Just when you thought that web browsers were becoming boring, Mozilla announced that Firefox 52 now supports WebAssembly, which brings greatly enhanced speeds to web apps. Learn more about how this expands the capabilities of the web for everyone.
FOSS Force
Should the U.S. armed forces begin releasing software under an OSI approved open source license rather than as public domain?
Roblimo’s Hideaway
This question has generated many pixels’ worth of traffic on the OSI License discuss email list. This post is just a brief summary of a little of the discussion, which has been going on for some weeks and shows no sign of slowing down.
There are currently 80 Open Sourse Initiative-approved open source licenses. It’s nice that the Army (I’m a veteran) wants to not only write software licensed as open source, but OSI-approved open source software. (Go Army!)
But does the Army really need its own special OS license? Should the Air Force have a different one? Will the Navy want a Coastal Combat Open Source License, along with a separate Blue Water Open Source License? That might sound far-fetched, but Mozilla has three separate open source licenses, Microsoft has two, and Canada’s province of Québec also has three. So why shouldn’t the U.S. Department of Defense have a whole slew of open source licenses?
After being unveiled in London last June, Bluetooth 5 was officially released on December 7, with a lot of features for IoT devices. The Screening…
Some words for thought from this week’s video on nteract: “Open science isn’t truly open and open source isn’t truly open.”
The Screening Room
In her PLOTCON 2016 presentation, Safia Abdalla, an open source enthusiast in Chicago, starts off saying, “The need (for human beings) to write and draw things is not new. The desire to communicate with each other has existed since the dawn of our species.” She goes on to say, “I think we’re long overdue for a renaissance that’s going to help us to communicate with each other as people…. Interactive notebooks and nteract will play a key role in the New Knowledge Renaissance.”
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of February, 2017. 1. Best Linux Distro: Final Round of Voting Has…
With just a little imagination, you could easily make yourself a pretty cool mobile app using Open Data Kit.
The Screening Room
Open Data Kit is a free and open source set of tools which help organizations author, field, and manage mobile data collection solutions. The flexibility that open source offers means that the use cases for these tools are very broad. Check this introductory video about ODK tools which explains a rural medicine use case.
Now that Thunderbird is back in the Debian repositories, the decade long dispute that led to all Mozilla products in Debian being rebranded has ended.
The hatchet is finally completely buried. Iceweasel was laid to rest a year ago with the return of Firefox to Debian. Now, Icedove gets to go gently into that good night as well, as the Thunderbird email client returns to Debian.
Open data is an important concept at Code for America, which addresses the widening gap between the public and private sectors in their effective use of technology and design.
The Screening Room
Finding compatibility issues in open source software is tedious and complex. Roblimo explains why organizations that look for compliance issues are a valuable asset to the FOSS community.
</p?Roblimo’s Hideaway
When I heard about FOSSA, my first thought was, “Don’t Black Duck and Palamida already have the FOSS license compatibility thing pretty well sewed up? Do we really need another company doing it?”
This was, of course, the question I immediately asked FOSSA founder Kevin Wang. His answer, via email:
People involved in the maker movement are coming up with all sorts ideas to both help the planet and improves people’s lives — such as this idea for an open source village.
The Screening Room
If you’re looking for people thinking outside the box, open source people spend most of their day thinking outside the box. Witness Alex Cureton-Griffiths talking about his ideas, at MakerBay Central in Hong Kong, for an open source village in China. Yes, the text in his LibreOffice presentation appears reversed, but that’s a feature, not a bug. (Give me a few weeks to figure out why.)