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  • Roberto Galoppini 5:36 pm on March 26, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Public Service Content: Open Knowledge Foundation’s response to Ofcom’s consultation 

    Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries,released a discussion document to encourage debate around public service intervention in digital media and the concept of the Public Service Publisher. The Open Knowledge Foundation made a joint response in association with the Open Rights Group to OfCom’s Public Service Publisher consultation.

    public contentPublic Content by jlori

    Firstly, we commend the suggested investment in open content and open data. In particular we urge that, where the PSP funds the generation of new content, such content should always be made available under a license such that others are free to enjoy, redistribute and, most importantly, reuse and refashion that content.

    Secondly, we ask that OfCom pay special attention to the ability of the PSP to invest in architectures of participation, both by supporting the development of Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and Open Content technologies and projects and by investing in the creation of content to encourage the growth of networks around these technologies.[..]

    The success of an endeavour like the PSP will rely upon these details of its founding principles, and we urge OfCom to pay significant attention to those details now. For example, the PSP may commission a website for people to post and discuss short films, investing in the “architectures of participation” suggested above. But unless the use of Free/Open Source software is specified, and the resulting website platform is ‘open’, allowing re-use and modification by other interested parties, the PSP will not be fully meeting its public service remit. Similarly, The PSP might commission a set of short films to be placed on the website, to seed its growth as a network. But unless the PSP commission explicitly requires that the resulting work be ‘open’ so that others are free to use, reuse and redistribute the work, the PSP’s audience will remain ‘consumers’ of content, and the PSP will have failed to maximise the opportunities of the digital age.

    Finally, the PSP should engage in advocacy and educational initiatives to enable people, organisations and companies to publish their material using open licenses, formats and technologies. It is our sincere hope that the PSP can become a strong, public voice in favour of open knowledge structures.

    Read the full article.

    Technorati Tags: Open Content, Open Source, Open Knowledge

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 2:33 pm on March 26, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    IETF meetings: US Government demands prioritization 

    priorityPriority Sign by Pete Reed

    Representatives of the US government have demanded that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) come up with a solution for prioritizing certain data within government networks and at the interfaces to other networks. [..]

    At the IETF meeting in Prague Antonio Desimone of the US Department of Defense said that the switch to a “global grid” raised a number of issues, such as how delivery of a specific e-mail could be ensured within a defined period of time. What was needed was a prioritizing of data, one that also took in emergency and catastrophe scenarios. [..]

    The solution would have to encompass the networks of partners, such as NATO, as well as public and commercial networks. As it was, the prioritizing of important data traffic was a topic of interest to all sides, he declared. [..]

    At the IETF meeting in Prague it was impossible to miss that some parties had their doubts about a default “priority bit” for data traffic. Commenting on the idea Fred Baker, Cisco developer and former head of the IETF, told heise online: “Realizing the prioritization in all servers is undoubtedly a controversial matter with the IETF.” He said he was especially worried that prioritization might in reality not be confined to authorized persons. Should confinement fail script kids and hackers might find ways to use “priority bits” for their purposes, he observed.

    Read the full article.

    Technorati Tags: IETF, prioritization, US Government, NATO

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 11:37 am on March 26, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source @ school: Tom Hoffman on free software for schools 

    Tom Hoffman, project manager of SchoolTool, an initiative funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation to create an open source framework for schools using Python and Zope, recently gave a presentation titled “Managing an International, Philanthropically Funded Open-Source Project from a Victorian in Elmwood.”

    schoolroomSchoolroom by cake_land

    But while schools may pay large sums for information systems, they often cannot add a feature or change an option to accommodate a particular scholastic arrangement. This causes problems for school administrators constantly. With proprietary software, it may even be illegal to analyze the technology in an attempt to make such changes.

    He said.

    Schools face difficult challenges because their scheduling, resources and classes regularly change and, importantly, differ from one school to the next. Open-source projects such as SchoolTool are based on collaboration between the author and users, who can improve and alter the source code to meet a specific need.

    It is difficult to bootstrap this kind of open-source project in schools that have stable technical infrastructure like here in the United States or in Europe. SchoolTool is more explicitly philanthropic and aimed at the developing world in the long term.

    So SchoolTool is not specificly addressed to schools already having a stable infrastructure.
    Tom has also wrote a letter to to Kenneth Whang, the NSF program officer in charge for the Scratch programming environment asking to publicly release the source code of the project, supposed to be already available as stated by the website.

    Apparently Mitch Resnick from the project replied, but his answer wasn’t fully satisfactory indeed.

    About Tom Hoffman.

