained emails could be put on the campaign website.
Yesterday I was invited to a meeting at the Department for Communities and Local Government with the key players in the local spending/Spikes Cavell issue that I’ve written about previous (see The open data that isn’t and Update on the local spending data scandal… the empire strikes back).
The following guest post is from Katleen Janssen, researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Groups on EU Open Data and Open Government Data.
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Open Access/Content
The MIX website has been up for a few months now, and it looks like there are 2-3 new hacks being put up each day. What's more, all of the work on the site is licensed under a Creative Commons license, which is awesome (although they chose the "no derivatives" version, which is less awesome, and perhaps a bit misaligned with the vision of the project to me).
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Open Hardware
There are 13 million-dollar open-source hardware companies, but there have been no standards governing what defines the still nascent field.
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Programming
Today SourceForge is announcing an open beta period for a new set of tools for developers. Specifically, our engineers have begun work on new and better tools for project members who want to use our tracker, wiki, and source code management. We also have a new open source project management environment. And there’s more to come.
Python developers have their choice of shells – command-line interpreters that let you write Python code and execute it immediately. Israeli developer Noam Yorav-Raphael used IDLE, the graphical shell shipped with Python, for many years, and even contributed to its code. But IDLE was originally created to run as a single process, so the client-server model was “quite hacky,” he says, and it was written using the outdated TkInter GUI toolkit. Yorav-Raphael decided that writing a new shell was the way to go.
“I started to gather ideas for a new shell in the summer of 2007, started writing it in the summer of 2008 (so I had a working but not really usable shell), worked on it again in the summer of 2009 (which made it actually usable), and added some cool features in the end of 2009. I released the first public version of DreamPie in February 2010.” Today he released the latest version.
Open source software development in Mexico.
Guest: Guillermo Amaral
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HTML5
If you want to watch Internet-delivered video on your PC, the vast majority of Web sites have settled on a single, consistent way to do that. That's the good news. The bad news is that this single, consistent delivery system is Adobe Flash, with all its security and stability issues.
Aloha Editor is an easy to use WYSIWYG HTML editor, featuring fast editing, floating menu, and support for HTML5 ContentEditable. It provides WYSIWYG editor to any website content instantaneously, enabling content editors to see the changes the moment they type.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Apple is the Company of Dictators and Worse
- Apple is just another greedy corporation in search of sweatshops and even pedophiles (especially the high-profile ones)
- Counting Unhatched Eggs Is Not Counting Chickens
- Everything here will persist as normal
- The "Infinite Bread"
- The biblical story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 has software parallels
- In Many Cases and in Many Different Ways, Technology Became Less Durable and Less Reliable Over Time
- The "modern" things are more complex. And complexity is a foe or reliability and repair-ability.
- Microsoft's LinkedIn is Losing Money, Traffic, and Hope; Now It Wants to Sell Its Users' Lifeblood (and Data)
- Let this be a reminder of what social control media really is about
- Microsoft Lunduke: Freedom of Speech Means Spreading What I Have to Say and Banning People I Disagree With
- 4Chan is one he aims for and he is siccing 4Chan trolls at people he doesn't like
- Richard Stallman Back at the "Rudolf-Diesel" Hörsal "MW 2001" in About 40 Hours
- He spoke there before; there's a very high seating capacity there
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- Death of Elias Diem: FSFE mailing list archives hidden
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 20/10/2025: Louvre Museum Reveals Weakness, About 7 Million Protest US Turning Into Oligarchy/Monarchy
- Links for the day
- They Should Have Listened to Techrights Over a Month Earlier (Xubuntu Site Compromised)
- we reported this issue about 40 days earlier and nobody did anything about it
- Richard Stallman to Give Another Talk Today in Bavaria (Bavarian Academy of Science)
- Tomorrow at 6 PM he speaks in Munich
- Barry Kauler Explains That Puppy Linux and EasyOS Exclude Systemd to Keep Things Simple
- Barry Kauler's Puppy Linux is in the community's hands. He now focuses on EasyOS and more.
