The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Reciprocity, Not Reward, Drives Decision to Cooperate
A new study suggests the decision to cooperate with others comes from someone's mood and his or her history of cooperation.
Via Nicholas Ripley
Phi Beta Iota: Cultural context, not organizational design, is the key factor.
The Collapsing US Economy and the end of the world
In a recent column, “Can The World Survive Washington’s Hubris,” I promised to examine whether the US economy will collapse before Washington in its pursuit of world hegemony brings us into military confrontation with Russia and China. This is likely to be an ongoing subject on this site, so this column will not be the final word.
Open Source Everything
20120706 Open Source Everything Highlights
Filmmaker to attempt year of Open Source Everything
Open Source Life: How the open movement will change everything
Open Source
Like Open Source? For Collaboration, Try Group-Office 4.0
Mozilla Foundation and EFF join hunt for Syrian open source developer
Q&A: Harris president Jim Traficant on the ‘genius' vision of open source in VA and DoD iEHR
Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FOSS, FLOSS, F/OSS)
Free Software Foundation on Secure Boot
Open source incest: GPL forked by its coauthor
Continue reading “20120707 Open Source Everything Highlights”
Open Source Everything Project
The Open Source Everything Project would be one of the key mechanisms by which Foundation initially promotes the precepts of a Post-Industrial culture. It would also be an eminently practical resource for its business and community development.
The basic objective of the project is to establish a web site and associated media to host a vast and perpetually evolving archive of Open Source plans and instructions for the fabrication of the full compliment of artifacts on which a contemporary western standard of living is based. Media, including web sites, focusing on the subject of DIY fabrication are, of course, nothing new. However, there has generally been an avoidance in this field of project designs for practical useful artifacts that might compete directly in performance and economy with the products of commercial industry. Traditionally, DIY has been about the revival of antiquated labor-intensive craft techniques which, although culturally valuable, do not allow for the production of economically competitive artifacts and thus have little progressive social impact. Currently, a new DIY movement with a distinct culture derived from that of the personal computer hobbyist culture has emerged. This new movement is embodied by web sites such as the famous MAKE blog where readers are encouraged to contribute their own project instructions and photos for the fabrication of novel artifacts. MAKErs are pioneering a progressive new attitude toward technology and the products of industry, but while much of the language used and ideals embodied by this new community express a Post-Industrial sensibility, very few of the artifacts that MAKErs contribute to their community have any practical purpose. They are predominately hacks of existing commercial products intended mostly for short-lived amusement or to exploit features the manufacturers had overlooked or tried to lock-out in some way. Nowhere on the MAKE blog will you find plans for an actual functional and economical refrigerator made from scratch.
Read full post and see additional links.
Continue reading “DefDog: The Open Source Everything Project”
Sun May 29, 2005
I've written about Open Source Politics, Open Source Activism, and Open Source Journalism. Open Source software is taking over our desktops at the expense of monopolistic Microsoft (get Firefox!). Television is getting in on the act. Shows like American Idol let the public be the judges, not three has-beens sitting on a judge's table. Al Gore's new network, Current, is predicated heavily on an open source model — with a great deal of programming produced by its viewers.And corporate America is catching on.
Continue reading “DefDog: Democratizing commerce – 2005 call to arms”
Open Source Life: How the open movement will change everything
LifeHack.org, 18 June 2012
Consider this: in just a few short years, the open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia has made closed-source encyclopedias obsolete — both the hard-bound kind and the CD-ROM or commercial online kind. Goodbye World Book and Brittanica.
Sure, these companies still exist, but their customer base is rapidly shrinking as more and more people would rather go with Wikipedia — it’s free, it’s easy to use, and it’s much, much more up-to-date.
This is but one example of how the concept of open source has changed our lives already. Over the next 10 years or so, we’ll be seeing many more examples, and the effects could change just about every aspect of our lives.
The open-source concept was popularized through GNU and the GPL, and it has spread ever since, in an increasingly rapid manner. The open-source OS, Linux, has been growing in users exponentially over the last few years, and while it still has a ways to go before it can challenge Microsoft or Apple, it has become a viable and even desirable alternative for many.
Open-source alternatives have been growing in number and breadth: from office software to financial software to web and desktop utilities to games, just about any software you can think of has an open-source alternative. And in many cases, the open-source version is better.
Now consider this: the open-source concept doesn’t have to just apply to software. It can apply to anything in life, any area where information is currently in the hands of few instead of many, any area where a few people control the production and distribution and improvement of a product or service or entity.
Continue reading “DefDog: Open Source Life – How the open movement will change everything”
A New Way of Measuring Openness: The Open Governance Index
Liz Laffan
Technology Innovation Management Review (January 2012)
How open is open enough?
Joel West, Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Open source software is now “business as usual” in the mobile industry. While much attention is given to the importance of open source licenses, we argue in this article that the governance model can be as necessary to a project’s success and that projects vary widely in the governance models – whether open or closed – that they employ. Open source governance models describe the control points that are used to influence open source projects with regard to access to the source code, how the source code is developed, how derivatives are created, and the community structure of the project. Governance determines who has control over the project beyond what is deemed legally necessary via the open source licenses for that project. The purpose of our research is to define and measure the governance of open source projects, in other words, the extent to which decision-making in an open source project is “open” or “closed”. We analyzed eight open source projects using 13 specific governance criteria across four areas of governance: access, development, derivatives and
community.
Our findings suggest that the most open platforms will be most successful in the long term, however we acknowledge exceptions to this rule. We also identify best practices that are common across these open source projects with regard to source code access, development of source code, management of derivatives, and community structure. These best practices increase the likelihood of developer use of and involvement in open source projects.
