open source
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7 Notable Legal Developments in Open Source in 2016
In 2012 the jury in the first Oracle v. Google trial found that Google's inclusion of Java core library APIs in Android infringed Oracle's copyright. The district court overturned the verdict, holding that the APIs as such were not copyrightable (either as individual method declarations or their "structure, sequence and organization" [SSO]). The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, applying 9th Circuit law, reversed, holding that the "declaring code and the [SSO] of the 37 Java API packages are entitled to copyright protection." The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case, and in 2016 a closely watched second trial was held on Google's defense of fair use. In May 2016 the jury returned a unanimous verdict in favor of Google...
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7 Ways Open Source was Essential to Business in 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic created many new challenges for businesses in 2020 as they rapidly moved non-essential workers to remote operations. However, it also created tremendous opportunities for innovation as people searched for effective ways to work and collaborate virtually. Opensource.com responded to the need by publishing a variety of articles in 2020 on working better with open source. Since it appears working remotely is here to stay for the foreseeable future, make sure you're doing everything you can to adapt by reading the top seven articles about open source business from 2020.
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7 Ways to Discuss Legal Matters with an Open Community
Having watched a fair number of people attempt to engage both the Open Source Initiative's licensing evaluation community and the Apache Software Foundation's legal affairs committee, I'd like to offer some hints and tips for succeeding when it's your turn to conduct a legal discussion with an open community. First and foremost, make sure the person conducting the conversation is both qualified and empowered. Don't send proxies; they simply frustrate the community, who quickly work out that your representative is always playing the second-hand car salesman and going to the back room to ask for a deal...
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8 Clever Ideas For Making Government Work Better With Data
How can we make the places we live more awesome through data? Read More »
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8 Linux Predictions for 2016
Looking ahead to 2016, I see big things for ChromeOS, Android, and even Microsoft in the Linux world. As 2015 comes to a close, the time has arrived to make predictions for what will happen in the Linux (and broader Free and Open Source Software) world in the year ahead. Will all of my predictions actually come true in 2016? Who knows? But I’m making them anyway!...
9 Relevant Topics for Community Leaders Today
In 2009, Jono Bacon brought the first Community Leadership Summit to the free and open source world. Five years later, Donna Benjamin hosted an off-shoot event, CLSx at linux.conf.au in Perth. 2017 marks the third year for CLSxAU at LCA. This year the event hosted nearly 30 attendees, each participating in one or more of nine discussion sessions. All CLS events are presented in an unconference format, allowing attendees to shape the program as they see fit...
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9 Rules for the Proper Care and Feeding of Communities and Carnivorous Plants
In 2016, I adopted my first carnivorous plants, a Venus Fly Trap and a Pitcher Plant, which my Facebook friends named Gordon and Bananarama, respectively. I quickly discovered that the health of Gordon and Bananarama was closely connected to the environment I provided as much as to their ability to catch the occasional bug and get energy from the sun. In this article, I'll pull from my experience working with open source communities—and a few months of experience keeping Gordon and Bananarama alive—to explain how caring for carnivorous plants is much like caring for a community...
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A 3D printed Hand Brings The Crowd To Their Feet
Earlier this year, I shared my story about open source designs and my 3D printed prosthetic hand to a room of 4,600+ at Intel’s Annual International Sales Conference in Las Vegas. I joined Jon Schull on stage, the founder of e-NABLE, an online group dedicated to open source 3D printable assistive devices.
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A 40-Year 'Conspiracy' at the VA
Four decades ago, in 1977, a conspiracy began bubbling up from the basements of the vast network of hospitals belonging to the Veterans Administration. Across the country, software geeks and doctors were puzzling out how they could make medical care better with these new devices called personal computers. Working sometimes at night or in their spare time, they started to cobble together a system that helped doctors organize their prescriptions, their CAT scans and patient notes, and to share their experiences electronically to help improve care for veterans...
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A Business Plan for Your Open Source Project
Open sourcing your code is only a small part of building a successful open source community. Like any new venture, you need a vision of what you want to achieve and a concrete plan that will take you there. You want to be able to answer questions about your project like: Who is this project geared towards? Why would someone want to use this code, let alone, contribute to it?What core problem am I trying to solve?
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A Community of Practice Is More Than a Website
Over the last year or so, the term communities of practice has entered the social media buzzword lexicon along with virtual collaboration, engagement, platforms, and Enterprise 2.0. Senior leaders want to establish them, new employees are being told to join them, and middle managers are being told to support them, but what, exactly are they? Read More »
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A Connected Garden Can Reap More Of What You Sow
You don't have a green thumb, but your devices might. [...] If you find yourself accidentally killing your plants, maybe it’s time to hand over the controls to somebody else. Make that something else—connected devices that use quantified data to nurture your plants into their most verdant and fruitful selves. Read More »
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A Doctor Leverages Open Source to Learn How to Code And Improve Medical Care in Africa
Judy Gichoya is a medical doctor from Kenya who became a software developer after joining the open source medical records project, OpenMRS. The open source project creates medical informatics software that helps health professionals collect and present data to improve patient care in developing countries. After seeing how effective the open medical records system was at increasing efficiency and lowering costs for clinics in impoverished areas of Africa, she began hacking on the software herself to help improve it. Then she set up her own implementation in the slums outside Nairobi, and has done the same for dozens of clinics since. This is a classic story of open source contributors, who join in order to scratch an itch. But Gichoya was a doctor, not a programmer. How did she make the leap?
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A Few Notes on the Enthusiasm Around 'Open Source' Health IT in the UK
There is a renewed vigor in healthcare IT. Lots of great [open source] projects curated by enthusiastic people, encouraging new thinking around the definition, development design and delivery of technology for healthcare. Here I’m thinking about DigiHealthCon, HANDI, NHS Hack Day and the eHealthOpenSource competition and Pipe and Hat Club. Read More »
A Framework For Building Products From Open Source Projects
If your experience with technology resembles mine in any way, you know intuitively that the projects we DIY are not the same as the products we spend money buying. This isn't a new observation in the open source community...Sarah Novotny, who led the Kubernetes community and was heavily involved in the Nginx and MySQL communities, emphatically articulated at the inaugural Open Core Summit that the open source project a company shepherds and the product that a company sells are two completely different things. Yet, project and product continue to be conflated by maintainers-turned-founders of commercial open source software (COSS) companies, especially (and ironically) when the open source project gets traction. This mistake gets repeated, I believe, because it's hard to mentally conceptualize how and why a commercial product should be different when the open source project is already being used widely.
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