EDUCAUSE | opensource

Flickering (or is that Flickring?)

wallen — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:09:33 -0600

I teach a survey of art history class. I use digital images in the classroom and online. While I have several thousand of my own images, my collection is far from comprehensive in chronology and in geography. Arkansas State University twice purchased digital images under a contract with Saskia and others that places severe restrictions on where and how the images may be used (they may be seen only by faculty and students of the university under a secure sign-in system).

I discovered that Flickr has a large store of digital images that may be used for educational purposes. Of these hundreds deal with art and architecture (mostly architecture and sculpture, but with some surprisingly good images of paintings). I never prepare a presentation for my students without checking the holdings of Flickr. Additionally, when I find a particularly good source of images, I bookmark it in del.icio.us so that I may quickly find the collections (under imagearchive) and also share what I have found with others.

The image resources on the web, especially those that offer material unrestricted or under a Creative Commons license.

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Martin Ringle, Chief Technology Office for Reed College

gbayne — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 13:26:34 -0600

In this 26 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Martin Ringle, Chief Technology Office at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. For more than 20 years, Marty Ringle has contributed to the higher education IT profession as a change agent, a collaborator, and an organizer. A deep believer in the role and mission of small liberal arts colleges, his career has been marked by his ability to meld diverse entities into a coherent whole. This interview was recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference in Seattle, Washington.

FSF to launch campaign targeting social activists

StuartYeates — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 02:00:40 -0500

Newsforge is carrying an article saying that Free Software Foundation (FSF) is about to launch a significant campaign targeting social activists, trying to sign them up to the free software movement. This would significantly advance the political aims of the FSF.

I'd see this as largely a response to the ongoing success of the open source movement which largely silent on the political issues of open source and free software, choosing to focus on technical and business motivations.

The message, Brown says, will be a simple one, calculated to appeal to these groups: "Free software is an issue of free speech when we're moving more of our lives on to computers." The goal is appeal to the strong ethical stance of activist groups, and to encourage them to adopt policies in favor of free software.

"All these groups share a body of issues that they all recognize and care about," Brown says. "One group may be working against child poverty, another for recycling, but the people in these organizations can almost be transferred from one to the next. And from my experience with networking within social groups, if we could have one success, then it could very quickly lead to lots of success, because this community really communicates well." In other words, the FSF hopes that the promotion of free software will rapidly become part of this standard body of issues in the activist community.

Enforcing the GPL

StuartYeates — Fri, 12 May 2006 08:45:36 -0500

Joe Brockmeier has written a piece for newsforge on Enforcing the GPL (GNU Public License), and while the news is not good, there is substantial hope, including the information (which I'd overlooked) that because copyright has fixed term, there is no statue of limitations, so even if enforcement is very lax, we can catch up later. There had to be at least one silver lining to the continuous attempts to increase the length of copyright terms.

Most of the infringing appears to be in the embedded market, particularly in the routers and other "Internet" devices:

According to former BusyBox maintainer Erik Andersen, violations are fairly common. "I get roughly three reports every week of some device or other that is shipping with BusyBox in violation of the license; i.e., the vendor fails to support source, fails to offer source, and in many cases, claims the software is completely proprietary, when in fact it is obviously running Linux and using BusyBox."

Good numbers for day two of the OSS Watch Sustainability Conference

StuartYeates — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 03:47:57 -0500

Delegates in the Rhodes Trust lecture theatre
Originally uploaded by Stuart Yeates.

Even after dinner the night before with free-flowing wine (and port), a large number of people turned up bright and early this morning to hear Paul David (Stanford and Oxford) talk about the economics of open source and Niall Sclater (The Open University) talk about the business case for rolling out Moodle across an institution of 200,000 distance learning students.

The case for Shibboleth

StuartYeates — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 02:58:16 -0500

Shibboleth is the next wave of authentication and authorisation software from the Internet2 crowd. To be clear, Shibboleth isn't a silver bullet, it is a large and complex system which will be non trivial to roll out for. But it is becoming clear to me that there are some institutions in which the business case for Shibboleth (or something like Shibboleth) is very strong. These include:

Institutions in consortia with a tension between sharing information (student records, staff records, course materials, etc) and hiding information (to prevent rival institutions "poaching" staff and students). Shibboleth allows fine-grain control over which groups of people have access to what information, and because it can be truly distributed, without a "main server," no institution has to hand over unnecessary data to another institution.
Educational institutions with embedded medical, military or similar institutions wanting integrated systems. It's very hard to imagine how you can balance the legal requirements of medical records and case notes (which are now digital and which need to be used in training doctors) with the requirements of an educational institution one, without the flexibility of Shibboleth.
Large institutions which function as a single entity but which are actually several legal entities whose activities are technically and financially separate. The most obvious candidates here are collegiate universities (such as Oxford and Cambridge in the UK) and institutions with religious affiliation which preserve a separation of interests.

