Tag Archives: open source

Software As Cultural Artefact

You may recall I attended a meeting in Paris last November where we worked on a statement about the cultural value of software. I am delighted to say it has now published both a call for action by UNESCO and a report explaining in more depth.

This is the first work of public policy of which I’m aware that explicitly recognises “that the source code of software used for the implementation of laws and regulations defines the experience of the law by citizens.” That important statement forms the anchor for much change in global legislation relating to digital rights, and as a UNESCO Call it will be considered by each and every future UNESCO policy and consequently by national policy of UNESCO members. Notably, it calls on all to “enable effective independent auditing of software source code used to make decisions that may affect fundamental rights of human beings and where possible ensure it is made available under an open source license.”

Software embodies the procedures by which the citizen engages with the state, through which the citizen and the market interact and in which citizens engage each other and enjoy cultural and leisure pursuits. Our ability to see society in action and guarantee the democracy that sustains it is increasingly dependent on our ability to review the software by which it is enabled at every level. When we have no right of review – let alone a right to directly participate in maintaining the software –  we have lack the most import of the checks and balances of a 21st century democracy.

The Paris Call identifies software as a primary cultural artefact, requiring public access, demanding preservation and deserving cultivation. It sets a benchmark for the treatment of software as modern treasure. Now its the turn of the framers of wider policy to take that into account.

FLOSS Weekly 513: NextCloud

This week on FLOSS Weekly Simon co-hosted a fascinating conversation with NextCloud’s founder Frank Karlitschek.

FLOSS Weekly 495: HAX

Want a WYSIWYG editor for your CMS content? Simon co-hosted a FLOSS Weekly show all about the HAX project — Headless Authoring eXperience — this week which does exactly that. It’s a young project and deserves wider visibility, so take a look!

Should we celebrate the anniversary of open source?

Tomorrow here in Portland at OSCON, OSI will be celebrating 20 years of open source. I’ve had a few comments along the lines of “I’ve was saying ‘open source’ before 1998 so why bother with this 20 year celebration?”

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That’s entirely possible. The phrase is reputed to have been used descriptively about free software — especially under non-copyleft licenses — from at least 1996 when it appeared in a press release. Given its appropriateness there’s a good chance it was in use earlier, although I’ve not found any reliable citations to support that. It was also in use in another field well before then, to describe military or diplomatic intelligence obtained by studying non-classified sources.  Continue reading →

FLOSS Weekly 488: Keycloak

Simon co-hosted this week’s show, which looked at a very interesting identity management system called Keycloak that puts commercial-strength federated authentication, authorisation and identity management within the reach of every developer. It’s written in Java, backed by Red Hat and has a large and active community.

 

 

Welcoming Software Heritage

Coade Stone is a fantastic artificial rock whose creation process was lost for more than a century because it was kept secret, although it has recently been reverse engineered.

Comments delivered at the opening of Software Heritage at UNESCO:

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to bring greetings from the Open Source Initiative, the global charity promoting open source and acting as steward of the open source definition and the list of approved licenses.  Continue reading →

FLOSS Weekly 484: The Lounge

After the Pidgin show a while back, Simon stepped in at 11:59 for Randal again, hosting an interesting show about a pure community project that makes a web-hosted IRC client called The Lounge. If you need a web client where you can maintain ongoing IRC sessions, this open source, self-hosted alternative to IRCCloud and others may be the answer. It’s written in Javascript, runs in Node and there’s a ready-to-use Docker container available.

Going With The Grain

If you’re managing community or developer relationships for your employer, a crucial principle is to “go with the grain” of the community — promote and embrace the freedoms it needs and the expectations it cherishes — rather than take actions that result in easily-anticipated opposition.

More at https://devrel.net/community/going-with-the-grain

FOSDEM: How the humble FAQ got Java Open Source

Rich Sands and I gave a new talk in the Community Devroom at FOSDEM. We explained how important the OpenJDK FAQ had been to Sun’s ability to release the Java platform as Open Source, and explained (using an FAQ of course!) how to use the same approach in other projects.

There’s more to say on the subject (we originally created a 40 minute talk before we found we only had 15 minutes, hence the slight over-run) so hopefully OSCON will accept the proposal we run the whole thing there.

FOSDEM: The Third Decade of Open Source

This weekend I spoke at FOSDEM in Brussels to deliver the opening conference keynote. My subject was “The Third Decade of Open Source” and as OSI President I summed up the main events of the last 20 years, some of the key facts behind them and then offered five trends that will shape the next decade.