When open-source eats itself, we win • The Register
When open-source eats itself, we win • The Register.
As is often the case, a good examination. But I’d emphasize that the issue is not open source v. open source but the shift to event-driven systems, architectures, programming.
Revisiting the 2011 Predictions, Part 2 – tecosystems
Revisiting the 2011 Predictions, Part 2 – tecosystems.
I think that Stephen is more right than wrong and probably if anything needs to be bolder in his predictions. I’d also love to see investigation of the use/development of apps outside of the already-developed markets.
Planet Miro
I’ve been playing around with Miro, one of the very few open source apps listed on Apple’s App Store and an excellent player of audio/visual media. But Miro’s mother group, Participatory Culture Foundation, also makes Amara, as well as other tools that expand the usable effect of the Internet, including crowdsourced material (which is what makes the Internet other than an “official” library).
PCF’s goals are ambitious and realizable. The app itself I use (or am anyway experimenting with), Miro, has some bugs, such as minuscule fonts (and these are dimensions seem opaque to alter), as well as other UI shortcomings. There’s too much going on, for instance, and most of it is not interesting, in that it is not actually related to the task at hand, e.g., listening or watching or playing games. As well, and more up my alley, though Miro is open source and the project itself is not business nor ad shy, it’s still oddly difficult to work directly with the code. It’s by no means impossible–I can download the source, via Git–but there seems to be little in the way of inviting contributors to, well, contribute.
There are some banners proclaiming it’s openness and nonprofitness and *virtue*, but why not have more direct links to filing bugs? To fixing them? To making extensions?
I’m not really faulting the project. It’s done wonders and is great and the app is superb. Congratulations. But their community outreach, and I mean that community that can produce, as well as consume, seems lacking in important ways. And the evident desire to control the course of development seems, to me, too weighty.
I can see the point of focus and indeed I’d be appalled if there were not the sort of focus that pitilessly ignores all the other really desirable things to do in the act of doing what what is needed. I think the translation platform of Amara is really, in fact, groundbreaking, in that it provides precisely the tool needed to use the vast wealth of informational resources the Web has made available.
But this magnitude of ambition demands an equivalent, if not greater, community play.
(For comparison: look at the way that Kaltura has managed its business. Not quite the same, but an interesting correlate.)
Modern Monetary Theory Primer – New Economic Perspectives
Comments (1)Modern Monetary Theory Primer – New Economic Perspectives.
Stephanie Kelton in particular is worthwhile following. The fun thing about modern economics is that, like other efforts to formally describe simple actions that are then repeated into complexity, it can become bewildering counterintuitive. Which is why math is so useful: we don’t have to keep on thinking about negative things that persist on having positive effect, we let the symbols operate as they are ruled to.
Disability Rights: An Important Test for Open Society | Open Society Foundations OSF
An important test of an open society is whether or not people with disabilities are actually included in the mainstream. Working on disability rights in societies that are not fully open, can help open up space to work on many other issues. For example, as you raise the expectations of parents about the inclusion of their children in the education system, you’re helping to raise expectations around a whole host of other issues like ensuring that as their children grow in adults they can assume productive lives and also be agents of their own change in the democratic process. From that point of view, I see the disability issue almost as a vanguard in creating open societies. It makes people face the mirror, and face the contradiction between their professed universal values and how they’re actually implementing them on the ground.
via Disability Rights: An Important Test for Open Society | Open Society Foundations OSF.
The evolutionary origins of modularity
[1207.2743] The evolutionary origins of modularity.
Seems to be a fairly strong argument for Agile development–and a clean description (as it were) of how work gets done fast and with little waste: by small groups working together.
btw, if you don’t normally follow arxiv.org, well, your loss.
newspeak 