    As a teacher, free software project manager and developer, and blogger, Tom Hoffman advocates for progressive educational reform and practical open source technology in schools. Since 2004 Tom has managed SchoolTool.

    About SchoolTool.

    It is a project to develop a global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an open-source license and designed to be used on an unlimited number of machines by an unlimited number of clients. Via a Web browser interface accessible through any operating system, SchoolTool allows schools to manage enrollment information, scheduling, attendance and grades, generate reports, and import and export data.

    About Scratch.

    Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web. Scratch is designed to enhance the technological fluency of young people, helping them learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, and they gain a deeper understanding of the process of design.

    Technorati Tags: open source, schooltool, scratch

     

    • Jac Smit 12:06 pm on May 9, 2007 Permalink

      We are a school based in Mozambique. Looking for a tool that would help us in School Administration. How do I download it to see what it can do for me?

    • Roberto Galoppini 2:47 pm on May 9, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Jac, schoolTool is still under development. Have a look at SchoolForge news journal to find school-related open source resources, and take your time to read also the BECTA report.

      I hope it helps.

  • Roberto Galoppini 1:29 pm on March 25, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Community development: all communities are not the same 

    Reading the Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) I happened to read “Care and feeding open source programmers” an article about the “HandBrake manifesto“, a post defining what Open Source is for his author.

    Open source is:

    • A means to encourage software innovation among diverse groups of programmers
    • A policy of open inspection and analysis of source code, both to educate and provide a means for constructive criticism
    • A means by which programmers can “scratch their itch” for mental stimulation while at the same time solving computing problems that are frequently applicable even to non-technical users
    • Free, both intellectually and in terms of cost

    Open source is not:

    • A way to get commercial-quality support at no charge
    • A free-for-all forum to ask for pie-in-the-sky software features and expect them to be implemented as requested and with no delay
    • An invitation to harass and otherwise frustrate a small and dedicated development staff because they didn’t do what you wanted

I can see here many disagreeing on that, but I believe there is no doubt that any author can choose his/her community, choosing not to have one (or even something like that).

Authors have the power, and users too indeed! I start thinking Rubini is pretty right…

Technorati Tags: Open Source Community, HandBrake

 

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:04 pm on March 24, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Novell: Novell’s apologizing is a sign of .. ? 

    Matthew Aslett’s article “Novell apologizes for false free software funding claim” tells the full story of Novell’s head of marketing for Linux and open source, Justin Steinman, who just apologized to the FSF after making misleading statements about the company’s financial contribution to the FSF.

    Steinman made the claim in an online interview last week but was quickly forced to retract the statement after the FSF’s executive director Peter Brown disputed it via a statement to the Groklaw web site.

    “Novell last gave funds to the FSF in October 2005, when they donated $5K as part of FSF Corporate Patron program. Since their deal with Microsoft was announced we have not asked them to renew as a patron, nor would we. Novell is not ‘a significant financial contributor to the Free Software Foundation’,” Brown stated.

    In his apology Steinman stated that he believed his original statement to be true at the time he made it, but nevertheless apologized for misrepresenting the facts.

    “Further research inside Novell confirms that Peter Brown is correct and I spoke in error. I want to make it clear that I had no intention of making false claims or providing misinformation to the market,” he wrote. “I want to apologize to the Free Software Foundation and to the open source community for making this misrepresentation. I should have double-checked the accuracy of my information before speaking, and for that, I offer no excuse.”

    Read the full story and wonder what is going on at Novell, I have no clue..

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 6:40 pm on March 23, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Digital World Freedom: Digital Video Broadcasting and DRM 

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the only public interest group attending Digital Video Broadcasting’s closed technical meetings, just reported some feedbacks on these meetings, quite harmful indeed.

    Today, consumers can digitally record their favorite television shows, move recordings to portable video players, excerpt a small clip to include in a home video, and much more. The digital television transition promises innovation and competition in even more great gadgets that will give consumers unparalleled control over their media.

    But an inter-industry organization that creates television and video specifications used in Europe, Australia, and much of Africa and Asia is laying the foundation for a far different future — one in which major content providers get a veto over innovation and consumers face draconian digital rights management (DRM) restrictions on the use of TV content. At the behest of American movie and television studios, the Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB) is devising standards to ensure that digital television devices obey content providers’ commands rather than consumers’ desires. These restrictions will take away consumers’ rights and abilities to use lawfully-acquired content so that each use can be sold back to them piecemeal.

