A kapitalizmus ellenségének tartják a nyílt forráskódot

Amerikai szerzői jogvédő lobbisták gyakorlatilag egy kalap alá veszik a nyílt forráskódú szoftvereket az illegális kópiákkal, vélekedésük szerint  alkalmazó országokat az USA-nak fel kellene vennie a kapitalizmus ellenségeit tartalmazó listára.

British Library Launches UK Web Archive

The British Library has launched a web archive designed to preserve pages from UK web domains, much as the library preserves a physical archive of British Books and other publications. The system - which includes the open source Hadoop software - has been built by IBM.

Kétezer nyílt forráskódú alkalmazás a közszektor számára

Az Európai Unió Open Source Observatory and Repository (az Európai Unió Nyílt Forráskódú Obszervatóriuma és Tárháza; OSOR.eu) mára a közigazgatás számára már több mint kétezer ingyenes és nyílt forráskódú alkalmazáshoz enged hozzáférést. Hamarosan magyar szoftverek is bekerülnek az OSOR tárházába.

Nokia: a mobil jövője nyitott, ahogy a forráskódunk is

A Nokia megnyitotta világszerte 330 millió készüléken használt mobil operációs rendszerének forráskódját, lehetővé téve a közösségi és kereskedelmi szoftverfejlesztés fellendülését, ezen keresztül pedig saját vezető szerepének biztosítását.

Élénkülhet a szoftverpiac a kötelező nyílt szabványok miatt

Egy nemrég hozott törvénymódosítás nyomán a közigazgatás és az állampolgárok is spórolhatnak, míg a kisebb szoftvercégek több megrendeléshez juthatnak.

A legális fájlcseréért kampányol a magyar Kalózpárt

Tavaly év vége óta működik, immár több száz lelkes követője van az LMP-hez kötődő magyar Kalózpártnak. Céljuk a fájlcsere legalizálása az első publikálást követő öt év elteltével, törekvésük, hogy a kultúra szabadon elérhető, fogyasztható és létrehozható legyen. Amerikától Ukrajnáig 35 kalózpárt alakult már. Az ellenvélemény szerint az lenne a megoldás, ha az online világban jogszerű szolgáltatások alakulnának ki, a fájlcsere technológiája önmagában nem érdekes.

The Public Domain Manifesto

Preamble

"Le livre, comme livre, appartient à l’auteur, mais comme pensée, il appartient—le mot n’est pas trop vaste—au genre humain. Toutes les intelligences y ont droit. Si l’un des deux droits, le droit de l’écrivain et le droit de l’esprit humain, devait être sacrifié, ce serait, certes, le droit de l’écrivain, car l’intérêt public est notre préoccupation unique, et tous, je le déclare, doivent passer avant nous." (Victor Hugo, Discours d’ouverture du Congrès littéraire international de 1878, 1878) 

"Our markets, our democracy, our science, our traditions of free speech, and our art all depend more heavily on a Public Domain of freely available material than they do on the informational material that is covered by property rights. The Public Domain is not some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by property law. The Public Domain is the place we  quarry the building blocks of our culture. It is, in fact, the majority of our culture." (James Boyle, The Public Domain, p.40f, 2008)  

The public domain, as we understand it, is the wealth of information that is free from the barriers to access or reuse usually associated with copyright protection, either because it is free from any copyright protection or because the right holders have decided to remove these barriers. It is the basis of our self-understanding as expressed by our shared knowledge and culture. It is the raw material from which new knowledge is derived and new cultural works are created. The Public Domain acts as a protective mechanism that ensures that this raw material is available at its cost of reproduction - close to zero - and that all members of society can build upon it. Having a healthy and thriving Public Domain is essential to the social and economic well-being of our societies. The Public Domain plays a capital role in the fields of education, science, cultural heritage and public sector information. A healthy and thriving Public Domain is one of the prerequisites for ensuring that the principles of Article 27 (1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ('Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.') can be enjoyed by everyone around the world.

The digital networked information society has brought the issue of the Public Domain to the foreground of copyright discussions. In order to preserve and strengthen the Public Domain we need a robust and up-to-date understanding of the nature and role of this essential resource. This Public Domain Manifesto defines the Public Domain and outlines the necessary principles and guidelines for a healthy Public Domain at the beginning of the 21st century. The Public Domain is considered here in its relation to copyright law, to the exclusion of other intellectual property rights (like patents and trademarks), and where  copyright law is to be understood in its broadest sense to include economic and moral rights under copyright and related rights (inclusive of neighboring rights and database rights). In the remainder of this document copyright is therefore used as a catch-all term for these rights. Moreover, the term 'works' includes all subject-matter protected by copyright so defined, thus including databases, performances and recordings. Likewise, the term 'authors' includes photographers, producers, broadcasters, painters and performers. 

Governments are adopting Joomla and Open Source

Recently, Vu Hoang Viet a friend in Vietnam who was involved with the Vietnam JoomlaDay I attended last year, shared with me the following news article. He's translated it for English speakers below:

New Zealand Post to Try Linux Desktop

The New Zealand Post is one of three government agencies looking to rip out their Windows desktops and replace them with Linux and open source applications.

Obama enforces trade embargo against open source

The Obama Administration has forced Sourceforge to deny service to its anti-terrorism sanction list.
In practical terms this means people in Cuba, North Korea, the Sudan, Syria and Iran get “403 forbidden” messages when they try to access sourceforge.org addresses. (Here’s how the Armenian Private School in Toronto, Canada displays 403 errors.)

Öt ország nem kaphat nyílt forráskódot

Ellenkezik az amerikai kormány internetes szabadságot hirdető politikájával, és a nyílt forráskód alapelvével is, ennek ellenére a SourceForge portál letiltja az embargóval sújtott országokból érkező letöltéseket.

A nyílt forráskódú programok internetes megosztását és letöltését segítő SourceForge.net portál elkezdte kiszűrni az Iránból, Kubából, Szíriából, Szudánból és Észak-Koreából érkező lekéréseket. Ezekből az országokból tehát nem lehet hozzáférni az ingyenes szoftverekhez.

What the Open Government Directive Means for Open Source?

On the heels of the Open Government Memo of January 21st, 2009, the Obama Administration has issued the Open Government Directive. The Directive tells agencies what they must do to meet the expectations set by the Memo. The directive names many deadlines for agency compliance, most of them around reducing FOIA backlogs and increasing the amount of agency data released to the public. This isn’t surprising, since the Memo names transparency, collaboration, and participation as the guiding principles. Transparency is the easiest to articulate and implement — just get the data out there in a useful form. Josh Tauberer’s Open Data is Civic Capital: Best Practices for “Open Government Data” is an excellent handbook for doing this. If you want to track agencies’ progress, the Sunlight Labs folks have produced the outstanding Open Watcher.
What’s most interesting to me, and my friends at Open Source for America, though, are the more ambiguous orders. Although the Directive does not use the phrase ‘open source software’ at all, many of the principles and methodologies described are obvious references to open source. Many of these orders stand out as opportunities for open source developers, in the public and private sector, to demonstrate how our development model can help the Administration also make good on the last two principles: collaboration and participation. As Macon Phillips, the White House New Media Director said, “Open Source is… the best form of civic participation.”

Malaysia: 95 % OSS

Some 95 percent of Malaysia's government agencies have adopted open source software (OSS), but the remaining 5 percent have not warmed to the concept--and is unlikely to anytime soon, according to a government official.

Denmark changed to ODF and OSS

It has been announced by the Danish government, that the Danish state administrative body will adopt the open format ODF as its sole document standard from April next year. This means that the Danish state will now ditch Microsoft’s proprietary document formats.