Tag Archives: Free software

Faletti: “Open Source leads to Barbarity”

[again news about Italy in Italian]
In article on La Stampa, Faletti speaks about his free appearance in a Television Spot campaign of the Italian Government to fight piracy of multimedia content. There is no need to say that the spot costs public money to be broadcasted in televisions and that this becomes private money of Berlusconi who owns Italian private televisions.
Anyway the point I want to make here is another: the spokeman of the campaign against piracy, Faletti, is so informed that says:
«Io invece penso che l’open source sia il sistema migliore per precipitare nella barbarie.».
(I think instead that Open Source is the best way to fall into Barbarity.)
Let me state it again: this is the man chosen by Italian Government to explain to Italians (via television) what is piracy and how to fight it.

Identity Burro: GreaseMonkey extension for social sites.

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UPDATE: there is now an IdentityBurro project page
You are looking at the page of xyz on flickr and you would like to see xyz‘s bookmarks on del.icio.us?
Or, you are on the technorati profile page of abc and you would like to see abc‘s photos on flickr?
Well, if one of these desideratas has been in your mind before, you now have it!
Enter Identity Burro (or IdentityBurro), a GreaseMonkey extension that inserts, in the profile page of user xyz on flickr or del.icio.us or technorati, the link to the profile pages of user xyz on flickr and del.icio.us and technorati. Your social sites are now more social!
See the screenshots.

Still with me? Then I guess you might want to install:
Current Version: Identity Burro v0.1

At the moment there is nothing better I can do that assuming an user has the same nick on every site: I assume xyz@flickr is xyz@del.icio.us and xyz@technorati. I know this is by no means guaranteed to be true (or desirable). I hope (and ask) that one of this social sites will soon let its users to enter which are their nicks on other sites. In this way I would be able to get this information and put the correct links when xyz@flickr is called abc@del.icio.us.

And of course, as you can see by the name of the extension, inspiration for this extension came from the mighty BookBurro extension, whose creator Jesse I just met few days ago at the AAAI 2005 conference in Pittsburgh.
The code is released under a Creative Commons “Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5” licence (since Book Burro was released in this way and the shareAlike option didn’t really give me a chance to change licence for a GPL).

If you like, you might want to let me know if it works in the buggy browser, I mean, Internet Explorer.
Todo:
# when expanded, part of the unexpanded interface (buttons and icons) remains in background, more transparent. understand why and fix it
# when expanded the “expand” icon should become a “shrink” icon (the arrow in the other direction).
# some CSS properties are inherited from the current site, so that for example, the extension looks a bit different in flickr and in del.icio.us. Understand which are the properties of which elements and overwrite them (surely the background of some elements is inherited).
# adding more social sites, for example, webjay, citeulike, last.fm, audioscrobbler, furl, wist, blogmarks, 43things, tagsurf, upcoming, jots, podcast, consumating, rojo, bloglines, smugsmug, bookswelike, kinja.

Leave comments to this post for communicating with me about the extension.
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Trento province chooses Free Software

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The article on newspaper L’Adige reports that “Also Microsoft, that is opening a research centre in Trento, will have to use it”. Anyway I think it is probably just a boutade of the article writer to get attention (and he succeeded, at least with me). Anyway the press conference of the Province is more precise and useful. All the links point to information in Italian, some extracts follow.
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AAAI05: terrific talk by Marty Tenenbaum

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AI Meets Web 2.0: Building The Web of Tomorrow Today by Dr. Jay M. Tenenbaum.
Terrific terrific talk, fascinating. I should have podcasted it because you really missed something (except I have nothing to record audio on, would you consider sending me your old mp3 recorder pen?). I was so excited during the talk that I happened to take a photo of almost any slide. Actually the slides were 94 and I photoed 59 of them! Incredible to me as well.
Anyway, you might want to read the slides (pdf) or maybe you want to have a look at my pictures (possibly as a slideshow).
He introduced all the stuff I enjoy, such as Blogs, RSS, wiki (wikipedia), folksonomies, tags, flickr, Del.icio.us, microformats (aka Lower case semantic web), technorati, pubsub, greasemonkey (bookburro, greasemap) and much more; all tied together in a fascinating, convincing, making-sense manner!
After his presentation, we spoke about my research and he seemed interested. He invited me to visit commerce.net for one month or so and I have to say that I really like the idea. I spoke also with Rohit Khare that is actually working with Tenenbaum and he has a whole bunch of very clever, fascinating, realizable ideas that would really make an impact. They also underline more than once that this kind of architecture/language-of-web2.0 projects should be open source and I totally agree with them and like it.
Actually after the presentation, while I was speaking with Marty and Rohit, there was also Jesse Andrews, the creator of the mind-blowing book burro (actually he got most of the attention, totally deserved by the way). I guess it should be too cool having someone presenting your hack on a conference and then go to meet that person and say “You know the Book Burro extension you presented? Well, I’m the creator of it!”. Cool! If you want to see how Jesse looks like, here is a picture of him and wait some more great hacks from him in few days.

