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With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Open Library Environment (OLE) Project will convene the academic library community in the design of an Open Library Management System built on Service Oriented Architecture. The project leaders are a multi-national group of libraries dedicated to thinking beyond the current model of an Integrated Library System and to designing a new system that is flexible, customizable and able to meet the changing and complex needs of modern, dynamic academic libraries. The end product will be a design document to inform open source library system development efforts, to guide future library system implementations, and to influence current Integrated Library System vendor products.
We hooked it up to the Internet Archive's book scanning project, so that you can read the full text of all the out-of-copyright books they've made available. And we hope to add a print-on-demand feature, so that you can get nice paper copies of these scanned books, as well as a scan-on-demand feature, so you can fund the scanning of that out-of-copyright book you've always loved.
But we can only do so much on our own. Hopefully we've done enough to make it clear that this project is for real—not simply another pie-in-the-sky idea—but we need your help to make it a reality. So we're opening up the demo we've built so far, opening up the source code, opening up the mailing lists, and hoping you'll join us in building Open Library. It sure is going to be a fun ride.
—Aaron Swartz and the Open Library team, 16 July 2007
"The open source development model promises freedom to its participants: the freedom to download, test, modify, and put into production software without paying licensing fees."
Zebra supports large databases (more than ten gigabytes of data, tens of millions of records). It supports incremental, safe database updates on live systems. You can access data stored in Zebra using a variety of Index Data tools (eg. YAZ and PHP/YAZ) as well as commercial and freeware Z39.50 clients and toolkits.
Zebra is free software, available under the GPL license. It may be used by anyone without charge. If you wish to incorporate Zebra into a commercial software distribution, please contact us about alternative licenses.
Free and open-source software is good for you and good for the world. This is the best Mac software that we know of.
MapBuilder is a powerful, standards compliant geographic mapping client which runs in a web browser.
Geotools is used by a number of projects including Web Feature Servers, Web Map Servers, and desktop applications, as is described on this page. Some screenshots of Geotools in action are also available.
Programmers wishing to use GeoTools in their own applications can get more information from the Use page and the User Guide. Developers wishing to extend the GeoTools library can get started on the Develop page and the Developer Guide.
GeoTools releases can be found on the downloads page. The Geotools code base is maintained in a subversion repository.
GeoServer is an Open Source server that connects your information to the Geospatial Web.
With GeoServer you can publish and edit data using open standards. Your information is made available in a large variety of formats as maps/images or actual geospatial data. GeoServer's transactional capabilities offer robust support for shared editing. GeoServer's focus is ease of use and support for standards, in order to serve as 'glue' for the geospatial web, connecting from legacy databases to many diverse clients.
GeoServer supports WFS-T and WMS open protocols from the OGC to produce JPEG, PNG, SVG, KML/KMZ, GML, PDF, Shapefiles and more. More information on specific features of GeoServer can be found here, and some samples of GeoServer in action are in the gallery.
GeoServer is built on Geotools, the same Java toolkit that udig uses. GeoServer is a truly open community, with a well documented and modular codebase, so don't hesitate to get involved.
Open source. Open space. Open art. Open doors. Open questions. Open City?
Open Cities Toronto 2007 is a weekend-long web of conversation and celebration that asks: how do we collaboratively add more open to the urban landscape we share? What happens when people working on open source, public space, open content, mash up art, and open business work together? How do we make Toronto a magnet for people playing with the open meme?
You are invited to discuss, dance, debate, and download Toronto's potential to become an epicentre and an example of a community that thrives on openness. We've all chosen to live here for a reason - let's figure out how we can combine our talents to build a city-wide community of openness.
about...
Open Source is a conversation, four times a week on the radio and any time you like on the blog. We designed the show to invert the traditional relationship between broadcast and the web: we aren’t a public radio show with a web community, we’re a web community that produces a daily hour of radio.
OpenStreetMap allows you to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth.
From the website:
Welcome to FUH2.com, home of the official Hummer H2 salute. So...why all the fuss? Well, it breaks down like this:
- The H2 is the ultimate poseur vehicle. It has the chassis of a Chevy Tahoe and a body that looks like the original Hummer; i.e. it's a Chevy Tahoe in disguise.
- The H2 is a gas guzzler. Because it has a gross vehicle weight rating over 8500 lbs, the US government does not require it to meet federal fuel efficiency regulations. Hummer isn't even required to publish its fuel economy (owners indicate that they get around 10 mpg for normal use). So while our brothers and sisters are off in the Middle East risking their lives to secure America's fossil fuel future, H2 drivers are pissing away our "spoils of victory" during each trip to the grocery store.
