Archive for the ‘open source’ Category

Open Source Creeps

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A woman’s response to the feminist view of the open source community.

Embracing Open Source Philosophy

The concept of Free Software, wherein knowledge is created by the community for the community, without being driven by commercial interests, must be extended to research to solve problems in health care, agriculture, energy and safe drinking water, the former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, said.

He was speaking at the inauguration of the three-day National Convention for Academics and Research on 'Computing freedom for technology, education and research,’ organised by the Free Software Movement of India (FSMI), a national coalition of regional free software movements, on the Mahindra Satyam campus here on Thursday.

Mr. Kalam implored scientists, researchers and academics to embrace the 'open source philosophy’ in their respective fields, and work towards building 'open source networks’ that can help pool talent, research and know-how from around the world. Such a platform can help evolve scientific solutions to problems, particularly those relevant to developing countries.

"Why don’t Free Software movements come together to create a network of experts to work on providing free drinking water," he asked the audience.

.:thehindu.com->

The Top Five Open Source Projects of 2010

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This year, for my annual Top Five Open Source Project list, I decided to change things a bit: AThe projects are roughly organized by how much time I spend with them. As I noted last year, I gave R and all its associated projects a Lifetime Achievement Award, so I could use the space for other projects. The primary criteria I use to evaluate open source projects are quality of the software, activity / strength / responsiveness of the community and documentation.

: Continue on to the list :

What is OpenCyc?

OpenCyc is the open source version of the Cyc technology, the world’s largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine. OpenCyc can be used as the basis of a wide variety of intelligent applications such as: Arapid development of an ontology in a vertical area, email prioritizing, routing, summarization, annotating, expert systems and games.

.:opencyc.org->

GVCS - Global Village Construction Set

Go Open - Mark Shuttleworth Interview

Mark was born and raised in South Africa, and studied finance and information technology at the University of Cape Town. He went on to found Thawte, a company specialising in digital certificates and internet privacy, developed using Open Source software. He sold Thawte to the American company VeriSign in 1999, and founded HBD Venture Capital and The Shuttleworth Foundation. In April 2002 Mark became the first African in space, as a cosmonaut member of the crew of Soyuz mission TM34 to the International Space Station. Mark maintains that ‘If we are to lift Africa from her current circumstances, we will need a generation of learners that are gifted with curiosity about the world in which they live, and the tools to understand and shape that world’. With this in mind he and his Foundation have invested in projects such as TuxLabs, HIP2B2, The School Tool Project (to develop a common global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open Source licence)and The Ubuntu Project, a community project with participation from many volunteers, sponsored by Canonical Ltd

The Geography of Open Source

The paper presents an empirical study of the geography of open source software development that looks at Github, a popular project hosting website. We show that developers are highly clustered and concentrated primarily in North America and Western and Northern Europe, though a substantial minority is present in other regions. Code contributions and attention show a strong local bias. Users in North America account for a larger share of received contributions than of contributions made. They also receive a disproportionate amount of attention.

.:takhteyev.org->

Open Source Cell Phone Network

In the developing world, cell phones come before land lines. Why? Because installing cell towers is cheaper than running landlines. But even lower cell phone costs turn telecom companies away from the poorest and hardest-to-reach areas. Where they do provide coverage, it’s expensive, especially for the 3 billion people in the world who earn about $3 per day.

A small team of telecom industry veterans has solved both of those problems. The team developedAOpenBTS, an open-source, software-based cellphone network. Not only does it cost one-tenth as much as traditional networks, but carriers could charge callers about $2 per month and still make a profit.

To do that, OpenBTS has stripped some of the opacity from cellphone service, turning it into a do-it-yourself project. Now, anyone with some technical chops, a Radio Shack nearby, and $4,500 can make a network that works with a standard GSM cellphone. In sum, this project could change how most of the world communicates.

.:engineeringforchange.info->

What is Competing Hypotheses?

Open Source Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) will help you think objectively and logically about overwhelming amounts of data and hypotheses. It can also guide research teams toward more productive discussions by identifying the exact points of contention.

Most analysts…pick out what they suspect intuitively is the most likely answer, then look at the available information from the point of view of whether or not it supports this answer. If the evidence seems to support the favorite hypothesis, analysts pat themselves on the back and look no further.

.:competinghypotheses.org->