EU parliament stops Europe Parliament nixes software patent law.

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Great day for European Computer Industry! And for Democracy! Ane one less reason to leave “old Europe”….
Europe Parliament nixes software patent law
STRASBOURG, France Jul 6, 2005 — The European Parliament on Wednesday rejected a proposed law to create a single way of patenting software across the European Union, a blow to big tech companies who had pushed hard for its adoption.
The so-called software patent directive, turned down in a 648-14 vote with 18 abstentions, would have given companies EU-wide patent protection for computerized inventions

My suggestion to Google: getoutfoxed(‘s author)

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Google, do hire Stan before Yahoo! does it. Stan is the author of “Outfoxed – Personalize your internet.” I didn’t play with the code yet (seems a Linux version is not yet ready at the moment, but on the way). Yes, the code is open source (Mozilla Public Licence), sweet! Anyway, the detailed description is fantastic! It is a bit like what I want to do for my PhD thesis. The difference? Stan did it! Check the site: it has a lot of interesting pages such as The Outfoxed Idea (A collection of thoughts on the theoretical aspects of Outfoxed, and the whole idea of using social networks for metadata distribution). Or at least the page A Third Phase of Internet Search in which Stan pictiorally shows the 3 phases: Naive trust –> PageRank and inferred quality –> Social networks to determine subjective quality
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GreaseMonkey is the real Semantic Web (and now works on HospitalityClub)

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GreaseMonkey is an extension for Firefox that allows you to totally (and easily) change the layout of any received web page. Don’t like the color of the banner of that_site.com? You can change it! Do you prefer to have the login link on the_other_site.org on the right? You can place it wherever you want! While visiting the page of a certain book on Amazon.com, do you want to see the prices other sites ask for the same book (with this information embedded on “original” Amazon page)? You can do it (with BookBurro extension)! Want to hide forever every Google AdSense ad? You can do it! You find hundreds of scripts (for hundreds of different sites) over at GreaseMonkey UserScripts wiki or you can easily create yours (as I did, see the end of this post).
Oh yes, this will blow up your business model and “any kid with a bright idea and a knack for DHTML can create a new interface for your site, and it will probably be better than yours.”
And yes, this is much much more real (and useful) than all the Semantic Web you listen about at conferences (with tons of papers and tons of highly funded programs that, at least at the moment, produces almost nothing you can use and play with; if I’m wrong, use the comment to point out interesting stuff).
Anyway, I played a bit with GreaseMonkey. I recommend you diveintogreasemonkey by Mark Pilgrim and I suggest you to follow it step by step (this is faster than trying to jump to what you need because you will jump back to understand that what you skipped was important).
And eventually, I created 2 GreaseMonkey scripts for HospitalityClub, that I think can save me a lot of time in using the site. I used HospitalityClub for finding hospitality in Trieste when I was attending the School on Networks (thanks truesmile and inquis), I used it in order to find hospitality in Pittsburgh where I’ll be for the AAAI conference (thanks roder) and yesterday I wanted to use it for finding hospitality for my (short) holidays in Italy [not going to tell where]. The problem with HospitalityClub is that the interface is not too usable. My usual use case is the following: I search all the people offering hospitality in the place where I want to go, and I send to all of them the same request. This requires visiting the list of users, clicking on every username to go to her userpage and, on the userpage, click on “send message to this user” that leads to a new page, then copying my name in a field, my passport number in another field, the request text in a text area and push Submit. All these steps must be done for all the users!
So I created a GreaseMonkey extension that add a link near every username: the link allows to go directly to the “send message” page.
[ script: hospitalityclub_addSendMsgLink.user.js ]
And I created another extension that prefill the values in the “send message” page with the default ones (my username, my passport number, the request message).
[ script: hospitalityclub_defaultValuesInMsg.user.js ]
In this way you just have to push Submit. It would be possible to push Submit automatically with the extension but I wanted to keep some control … interestingly GreaseMonkey gives you so much power that then your small brain is no more able to manage it. I mean, for example, I have at least 4 extensions that modify google.com pages and I’m no more able to tell which extension inserts what in which cases… this is something I need to think a little bit more about.
Anyway the 2 extensions are released under GPL (software that gives you freedom) so you are free to play with them, free to study them and free to modify them. Enjoy!

