GitHub was intended to be an open software collaboration platform, but it’s become a platform for much, much more than code. It’s now being used by artists, builders, home owners, everyone in between, entire companies … and cities. -
The GitHub revolution.
posted by Artw
on Mar 7, 2013 -
58 comments
As a part of their new open access policy, Yale is releasing their vast digital images collection for
free. Although it will take years to upload everything, the online collection is starting with 250,000 images.
A sampling includes original Mozart manuscripts, maps from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and John Trumbull's iconic Declaration of Independence.
[more inside]
posted by thebestsophist
on May 16, 2011 -
15 comments
Oracle didn't see this coming. There were some significant concerns when Oracle took stewardship of Sun's open source projects like MySQL and OpenOffice, and these concerns led to contributors to OpenOffice asking Oracle to fork over control of the project. Oracle refused.
[more inside]
posted by juiceCake
on Apr 18, 2011 -
108 comments
Yesterday (April 15), Representatives Doyle (D-PA), Waxman (D-CA), Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL), Harper (R-MS), Boucher (D-VA) and Rohrabacher (R-CA) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (HR 5037), a bill that would ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies. -
Alliance for Taxpayer Access. [more inside]
posted by infinite intimation
on Apr 20, 2010 -
26 comments
"Papers that are scientifically flawed or comprise only modest technical increments often attract undue profile. At the same time publication of truly original findings may be delayed or rejected."
In an
open letter addressed to Senior Editors of peer-review journals,
Professor Austin Smith (
publications) and another 13 stem cell researchers from around the world have
expressed their concerns over the current peer review process employed by the journals publishing in the field of stem cell biology.
[more inside]
posted by kisch mokusch
on Feb 3, 2010 -
25 comments
Toronto's Open Civic Data. The city of Toronto has released its data to the world via the new Open Toronto initiative: geographic data for a variety of civic divisions, lists of licensed business, public transit stops, routes & schedules, a SOAP-based geocoding API and more.
posted by GuyZero
on Nov 3, 2009 -
30 comments
"The [textbook] industry charges outrageous prices for new textbooks while simultaneously doing everything it can to make older versions unusable or obsolete. There is simply no reason that a new calulus textbook should cost $157. The study of calculus, at least the type of calculus that most of us need to study in high school or undergraduate programs, has not changed significantly in decades." -
Textbook Revolution.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Jul 24, 2007 -
77 comments
You've heard of
ScummVM and
MAME, but harvest time is approaching in the field of reverse-engineered
open source re-implementations of other classic games too:
OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon),
LinCity (Sim City),
Advanced Strategic Command (Battle Isle),
Freeciv (Civilization),
Enigma (Oxyd),
Widelands (Settlers),
OpenArena (Quake 3),
Spring (Total Annihilation),
JJFFE (Frontier First Encounters),
Vega Strike and
Oolite (Elite),
FreeOrion (Master of Orion),
Pingus (Lemmings),
Stratagus (Warcraft II et al.),
CloneKeen (Commander Keen),
Exult (Ultima VII),
FreeCNC (Command & Conquer),
REminiscence (Flashback),
LGeneral (Panzer General),
Pioneers (Settlers of Catan), and
Freedoom (Doom).
posted by hoverboards don't work on water
on Feb 1, 2007 -
43 comments
Prediction markets trade uncertainty for collective wisdom, and
have been proven to be more accurate than other mechanisms for predicting outcomes such as polls. Many corporate entities (HP, Intel, Google, Yahoo, Siemens, etc.) are said to be using them internally. Several successful prediction markets already exist, such as
Hedgestreet,
NewsFutures, the
Iowa Electronic Markets, Hollywood Stock Exchange, and
Inkling Markets.
A spinoff of DARPA's
Policy Analysis Market, prediction markets might be to markets what open source was to software.
posted by localhuman
on Dec 16, 2006 -
18 comments
DTV beta for Mac is now live. DTV is a new, free and open-source platform for internet television and video. The goal here is to make sure that internet TV is open and independent. Free, open source software and open standards mean anyone can watch and everyone has a voice.
posted by signal
on Aug 9, 2005 -
23 comments
Norway's Ministry for Modernisation has declared for Open Source formats. Speaking at eNorge, the Norwegian Minister for Modernisation, Morten Andreas Meyer, has said that "proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government". Although he did not mention Microsoft by name, he did say that this was the last time he would be streaming his speech using the current (WMP-based) technology.
The Ministry for Modernisation may sound quaint, but it was founded in 2004 with a
broad remit, and 200 employees, not a small number in a nation of less than 5 million souls. Although Norway's spending on IT may not be great compared to the US or China, as one of the wealthiest and most technologically developed nations on Earth (not to mention the emphasis on long-distance communications robustness created by a large country with terrible weather) it sets a precedent about what a tech-savvy first-world nation might do with Open Source, not because it cannot afford proprietary formats but because it does not want them. Microsoft, meanwhile, might be wondering why it bothered to translate Office into Sami. Will this be the first domino, or can it be written off as the actions of an oil-rich rogue state that will soon be brought back into the global consensus?
posted by tannhauser
on Jun 28, 2005 -
18 comments
Culture by the people, for the people. We all know that there are a gazillion blogs out there, with people talking about anything and everything, frequently to an audience of one. Those same text based blogs are incorporating
video as well. People are beginning to organize
their internet not through search engine algorithims, but by their own
tags. There's also a dedicated cadrey of partisan and non-partisan
"amateur journalism" sites. Then you have
full fledged communities focused to specific subjects, holding an unbelievable depth of knowledge and opinions. With entire
encyclopedias available online, and with smaller topic-centric wiki's available, can the creation and dissemination of audience authored content be far behind? Witness the growth of
Flickr, the probable success of
Vimeo, people programming their own
radio stations and/or
shows, the
increasing awareness and
use of the
Freedom of Information Act (
FOIA) by
plain ol' citizens, the courting of
TiVo by Google and Yahoo (to share homemovies and pictures, perhaps?), open source news sites like
Take Bake the News,
NowPublic (for royalty free images to accompany content),
Downhill Battle,
Our Media ( a place to store your content), and open-source
sounds and
sights. Could there eventually be enough worthwhile content to break us free of a corporate-delivered culture?
posted by rzklkng
on Apr 25, 2005 -
35 comments
Asidonhopo hits! --more--
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|K..KKK| ##-...-#######
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posted by felix
on Apr 13, 2005 -
93 comments
Interesting idea, but will it work? "Grub provides a free for download, distributed crawling client, which is used to create an infrastructure (database + volunteers) that will eventually provide URL update status information for nearly every web page on the Internet. Grub's distributed crawler network will enable websites, content providers, and individuals to notify others that changes have occurred in their content, all in real time"
posted by sixdifferentways
on May 18, 2001 -
0 comments
