Ryan Merkley is CEO of Creative Commons, a global non-profit organization with chapters in 85 countries that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. We need to talk about sharing. Much has been written about the “sharing economy” – web-enabled services like Uber and Airbnb that allow people to … Read more
Looking to promote the teaching of basic computer science in schools, the state government today said that all schools in Kerala, both government and aided, will soon be equipped with electronics and Raspberry Pi kits. Speaking at the inauguration of an ‘Electronics@School’ project, initiated by the state IT Department, Chief Minister Oommen Chandy said that … Read more
When the world’s most valuable company embraces open source, it means the shift in IT buying is well underway. Hadoop, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Mesos. It sounds like a mishmash of words you overheard while passing notes during high school science or literature. But it’s actually a sample of the open source technologies that power a … Read more
This manifesto aims at defining users’ fundamental rights to their own data in the Internet age. People ought to be free and should not have to pay allegiance to service providers. User data means any data uploaded by a user for his or her own use. Thus, users should have: Control over user data accessUser … Read more
There was a time when knowing how to program was for the geekiest of geeks. That’s not exactly the case today. As most entrepreneurs, freelancers and marketers will tell you, learning how to program can help you succeed. Over the past year, I’ve been learning to code. It’s helped me to become a much better entrepreneur … Read more
Save the date! The annual Fair Use Week, a celebration of the important doctrines of fair use and fair dealing, will take place from February 22-26, 2016. What is Fair Use Week? Each day teachers teach, students learn, researchers advance knowledge, and consumers access copyrighted information due to copyright limitations and exceptions such as fair use … Read more
The UK government on 7 September published recommendations and guidelines on the use and implementation of ODF, the Open Document Format. The compendium is authoritative, from its general introduction to the recommendations on procurement, a guide on integration of ODF with enterprise software, software that allows collaborating on documents and a review of ODF’s change … Read more
The Italian military is transitioning to LibreOffice and the Open Document Format (ODF). The Ministry of Defense will over the next year-and-a-half install this suite of office productivity tools on some 150,000 PC workstations – making it Europe’s second largest LibreOffice implementation. The switch was announced on 15 September by the LibreItalia Association. The migration … Read more
A couple of decades ago, if you spent every day in chat rooms with your friends, you were a nerd. Today if you do the same thing, you’re just the average Facebook user. And so it’s no surprise there’s a gold rush mentality in the learn-to-code movement. With the tech industry booming and its products … Read more
The City of Vienna was the first public agency in a German speaking country to develop an Open Government Initative and to commit itself to the concept of Open Data – an open and transparent system that makes city data available to citizens for their further use. Vienna’s first Open Data catalogue has been presented … Read more