Contribute to”The Politics of Open Source Adoption”

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The Politics of Open Source Adoption. It is very interesting and so present. It is on a wiki so you can edit it (and the 2 best new contributions will receive prizes of $250)
Some chapters: The European Politics of F/OSS Adoption, LiMux—Free Software for Munich, Source vs. Force: Open Source Meets Intergovernmental Politics, FOSSFA in Africa: Opening the Door to State ICT Development Agendas – A Kenya Case Study, NGO’s in the Developing Worlds, Legal Uncertainty in Free and Open Source Software and the Political Response, F/OSS Opportunities in the Health Care Sector.
This wiki is an invitation to collaborate on a real-time history and analysis of the politics of open source software adoption. The Social Science Research Council is pleased to offer a first version of this account—POSA 1.0. For our purposes, understanding the ‘politics of adoption’ means stepping back from the task of explaining or justifying Free and/or Open Source Software (F/OSS) in order to ask how increasingly canonical explanations and justifications are mobilized in different political contexts. POSA 1.0 tries to map the different kinds of political and institutional venues in which F/OSS adoption is at stake. It tries to understand important institutional actors within those venues, and the ways in which arguments for and against F/OSS are framed and advanced. It seeks to clarify the different opportunities and constraints facing F/OSS adoption in different sectors and parts of the world. It is an inevitably partial account that–we hope–can be extended and deepened by other participants in these processes. We would like your help in preparing POSA 2.0.
(via BoingBoing)
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Google boosts Open Source (and students can get $4500)

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The Summer of Code is Google’s program designed to introduce students to the world of Open Source Software Development.
This Summer, don’t let your programming skills lie fallow…Use them for the greater good of Open Source Software and computer science! Google will provide a $4500 award to each student who successfully completes an open source project by the end of the Summer. (payment details can be found in FAQ). By pairing applicants up with the proven wisdom and experience of established prominent open source organizations (listed below), we hope to make great software happen. If you can’t come up with a great idea to submit, a number of our organizations have made idea lists available.

I’m wondering what “OUR organizations” means … Did they already buy all of them? Yep, even If I was inteding to write a joke, the puzzling/scaring part is that this could actually be true …

Participating Organizations:
The Apache Software Foundation (ideas)
Asterisk
Blender (ideas)
Bricolage (ideas)
Codehaus (ideas)
Drupal (ideas)
Fedora Code
FreeBSD (ideas)
Gaim (ideas)
Gallery (ideas)
The Gnome Foundation (ideas)
Handhelds.org (ideas)
Horde (ideas)
Inkscape (ideas)
Internet2 (ideas)
Jabber
JXTA (ideas)
KDE
Project Looking Glass
LispNYC (ideas)
Live Journal
Mambo (ideas)
The Mono Project (ideas)
Monotone (ideas)
NetBSD (ideas)
NMap (ideas)
OhioLink
OpenOffice (ideas)
OSCAR (ideas)
The Perl Foundation (submission guidelines & ideas)
Portland State University (ideas)
The Python Software Foundation (ideas)
Samba (ideas)
Semedia (ideas)
The Subversion Project (ideas)
Ubuntu Linux (ideas)
The Wine Project (ideas)
WinLibre (ideas)
XWiki (ideas)
Google

Nokia 770 and the power of grassroot development (read GNU/Linux)

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Nokia presented Nokia 770 Internet Tablet and (behold!) it is powered by Linux. Is this a clever move? From my point of view, yes. I’m thinking to buy one, even if I dislike buying gadgets that are not totally useful to me and at the moment I can totally live without a tablet pc. The presentation by Nokia titled “Give and Take: Open Source play for a major telecom manufacturer” presents pros and cons, risks and potentials. I think Nokia was very clever, they are giving a tool to all the GNU/Linux hackers community. The community will play with it happily hacking and (as a by-product) will give back to Nokia (mostly for free) a bunch of incredibly clever applications and ideas that Nokia can embed on its Tablet PC and sell it even more. In fact Nokia is also trying to guide the process, since it has created maemo.org, a development platform to create applications for Nokia 770 Internet Tablet and other maemo compliant handheld devices in the future. Very clever! Will all the Tablet PCs move to GNU/Linux? I hope so but we will see.