Openness: December 2003 Archives

From Clark Campaign Going Open Source:

"Clark's technology team announced Monday the launch of Clark TechCorps, an initiative to build a suite of free, open-source applications for campaigns and elections."

"The project will organize volunteers to write software for the Clark campaign and release their work under open-source licenses."

""Open source for us symbolizes organizational transparency. We really feel that it's important that all development we do has this methodology behind it," said Clark TechCorps project manager Josh Hendler."

From Free software to aid poor doctors:

"A group of open source evangelists are looking to take the program called Vista beyond the borders of the US.
...
They say hospitals could save money by using the free software, as well as potentially saving patients' lives."

From Copyright Doesn't Cover This Site:

"To prove that open sourcing any and all information can help students swim instead of sink, the University of Maine's Still Water new media lab has produced the Pool, a collaborative online environment for creating and sharing images, music, videos, programming code and texts. "
...
"We are training revolutionaries -- not by indoctrinating them with dogma but by exposing them to a process in which sharing culture rather than hoarding it is the norm," said Joline Blais, a professor of new media at the University of Maine and Still Water co-director.
...
"It's all about imagining a society where sharing is productive rather than destructive, where cooperation becomes more powerful than competition," Blais said.

From Scientific Research Backs Wisdom of Open Source:

Few quotes:

"There's something going on in open-source development that is different from what we see in the textbooks," says Walt Scacchi, a senior research scientist at UC Irvine's Institute for Software Research.
...
"There's something going on in open-source development that is different from what we see in the textbooks," says Walt Scacchi, a senior research scientist at UC Irvine's Institute for Software Research.
...
"Open-source is not a poor version of software engineering, but a private-collective approach to large-software systems," Scacchi said.

Are they (SCO folks) out of their mind? When did it become a violation (of any sort) to share for free your knowledge, expertise and any other product that may derive from it?

From Open-Source Legal Experts Dismiss SCO's Copyright Claims:

"The second opinion is where the rubbish lies," Carey said. "While the U.S. Constitution grants Congress broad powers to protect authors and inventors, it does not grant Congress to power to prevent authors and inventors from giving their work away (or from licensing it for free on the condition that derivative works also be licensed for free). Nor has Congress ever attempted to prevent authors and inventors from giving their work away, or licensing them for free. It is not illegal, immoral or unconstitutional to be generous with IP. Heaven help us if such an intellectual-property regime ever comes to pass."

I couldn't agree more!

From Intel releases Open Source Lib - OpenML:

"VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Dec. 8, 2003 -(LinuxElectrons)- Intel Corporation researchers have released software that allows developers to build computers that can "learn" from their experience, using data to proactively improve their own accuracy and the ease with which we use them. The announcement was made today at the opening of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NIPS2003)."

"The software enables computers to estimate the likelihood that something will happen by calculating how often it occurred in the past. The software can be used to enhance a wide variety of interactive and industrial computer applications -- everything from culling through huge databases of gene studies to spot promising proteins for new drugs to email systems that create a model of a person's behavior to decide how best to manage newly arriving messages on its own. The software is available through Intel's Open Source Machine Learning Library (OpenML), a toolbox of functions that helps researchers develop machine learning applications."

An interesting development indeed! And it is open source.

From Faster, Better, Cheaper: Open-source Practices May Help Improve Software Engineering:

"ARLINGTON, Va. -- Walt Scacchi of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues are conducting formal studies of the informal world of open-source software development, in which a distributed community of developers produces software source code that is freely available to share, study, modify and redistribute. They're finding that, in many ways, open-source development can be faster, better and cheaper than the "textbook" software engineering often used in corporate settings."