freedom

Open Standards, Move Over

Andrew Updegrove is a co-founder and partner of the Boston law firm of Gesmer Updegrove LLP and an internationally recognized expert on standard setting and open source organizations and how to form them. He has represented over 70 standard setting, promotional, and advocacy consortia and open source projects. In 2005, he received the President’s Award for Journalism … Read more

Open Standards -­ a Key to Success in the Delivery of the DSM

Today, the European Commission achieved the next milestone in implementing the Digital Single Market (DSM), with the publication of a Communications package consisting of the Priority ICT Standards Plan (PISP), and of Communications on Digitisation, Cloud and the eGovernment Action Plan. With these initiatives the Commission focuses on the major technologies involved in the digital transformation of economies and … Read more

What if we owned the Internet together? It’s time to bring the co-op revolution to the web

Just a year or so ago, Bitcoin was weird. The digital ‘crypto-currency’ had become fairly notorious as a preferred medium of exchange for hackers, outlaws, and the most strenuous libertarians. The underlying blockchain technology—a secure, distributed database requiring no central server or owner—was earning the curiosity of radicals and visionaries who saw in it the … Read more

Creative Commons’ Radical Plan to Bring Joy to the Commons

As debate about the sharing economy rages, with fingers pointed at Uber and Airbnb as prime examples of what isn’t sharing, a global community is working toward a better world through…actual sharing. Creative Commons, the nonprofit organization that enables millions of people to share billions of creative works through a suite of free licenses, recently released its 2016-2020 organizational strategy. The … Read more

Open source essential to government modernisation

Using open source has set the city of Limerick (Ireland) free to modernise its organisation. The city merged several isolated department front-desks into one modern customer centre, with the customer relations management system and other open source solutions greatly improving service levels. Not encumbered by the limitations of proprietary licences, Limerick could customise applications to … Read more

#Firefox #multistream and renegotiation for #Jitsi Videobridge

Author’s note: Firefox landed support for multistream and renegotiation support in Firefox 38. This article talks about how the team at Jitsi Videobridge, a WebRTC service, collaborated with the Firefox WebRTC team to get Jitsi’s multi-party video conferencing working well in Firefox. In the process, several issues were identified and fixed on both sides of … Read more