    Consumers would never choose this future, so Hollywood will try to force it on them by regulatory fiat. DVB’s imprimatur may put restrictive standards on the fast-track to becoming legally-enforced mandates, and existing laws already limit evasion of DRM even for lawful purposes. In effect, private DRM standards will trump national laws that have traditionally protected the public’s interests and carefully circumscribed copyright holders’ rights.

    Hollywood has long pursued this goal in the U.S., but its schemes in DVB have taken place behind the public’s back and outside of scrutiny by elected officials. In this paper, we will summarize and expose Hollywood’s plan.

    Read the full article, or download the paper.

    Technorati Tags: digital freedom, DVB, EFF, DRM

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:07 pm on March 23, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Social Networks Business models: ASmallWorld CEO’s speech 

    ASmallWorld is a private high-trust social network by invitation only, designed by its founder, Erik Wachtmeister – a former investment banker – for people already connected to each other in the (offline) world. Erik has participated at the DLD conference and the video is available.

    I recently read an Eric’s post about the event, here a short excerpt:

    Social Networks have emerged over the past 3 years as a useful tool in creating and recreating networks, and establishing new unfettered distribution channels. The original idea behind aSmallWorld was based on the need for a large group of people with similar needs, to connect, reconnect, and exchange trusted information. It was not based on creating a free-for-all where anything under the sun and on the WWW goes. What is missing in almost every other social networking site is notion of Relevance and Trust. I believed there was a need for ASW because of the enormity and chaotic nature of the unlocked beast that is the Internet. MySpace and others have been feeding this beast and indeed creating exciting new forms of entertainment. Our goal, however, has been to come up with an alternative to the chaos, with endless “noise” drowning the “signal” we are searching for when we go on line.

    There is a lot of talk about web 2.0 and recently web 3.0. Web 2.0 is about connecting people with people and data, not WebPages. Web 3.0 is about connecting people with meaningful people and data. In that vein, aSmallWorld is all about filtering out information overload, spammers, scammers, stalkers, and irrelevant and unfiltered data that makes up 99% of what is out there. Add to this our over 100,000 trusted experts who can make our little world the most trusted place to go to online.

    I see a clear trade-off between unattended and open communities, like Orkut, and deeply controlled and closed communities like asw. I believe Eric is right saying that there was a need for communities like asw, just wondering if we might eventually see communities with an high level of trust democratically controlled by its own members..

    Technorati Tags: Social Networks, asw, DLD

     

    • Heidi P. Trabert 7:08 pm on May 6, 2007 Permalink

      Are you a member of asw? Or would you like to be one? And why?

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:39 pm on May 6, 2007 Permalink

      Yes Heidi, I am a member of asw. I believe that social networks like that, with an high level of trust are a viable tool. As a matter of fact I got useful travel tips, business contacts and I also met few interesting people.

      Does it answer your question?

    • Mirande 9:09 pm on June 3, 2007 Permalink

      Hi,

      My name is Mirande. I am an ex-model and also an attorney who has authored a number of publications. I run a group called Models (Women of Beauty and Substance). The group is geared toward attracting and promoting women with broad and diverse interests who can be viewed as both beauty and role models. I would love an invitation to join ASW. I believe that my group of beautiful and accomplished women would add value to the events that we frequent.

      I will gladly send you more information about me and my background if you e-mail me at mirande@modelsnyc.net. For example, all of my scholarly and professional literature is available and can be verified online.

      Mirande

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:59 pm on March 22, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Licensing: FSFE on simplicitity and lenght of licenses 

    FSFE stating that everyone would like that free software licences were shorter, talks about GPL and LGPL lenght, claiming that a longer GPL doesn’t have to mean more complex.

    FSFE fellowshipFSFE Fellowship initiative by Stefano Mainardi

    The number of words needed to ensure that software users had the four freedoms in the 1970s was zero. There were no software patents, no DMCA/EUCD laws, software generally came with source code, and there was generally nothing limiting a person from redistributing software.

    As software distributors started blocking these freedoms by legal and technical means, it became necessary for software that was intended to come with those freedoms to be accompanied by licences granting those freedoms and requiring others to pass them on when they pass on the software.

    GPLv1, written in 1989, had 1,500 words. GPLv2 has 2,300 words. Draft 2 of GPLv3 has 4,000 words. The most important implementation detail is that it has to work in court, and this can’t be compromised for the sake of making a shorter text. But if you can see ways to make it simpler, that would be very useful because it’s not only technology lawyers that have to read the GPL, it’s software developers and judges too.

    Read the full article.

    Technorati Tags: GPL, LGPL, FSFE

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:16 am on March 22, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source IP: Palamida says SCO’s furore has died down.. 