- The H2 is a polluter. Based on G.M.'s optimistic claim that it gets13 mpg, an H2 will produce 3.4 metric tons of carbon emissions in a typical year, nearly double that of G.M.'s Chevrolet Malibu sedan.
- The H2 is a death machine. You'd better hope that you don't collide with an H2 in your economy car. You can kiss your ass goodbye thanks to the H2's massive weight and raised bumpers. Too bad you couldn't afford an urban assault vehicle of your own. Or could you...?
- The H2 is a tax loophole. Under the current tax laws, business owners can deduct nearly half the cost of their H2s. If you are in the highest tax bracket, that's a tax savings of nearly $10,000! The government rewards you more savings for buying an H2 than you'd get for buying an electric car.
From the website:
Sophie's raison d'être is to enable people to create robust, elegant rich-media, networked documents without recourse to programming. We have word processors, video, audio and photo editors but no viable options for assembling the parts into a complex whole except tools like Flash which are expensive, hard to use, and often create documents with closed proprietary file formats. Sophie promises to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of creative people.
Cartographers have long used flow maps to show the movement of objects from one location to another, such as the number of people in a migration, the amount of goods being traded, or the number of packets in a network. The advantage of flow maps is that they reduce visual clutter by merging edges. Most flow maps are drawn by hand and there are few computer algorithms available. We present a method for generating flow maps using hierarchical clustering given a set of nodes, positions, and flow data between the nodes. Our techniques are inspired by graph layout algorithms that minimize edge crossings and distort node positions while maintaining their relative position to one another. We demonstrate our technique by producing flow maps for network traffic, census data, and trade data.
From the website:
Funambol is open source mobile application server software that provides push email, address book and calendar (PIM) data synchronization, application provisioning, and device management for wireless devices and PCs, leveraging standard protocols. For users, this means BlackBerry-like capabilities on commodity handsets.
Funambol is also a software development platform for mobile applications. It provides client and server side Java APIs, and facilitates the development, deployment and management of any mobile project. Funambol is the de facto standard implementation of the Open Mobile Alliance Data Synchronization and Device Management protocols (OMA DS and DM, formerly known as SyncML).
Van der Linden spends quite a bit of time railing on the inferiority of prevailing proprietary software standards, but also notes that Linux has a long way to come, especially in the areas of software availability and integration. When asked about the biggest barrier, he states that it’s the fact that Linux is not already number one. While this is not a specific failing of the open source model, the fact that (at least on the desktop) open source came along fairly late in the game, and with substantially less marketing clout suggests that there are perhaps markets where Linux is not destined to succeed.
The first two examples of reverse engineering that the article gives are open source projects. The ability of open source developers to reverse engineer the competing instant messaging clients developed by internet companies like Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft has had a dual effect – firstly, the article points out, it has allowed innovation by letting third-party developers (open source or otherwise) to create hybrid programs that bridge the inherent gaps in these incompatible protocols. Additionally, the presence of quality open source messaging software has helped to further the legitimacy of open source platforms such as Linux.
The second example is that of Samba, an open source program that allows Microsoft Windows based file sharing services to be both hosted on or accessed by any number of platforms. Because of Samba, users of Apple’s Mac OS X or Linux can interoperate with Microsoft Windows networks. The article points out that this has (also) lent legitimacy to Linux as a platform and helped it to compete in a world of proprietary standards.
Because of the decentralized nature of the open source movement uses of technology that require strict licenses is necessarily limited as there is no governing body to obtain and regulate use of licenses. This is especially true with licenses that prohibit disclosure of the underlying technology, as does the license from the DVD Copy Control Association. As a result of this, the extremely aggressive legal tactics of the content-owning industry pose a potential threat to the ability to choose what computer software to use, although it is interesting to note that it’s not clear that they have actually posed any hindrance to the open source movement.
There is an established idea in the usability community that software developers do not make good usability designers. This proves problematic for the open source movement, since one of the central tenets is that the software is conceived and developed by individual software developers. There is neither outside perspective available to mandate the hiring of usability professionals, nor capital available to do so. Usability professionals, the paper states, are not prevalent in open source projects the way that developers are because there are fewer of them to begin with, and therefore fewer peers to recognize any individual contributions to usability – peer recognition being one of the most agreed upon incentives for open source development.
