newspeak

Eventos open source y software libre. OpenExpoDay

Source: ¿Interesado en participar? – The Future is Open – Open Source y Software Libre

A personal, reflective argument for open practices by Chris Lee, who is both an Ars writer and a professional physicist. The claim here for open is not just for practices that work against closed, proprietary systems but also against peer review, about which, at this point, there are serious questions.

It all began with open access: the idea that published scientific results should be open to anyone. I’ve always been supportive of open access, but I’m now much more in favor of the practice. I think that arXiv.org should be our model: any scientist can upload drafts of papers before they go through peer review, allowing anyone to read them and others in the field to review them informally. This is in contrast to a place like PLoS, which puts a paper through formal peer review before posting it online for anyone to see.

 

Open access movement could change relationship between science and industry.

Source: Science with open hardware: A new way to restrict participation | Ars Technica

An interesting project and site. The link to the conference on Academia.edu, which has recently garnered all the wrong sort of publicity in staid journals like The Chronicle of Higher Education. (Inside Higher Ed, not protected by a paywall—yay—has a good summary of the monetisation scandal.)

Source: Centre for Disruptive Media

The semiconductor industry will soon abandon its pursuit of Moore’s law. Now things could get a lot more interesting.

Source: The chips are down for Moore’s law : Nature News & Comment

Mexico’s massive and hugely important university, the Unam, is going to a) digitise its archives (!) and b) make those digital copies publicly accessible. I’ve not read the details yet, and there’s always the danger that the process of digitisation will provide cover for redaction or archival pruning. (Along the lines of…. This cannot be digitised or it’s valueless—scribbles on an index card, say—so let’s toss it. And it’s not hard to imagine worse.)

Visitar la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) a través de Internet es posible. La universidad más grande de América Latina (supera los 330 000 alumnos) apostó por digitalizar el conocimiento que produce y abrirlo al público.

Source: La UNAM digitalizó todo su archivo y ahora es accesible al público | El Comercio

Interesting analysis of the ctcLink debacle in Washington State. The galling part is there seems to have been, back in 2013, when the decision was made for ctcLink, to ignore free software options. Worse, perhaps, given the reason for the migration—old software—was a desire for an “integrated” ERP that seems architected on a dated model. But this is depressingly true of so many school systems, regardless of level. Indeed, it probably gets worse the more one goes down the grades, as the desire to control information flow increases. (Control… here I suppose it means something closer to “censor,” the vaunted mission of libraries, schools and other pedagogic machines ca. 1900)

In a nutshell, the problems have to do with data — converting them, validating them, mapping them and so on. Moving to a new software platform is nowhere near as simple as downloading an app and sitting back as the installer runs. Think of it as a nervous system transplant. Once the brain — the software — is in place, the connections between individual nerve strands — the data — have to be restored.

Source: Washington state community college leaders work to get ERP software rollout back on track

Estonia leaps ahead. The article bears examination, and not just because Estonia could be a model (or would that be antimodel? Depends on what’s at stake and relations of ownership, I suppose). Note, I owe Theresa Hackett of EIFL.NET a thanks for alerting me to this article and to the German Model Law on Intellectual Property (and the analyses of it) upon which the new Estonian IP law has been itself modelled.

But do go over the article or at least the abstract. IP law is in shambles around the world and the TPP is hardly helping matters.

Source: The conceptual bases for codifying Estonia׳s IP law and the main legislative changes: From the comparative approach to embedding drafted law into the socio-economic context

More from noted IP attorney and scholar Michael Geist on the TPP, the massive trade agreement that would affect (at least) 40 percent of the world’s economy. The problem that Geist highlights begins with the definitional uncertainty—”mass-market software” is not defined in the agreement, it seems—and goes from there. The concern over the language and its consequences is significant. Geist quotes the former US NSA general counsel Stewart Baker as highlighting the policy difficulties put into motion by the language and its fuzziness. But Baker’s argument appears to rest on the notion that security stats with obscurity. And that exposure leads to vulnerability. These notions seem dated, at best and lead to equally convoluted fantasies of security and access that today’s (not yesteryear’s) leading security critics deplore.

Fortunately, though the TPP has been signed, there remains a two-year period of discussion before it can be ratified and take effect.

 

 

Another Trouble with the TPP is its foray into the software industry. One of the more surprising provisions in the TPP’s e-commerce chapter was the inclusion of a restriction on mandated source code disclosure. Article 14.17 states:No Party shall require the transfer of, or access to, source code of software owned by a person of another Party, as a condition for the import, distribution, sale or use of such software, or of products containing such software, in its territory. The provision is subject to some limitations. For example, it is “limited to mass-market software or products containing such software and does not include software used for critical infrastructure.” The source code disclosure rule is not found in any other current Canadian trade agreement, though leaked documents indicate that it does appear in a draft of the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA).

Source: The Trouble With the TPP, Day 27: Source Code Disclosure Confusion – Michael Geist

Gnumeric is a free-software application for spreadsheets. It’s very powerful and, as this release evidences, not just maintained, but advancing. The ODF fix is important, as hundreds of millions use office applications that rely on the OpenDocument Format (ODF), and many prefer the focused capability of Gnumeric. The fixes mean, then, that users can circulate documents they are working on and also collaborate. And, as Microsoft is not excluded here, it further means that there is no either/or melodrama.

Source: Gnumeric

The P2P Foundation often has good and interesting works: suggestive. Not remedies that one must follow, not ideological exegeses or rules. So, this event ought to be of interest. The question, though, is what one does afterward. The quick answer: We are doing it, anyway. The late-20th century collapse of the social, its routing to the exploitative, seems to be lifting, if only judging from the wave of neo-populist movements around the world.

But terms do need conceptual firmness if not actual rigor. Like “community,” a term that’s been so overused, so confused, so misused as to drive one to want something better, or at least more meaningful. But there really isn’t a “better” term, is there?

FLOSS4P2P: Commons Collaborative Economies: Policies, Technologies and City for the People. Barcelona, March 2016

Source: Policy & FLOSS for the Commons – upcoming P2Pvalue Event in Barcelona | P2P Foundation