The Open Source Initiative and Software Freedom Conservancy have announced the launch of a working group that will focus on issues surrounding tax exemption for free software organizations. This is in response to recent activities carried out by the IRS that have shown the importance of advocating the needs of free software organizations. More from […]
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Nigerian libraries do not typically have the resourced to provide staff and patrons with proprietary applications. The Librarians Registration Council of Nigeria is launchign a workshop aimed at educating Nigerian librarians on open source library tools. Their goal is to modernize Nigerian libraries and facilitate information sharing by training over 4,000 librarians. More from All […]
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The National Democratic Institute has released four open source, web-based applications designed to help civic groups organize, connect government with constituents, manage election data, and foster civic debate. Included applications: CiviMP – a tool to connect legislators with constituents CiviParty – an organizing and communication tool for political parties and civic groups The Issues – […]
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The patent system was developed independently in 15th century Venice and was expanded upon to include temporary monopolies in 17th century England. By the 1860’s many had begun questioning the effectiveness of the patent system, and recent research has backed up the claim that patents stifle innovation. The pharmaceutical industry has been one of the […]
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Copyright law has taken a 300 year path to arrive where it is today, starting with the Statue of Anne (1710) in Great Britain. The most recent alteration to our current copyright law was in 1976 when copyright was changed to be granted on creation rather than registration, and was extended to included the life […]
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North Carolina signed a bill into law last week aimed at preventing bad faith assertions of patent infringement. This law targets non-practicing entities: companies that own a suite of patents which are used solely for legal action and are not used to produce a product. 11 other states have already enacted similar legislation, and another […]
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Keeping a community engaged in an open source project is vital to ongoing success. Celebrating and recognizing community efforts, helping stars stand out, acting as the spark for ideas, and planning in-person meetings are all great ways to improve community engagement. More from OpenSource.com
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The Taipei City government has been looking for methods to improve the lives of the city’s citizenry through the use of open data. The first area they targeted was transportation because they felt this information would have the greatest impact on people’s every day lives. Getting accurate data for the 5,000 buses, 1,000 bust stations, […]
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Declining citizen participation in governance and political systems that are incapable of keeping up with the complexity of modern society is opening an innovation gap that needs to be filled in order to bring our systems of governance into the 21st century. DemocracyOS is a new project aimed at improving the interacting between citizens and […]
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The Australian Department of Immigration chose to use the open source programming language R to process visitor visas. The first prototype of the application cost them only $50,000 and in the first 12 months of production use more than 290,000 immigrants were processed, leading to 69 declined visas. This is a good example of governmental […]
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Bitcoin is quickly emerging as an alternative system of wealth storage and currency. It is an entirely unique asset class in and of itself, and it places financial power into the distributed network of all participants. The combination of digital scarcity, network effect, a finite supply with infinite divisibility, and a distributed trust network are […]
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Isolated incidents of government organizations migrating to open source are popping up in the news. Despite these developments, many governments know very little about the benefits of open source on IT infrastructure. Switching to open source can help government organizations switch technologies and make improvements much more easily, be more agile, and innovate more rapidly. […]
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The city of Turin has chosen to switch to Linux PC’s in 8,300 municipal offices. They needed to update from an older version of Windows, a process that would have cost 22 million euros to do so, rather than sticking with proprietary solutions, they have decided to switch to Linux and open source alternatives to […]
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The release of LibreOffice 4.3 has renewed vigor in the LibreOffice community in their drive to replace MS Office. More than 80 million devices are using LibreOffice, a number the Document Foundation expects to grow to 200 million by the end of the decade. LibreOffice is gaining support from many organizations and governments around the […]
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Versata v. Ameriprise sparked a series of legal actions that have the potential to drastically redefine open licensing, specifically the GPLv2. Versata sues Ameriprise over their use of 3rd party contractors to create modifications to Versata’s proprietary code. Their argument is decompiling the code is a violation of the license. Ameriprise discovers code in Versata’s […]
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The UK government recently announced the adoption of ODF and PDF as the standard document formats for all government work. This is a relatively unique approach to open standards adoption as it creates a level playing field for all market participants by removing application restriction based on proprietary formats. Now, citizens, business, and governmental organizations […]
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Toulouse, France’s 4th largest city began migrating from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice in 2012. This switch took a year an a half an ended with 90% of government desktops running LibreOffice. This decision saved the government $1 million euro and will likely lead to additional savings over the coming years. More from joinup.
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Permissionless governance is a concept where a community is free to use resources under a shared set of permissions that guarantees the ability to reuse those resources. The choice of open license a community makes can have long-lasting impacts on the sustainability of the project, so it is vital to consider the ramifications of any […]
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The UK government has chosen to use ODF and PDF for all electronic documents used in government work. These formats were chosen due to their broad accessibility to both government institutions and individual citizens. More from Gov.UK
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OST Original
A Brief Introduction to Open Licensing
Open source communities rely heavily on the ability to freely share information with all participants; this participation requires some form of legal protection to ensure the people involved are not on the receiving end of potentially disastrous litigation. Open licensing serves as a legal method for ensuring the spread of information by protecting participants. This […]
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Versata v. Ameriprise sparked a series of legal actions that have the potential to drastically redefine open licensing, specifically the GPLv2. Versata sues Ameriprise over their use of 3rd party contractors to create modifications to Versata’s proprietary code. Their argument is decompiling the code is a violation of the license. Ameriprise discovers code in Versata’s […]
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Despite a long history of failed attempts at using DRM to control hardware products, Keurig has decided to employ DRM measures in their new coffee brewing machines that prevents the use of competing coffee pods. Coupled with a failure to clear previous, non-approved, Keurig-branded cups from store shelves before launching the product this was a […]
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Open source is expanding beyond high-tech communities into many new aspects of our society. Open source projects often need to be localized for specific communities, and this process can be improved through consistency, communication, and testing. More from OpenSource.com