- Half a Year After Brian Fagioli Got Kicked Out of BetaNews for Slop He's Still Doing LLM Slop and Slop Images Targeting 'Linux' (Plagiarising Original Works)
- If the Web gets polluted or flooded by slopfarms such as these, and Slashdot then sends traffic so these slopfarms (Slashdot probably doesn't do this intentionally), then real writers with real knowledge of GNU/Linux will lose the spark for publishing
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 19, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, October 19, 2025
- Campaign of FUD Against Framework Laptops and GNU/Linux (Using Microsoft's Attack on Linux, 'Secure Boot')
- Ritual Defamation Cult has turned its attention over to Framework
- Liberation From 'The Feed'
- They rank things based on the editor's choice/ideology (he or she knows the sponsors, hence the masters)
- Microsoft's Killing of Vista 10 Seems to Have Resulted in More Articles About GNU/Linux (But Also FUD)
- We not only saw a rise in traffic, we also saw a remarkable rise in the number of articles
- Today (a Day Before Richard Stallman Talk at TUM) There's a Patent Propaganda Event at TUM
- Perhaps an opportunity for Dr. Stallman to rebut this "invention to patent" nonsense/fantasy (conflating monopolies with innovation)
- OpenSource or "Open Source" as a Brand is Dying, Let's Get Back to Talking About Software Freedom
- Those of us who actually want to reform the industry and put users in control of their systems/devices will recognise that "Open Source" was selling a lie or got-co-opted by liars
- 19 Years in Numbers: Techrights' Anniversary Countdown and Retrospective
- In 2019 we began improving our workflows and, accordingly/predictably, we became a lot more productive
- Slop Turns People Off (LLMs Lack Intelligence, They're Just Plagiarism Powerhouses That Fail to Deliver Any Real, Measurable Value)
- "More" (or "MOAR") isn't always better
- IBM Red Hat Has Re-calibrated or Adjusted to Bubble Economics, False Promises, and Slop/Plagiarism
- This won't end well
- Fake Numbers, Fake Claims, Fake Economy, and Media Grifters That Prop Up Fraud
- Grifters like The Register MS won't be looked upon kindly after the bubble implodes
- For Some, the GNU Web Site is Not Accessible This Week
- They seem to have gone into some kind of lock-down mode
- Symptoms of Upcoming Microsoft Layoffs in XBox
- A crashing franchise
- Psychiatrist confession: Germanwings crash & Debian toxic culture recognized before suicides
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Gemini Links 19/10/2025: Scentjacking 101, Slop Hype Boosters, and Steam Next Fest
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: The Serial Slopper, LinuxSecurity, and Google News
- Let's hope slopfarms die as soon as possible
- Links 19/10/2025: Cambodia Scam Centres, Slop Hurting Wikipedia Traffic
- Links for the day
- As Economies Crumble Free as in Beer Will Matter, Not Just Free as in Freedom/Libre (Libertad)
- French regions choosing to embrace Software Freedom
- 25 Years Ago, an Explanation of How Reducing Free Software to 'Apps' Would Interfere With Freedom Goals
- there's nothing unreasonable about it
- A List of 63 Known Gemini Clients (Software to Browse Geminispace Content With Gemini Protocol)
- Not counting browser plugins for Web browsers
- Gemini Links 19/10/2025: "Firma Odin Is Transforming" and Bot Attacks While "AFK"
- Links for the day
- US Government: 6.1% of Site Visitors Use GNU/Linux
- GNU/Linux has a considerable share and it is growing
- LLM Slop Could Not Rise to Prominence Without Media Complicity and Artificial Hype
- Inane garbage disguised as "journalism"
- Why the FSF No Longer Recommends Debian, as Explained by Richard Stallman This Month
- some weeks ago
- All the Latest Half Dozen Articles by Mehedi Hasan (UbuntuPIT) Only Admit at the End That He's Using LLM Slop
- Disclosure is OK, but the practice of using slop is not
- The 'Modern' Web of Fake Security and Easy Censorship of Whole Domains
- Each year it gets worse
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 18, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, October 18, 2025
- The Term "AI" is Not New and What Today's Media Calls "AI" Isn't Even AI
- Only the hype was new... and totally artificial
- Gemini Links 18/10/2025: "Planetary Rings", Steam, and PSU Replacement
- Links for the day
- Defeating LLM Abuse (State-of-the-Art Plagiarism) in the Area of Linux and GNU, Free Software, BSD, Security and So On
- The aim is to get them to stop using LLMs to rip off other people's work
- Links 18/10/2025: Russell Vought in Charge, US Government Leans to Russia Again
- Links for the day
- Credit Where It's Due: LinuxConfig.org Quit Doing LLM Slop, Back to Original and Real Articles
- We waited for a while to say this, now it seems conclusive
- Of Note: UbuntuPIT Aware of Critics of Slop, Adds Disclosure of Use of LLMs
- We appreciate the honesty
- Links 18/10/2025: Madagascar's President Flees and ICE Arrests Protest Comedian Robby Roadsteamer
- Links for the day
- Richard Stallman Near the European Patent Office (EPO) in 3 Days From Now
- It'll be a good opportunity for patent examiners to listen, ask questions, and maybe greet him in person
- From Scholar to Booster of Slop (and Even Slop in His Own Blog)
- We're going to keep an eye on future posts of his
- End of Vista 10 Also Good News for the BSDs
- There are many news sites that recommend trying GNU/Linux this month
- What's Wrong With Liking Parrots or Birds as Pets?
- They'd demonise people for speaking about freedom, no matter what they say or do
- Digital Sanitation Good Practices
- leave behind Microsoftism
- 10 Days Ago Richard Stallman Gave a Long Interview in French (linuxfr.org)
- English translation
- Science, Not Fast Food/Junk Food
- The commercial exploitation of users won't stop until users exercise full control over their software or - more broadly - their computing (including data)
- The Free Software Foundation, Which Has Appointed a 43-Year-Old President, is Looking to Add Another Board Member (or Treasurer)
- expect the FSF to add more people
- Richard Stallman Confirms Next Week's Talk at Technical University of Munich, We Urge EPO Staff to Attend
- That's probably late enough for EPO staff to attend after work
- Gemini Links 18/10/2025: Notifications and Geminaut
- Links for the day
- Many Red Hat People Are Leaving, But It'll Be Framed Publicly as Leaving IBM
- Similarly, IBM layoffs (or "RAs" as they're called) include Red Hat layoffs
- Expect More Waves of Microsoft Layoffs This Month (at Least Two Rounds Confirmed Already)
- From what we can gather, assuming the recent rumours about XBox are true, there will be at least 3 waves of Microsoft layoffs this month alone
- Security Issues in Cisco and Jenkins Passed Off as "Linux" Problems
- Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) tactics
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 17, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, October 17, 2025