Once such institutions have blazed a trail, Shibboleth should "just work" with a significant number of educational systems, making it an logical choice for the less motivated institutions in the next round of upgrades (or even the round after next for the very conservative).

It should also be remembered that the librarians love Shibboleth because it can enable return to anonymous reading and uphold other parts of the ALA's The Freedom to Read Statement. Unfortunately, I'm unaware of any institutions in which librarians, or civil-rights arguments, are taken sufficiently seriously as to motivate broad changes in internal business systems.

Shibboleth should also be welcomed because it is an open standard, allowing diverse applications and systems to communicate effectively. By enabling competition between application and system vendors, open standards drive effectiveness interoperability, lower prices and enable open source applications to talk to proprietary ones.

PayThyme pays off

StuartYeates — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 02:36:31 -0500

PayThyme from Clockwork Software has been used by 1315 employers to file over 215,000 employee P14 returns to HM Revenue and Customs. Some of the components of the open source software are officially recognised and others are undergoing the Accreditation process.

Financial and accounting software has traditionally been a challenging area for open source software because the requirements are specific to each jurisdiction and need to be updated every tax year, in addition, the potentially very high cost of accounting errors makes for a conservative outlook. Clockwork appear to to have overcome these issues by moving to a service-based business model.

In what is becoming a standard tactic, the open source nature of the software is downplayed on the main website, with all the open source, community and technical aspects relegated to a second site aimed at technical people rather than the target users (in this case bookkeepers and accountants): http://www.paythyme.org.uk/.

Software Freedom Day

StuartYeates — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 03:44:07 -0500

Software Freedom Day is rapidly approaching. It's probably too late to organise your own team, but many people will have a local team they can get together with and

September 10th is Software Freedom Day, a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). With a series of global events we want to showcase the excellent range of FOSS now available and show how in can be used to save money and gain freedom in every sector of the information society.

Over 200 groups from over 60 countries will participate in this second annual Software Freedom Day, by organising local events ranging from simple meetings in the park to install-fests and 'SpeedGeeking' events. The non-profit organisation Software Freedom International provides guidance in organizing SFD and some material support, but the volunteer teams around the world have done the bulk of the work and will put a local spin on the day. For those who have not yet planned anything for SFD it's not too late. Local groups simply orginise their own events, though official materials have now been allocated.

FOSS is licensed in such a way that it gives you the end user the right to use it freely for private or commercial use. You also have the right to inspect and even modify the underlying source code. You can give away or even sell the original version you received or one with your modification (though you may be required to pass on the changes you have made). You are not required to pay royalties to previous developers.

FOSS is important even for those without interest in source code. The release of the source allows external observers to inspect the true functioning of the program, which means that you as the end user can be confident that the program treats your private data with respect. You (or someone else) can verify that your data is not being passed on without your knowledge and you can be sure that your data will always be accessible and not locked away in a proprietary format. Also, the release of source code has in some cases spawned large communities of volunteer developers who have in turn provided the world with highly useful, and entirely free software such as Linux, OpenOffice, and Mozilla. These communities can in turn foster local IT industries in developing regions without the need for large up-front investments. The freedom of software is important for everyone, not just software developers.

The actual event is basically a coordinated PR effort involving giving away as many copies as possible of TheOpenCD to people who wouldn't normally be exposed to free software or free software ideas. It's really hard to measure the impact of this kind of publicity, unfortunately, but OSS Watch distribute TheOpenCD too, and increasingly, if people haven't heard of the CD itself, they've heard of the software on it.

The version of TheOpenCD being distributed is version 3.0, which is nice (but not perfect), it contains a realm of open source software for Microsoft windows machines.

Software on the CD includes GIMP, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Audacity, Gaim, PDFCreator and much more.

Special Interest Group on Open Source Software for Education Newsletter #5

StuartYeates — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 03:23:29 -0500

SIGOSSEE, the European group studying and promoting the use of open source in education, has released their fifth newsletter. The focus on this news letter is their up-coming Swedish meeting.

Newsletter (PDF)