newspeak

What is Nesma?

Your starting point for software measurement and software metrics

Just add grains of salt.

Under Canada’s current regime, the copyright on myriad Canadian works – such as the ground-breaking theories of Marshall McLuhan and the novels of Gabrielle Roy and Hubert Aquin – will lift in the coming two decades.

Extending the copyright would come at a cost to Canadian consumers, possibly in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s not clear where the benefits are. Nor is it exactly clear what this has to do with free trade.

via Copyright concessions may be downside of TPP deal – The Globe and Mail.

“MM: It’s not that Steve Jobs was not a genius—of course he was! But the problem is that the narrative we tell around entrepreneurs like him, Bill Gates or Elon Musk is so unbalanced. We pretend that government at best was important for some infrastructure and basic science behind their empires. We see the new Steve Jobs film, which is based on a 600-page book where not one word mentions any of the public funding behind Apple’s empire. But the real iPhone story — or the story behind biotechnology — reveals a very different narrative in which government-funded research made the most exciting innovations possible.”

via What the Steve Jobs Movie Won’t Tell You About Apple’s Success | Institute for New Economic Thinking.

“Members of the public are invited to provide feedback on the draft Strategic Plan at any time before or after it goes into effect.”

via Strategic Plan 2016-2020 Public Draft: Positioning the United States Copyright Office for the Future | U.S. Copyright Office.

via The biggest hurricane ever recorded is about to strike Mexico – Quartz.

The last time Mexico was slammed by hurricane …. remember? Anyone? It wasn’t that long ago and it really affected a lot of people. This one, Patricia, is worse. It’s bigger, meaner, and very likely will affect areas crucial to Mexico’s economic core. Oh, and it has winds tagged at >200MPH, 321KMP, one of the (if not the) largest.

Open Access is important. From the publisher blurb:

From The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series

Open Access

By Peter Suber

Overview

The Internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work “open access”: digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access is made possible by the Internet and copyright-holder consent, and many authors, musicians, filmmakers, and other creators who depend on royalties are understandably unwilling to give their consent. But for 350 years, scholars have written peer-reviewed journal articles for impact, not for money, and are free to consent to open access without losing revenue.

In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn’t, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold. Distilling a decade of Suber’s influential writing and thinking about open access, this is the indispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, and policy makers.

via Open Access | The MIT Press.

Oh, because it’s open access (OA), the book is free to download without cost. How, then, is the cost of making and distributing the book recovered? Good question.

via France’s citizens vote in favour of open source | Joinup.

via AGENDA | Stockholm Internet Forum.

The agenda is interesting—but so are the links. A simple question could be (awkwardly) phrased along the lines of, “Is global development imagined through the prism of the Internet seen more as an opportunity for established multinationals or as an extension of local communities, independent of multinational funds?

More and more conferences like this—about online communities, about openness. To participate in them all—just to attend!—would worsen the overall carbon load. Also prove exhausting. But the surge of such events makes one think that a) there is a real groundswell or (and this would not negate the first) b) a set of organisers have realised that there is yet another way to make money out of open source, one that had previously been most exploited by O’Reilly and the (now much changed) Linux Conferences: open source the conference.

Source: CoR – EuroPCom 2015: 6th European Conference for Public Communication

via Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log: CFP 2015: Internet content blocking by the ITC.

Makes for interesting (and galvanising) reading. Conference URL: http://goo.gl/yFKIOu