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A recent blog posting at The Guardian about the US “Special 301” rules has generated deep concern around the global open source community. It points (via a blog posting by Edinburgh University law lecturer Andres Guadamuz) to this year’s recommendations from the controversially-named International Intellectual Property Alliance, which describes itself as “a private sector coalition……

You can read about it here and then decide for yourself whether to sign it as well.

If you distribute Open Source software containing encryption from the United States, you are subject to US export controls, yes. But are there any real restrictions? The only thing that the law requires you to do (for Open Source) is send an email to [email protected] with the URL. So why do SourceForge and Google impose…

Yesterday Matt Mullenweg announced the establishment of the WordPress Foundation. It’s goals, among others, are “to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software”. He further elaborates: The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and…

I love stories of user-driven innovation. Here’s one I just discovered: the Magic Lantern firmware upgrade for the Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera. Trammel Hudson tells the story of his elegant and vital hacks: Magic Lantern introduction from Trammell Hudson on Vimeo. More awesomely, at 08:11 in the video (and here on the Wiki)…

This afternoon I heard this story on NPR. It’s not the first time OpenStreetMap was mentioned as an asset in the relief effort. It was also mentioned three days ago in a story sourced from the Associated Press. Open Source, open data, and open standards make it possible to not only optimize for the common…