    Palamida, a firm providing software assurance management products and audit services arrived on the scene about one year after Black Duck Software, states that legal concerns over Open Source Intellectual Property are not over yet.

    lawyers in pantsLawyers in pants by LordKhan

    Mark Tolliver, Palamida CEO, talking to Martin Veitch said:

    The SCO furore might have died down, but the bigger issue of mixing and matching code from various sources has not gone away. I don’t know when the last time was I discussed SCO. It’s not particularly relevant to today’s world, but one of the outcomes of the rise of open-source software is that you have less visibility as to what’s in your code.

    I really doubt that with open source you have “less visibility as to what’s in your code”, I would rather say the opposite, don’t you?

    Open Source Insurance firms are looking for cases, but Tolliver talks also about mergers and acquisitions:

    If you’re buying or selling software companies, there’s a large question as to what you are buying and how to value that. Palamida frequently gets involved in the nitty-gritty of deals, and often turns up surprising omissions in the declarations of what code bases contain. In one deal, the target company had disclosed [code from] three open-source products and our work showed 98 products. In our experience it’s zero malicious intent, just poor record-keeping.

    This makes definitely more sense to me.

    Read the full article.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Insurance, indemnification, Palamida, SCO

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:10 pm on March 21, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source CMS: the Centre for Inclusive Technology evaluated accessibility 

    The Centre for Inclusive Technology looked at some Open Source CMS in order to assess which would be most suitable from an accessibility point of view. Read the article edited by Josuha O’Connor, Senior Accessibility Consultant CFIT, screen test were executed by Paul Traynor, Expert Screen Reader Evaluation.

    access

    Methodology

    In order to give these tests a real world flavour and to ensure they were ecologically valid, we consciously did not use any particular testing method or script in order to access how intuitive these systems are out of the box.

    For the tests we looked at:

    • Jadu
      .
    • Mambo
      .
    • Joomla
      .
    • Quick and Easy
      .
    • Expression Engine
      .
    • Plone
      .
    • Drupal
      .
    • Textpattern
      .
    • Xoops
      .
    • Typo3

    Results

    Our feedback derives from user testing and observation of a screen reader user performing the following basic tasks, as well as the same tasks being performed by a user with no Assistive Technology/Special User Agent requirements and with an average computer skill level.

    The tasks included:

    • Uploading content and, where possible, editing and formatting content (using a WYSIWYG editor).
      .
    • Creating new pages (Category/Section headings and sub categories/headings).
      .
    • Basic administration of user groups and permissions.
      .

    Some excerpts from the results:

    Joomla

    Visually, the graphic style of the Mambo interface was pleasant to work with and the style of the Windows operating systems graphics would no doubt be appealing to many users and would not be too much of a departure from what they are used to, so this could be an advantage.[..]

    Some problems encountered were:

    1. Some links reading On Mouse Over could not be activated by pressing the Enter key.
      .
    2. Various items had checkboxes, etc. that weren’t very intuitive. The labels didn’t convey their purpose effectively to the screen reader user.
      .
    3. Radio buttons read well but their labelling could be improved. They often were not understandable as to what purpose they served.

    If these problems could be addressed, we would recommend Joomla.

    Plone

    From a usability perspective our first impression of Plone was that it is not that intuitive. This is primarily down to the labels and page types but this could be improved, as Plone is highly customisable. It is very feature rich out of the box and this may be why it feels rather unwieldy and a little intimidating.[..]

    The negative points are:

    1. Overall lack of consistency between what elements are visible when in forms mode/virtual PC mode.
      .
    2. The naming conventions for items used in the interface are a little unintuitive. Use of terms like Smart Folder wasn’t great, and we had no idea what a Smart Folder does. However, reading the manual would no doubt shed some light on this, which as previously stated, we have not done for this test in order to assess the CMS‘s level of instant usability.

    Overall, Plone was a good CMS and highly customisable and extendable. We would recommend it.

    Drupal

    In terms of the interface out of the box, Drupal takes the opposite approach to Plone. The interface is simple uncluttered and clean.[..] It could however be improved. For example the labelling of checkboxes in the blog administration page is not very good. There are checkboxes that allow the administrator to set permissions for anonymous and authenticated users that are also not labelled very well. This makes it difficult for a screen reader user to administer the site well as they cannot associate each checkbox with its relevant command.

    However, these are our first impressions and we feel that Drupal is one of the best that we have come across and would recommend it with some customisation.

    Read the full article.

    Technorati Tags: open source, CMS, Plone, Drupal

     

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