The paper outlines some of the other problems related to usability in open source, notably that usability design works best when done before any software development, anathema to the open source model of progressive improvement on rough development. Furthermore, many open source projects try to emulate commercial software, leaving little room for usability innovation. Finally, in a collaborative community with little central authority, it is logistically delicate to remove excessive functionality that may confound usability.
By way of introduction, the paper makes two points – first the obvious point that a complete abandonment of traditional property rights in favor of totally open licensing would have taken away the very thing that had made these companies successful in the first place – the proprietary differences between their software and their competitors. It points out as well that an initial hurdle for a potential alliance between corporation and open source is the latter’s lack of central management – with whom can a corporation negotiate without a central leader to definitively represent an open source project as large as, say, Linux?
The first case study is that of Apple, a company that faced increasing obsolescence of its core operating system (Mac OS) by the mid-1990s, and was unable to come up with a viable proprietary alternative. Apple’s strategy was to “embrace and enhance” existing open source technologies, and to this end it made headlines when it released the core of its new operating system, Mac OS X, as a fully open source project. It retained its competitive advantage, however, by releasing only material which was essentially already available, keeping proprietary the graphical interface which differentiated its product from competitors’ and other high-level components.
IBM embraced open source products in a similar way when the chose Apache, the open source web server, as the basis for their new line of server products. This adoption proved to be a boon for the Apache project, which received support from a major corporation. IBM’s adoption of Linux came later, but its portability (one of the foci of the open source movement) eventually allowed IBM to use Linux as the standard platform for a variety of products. In IBM’s commercial model, money isn’t made off the products themselves, but in the pairing of software with hardware, support, consulting, and other services.
Sun, although initially hesitant to embrace open source, eventually opened up several of its projects under restrictive licenses that allowed people to view and modify the source, but not to redistribute it for profit without paying royalties. In this way, Sun protected its property rights and proprietary advantage while reaping the benefits of community involvement with and contribution to its products.
Two important points can be drawn from these cases and from the article itself: firstly it is interesting to note that in the first two cases, where companies adopted previously existing products, they adopted products whose licenses allowed commercial derivative works. The license governing Linux and many other open source projects does not allow this; this is an important distinction. The second point is the contrast between Apple and Sun’s strategy – open parts vs. partly open. While Apple retains competitive advantage by opening only parts of their product (open parts), Sun retains their advantage by opening their products with important limitations that preserve that advantage (partly open).
Krishnamurthy, Sandeep, Cave or Community? An Empirical Examination of 100 Mature Open Source Projects, May 2002.
The value of this paper is represented in its byline: “An empirical examination of 100 mature open source projects.” The author used as his source one of the premier open source project management websites, home to tens of thousands of projects, and picked a sample that had reached the highest level – “mature.” As the paper notes, the projects sampled had been in existence for 18 months on average, and had released several versions of their product, therefore having the best chance of representing the community development possible within open source projects.
The paper’s most dramatic finding is that most mature open source projects are fairly small – the median number of developers in the sampled projects was four, with a lone developer being the most common case.
Other findings included that most projects did not generate very much discussion, in contrast to the portrait painted by the media of a bustling, communicative group of developers. The study found that products with more developers were viewed and downloaded more often, and also that products with more developers had smaller leadership bases.
Although this study is straightforward and not accompanied by a wealth of discussion, the findings speak fairly loudly toward discrediting a lot of the prevailing image of the open source project. Even the author’s tone in compiling this bibliography suggests that most projects are large networks of disparate talent, colluding to create products that are extensively peer-reviewed for quality. This study shows that to not necessarily be the case, although it is unclear what subjective level of success the surveyed projects had obtained – projects selected for other variables could yield different data, and the discussion in the study suggests that projects in other stages of life (earlier than “mature”) could carry different characteristics as well.
The paper draws an interesting comparison between the corporate sponsorship of the open source movement, which the literature suggest is related to scientific research both in its driving motivations (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2003) and its origins, and the employment of the scientific community by pharmaceutical companies. The benefits of both the volunteer open source and academic scientific communities are similar, and companies find success in leveraging these benefits by sponsoring those communities.
An essential point is made when the article points out that open source projects have been most effective in communities where the users are technically-minded, presumably because these users are more willing and able to compensate for the open source community’s lack of progress in the areas of user friendliness and documentation (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2003). The paper describes the history and structure of four specific successful open source projects; all of them products meant for system administrators and programmers, rather than end users. This and the paper’s characterization of the open source community as “elitist” seem to support my contention that a community of technically-minded developers creates products suitable for technically-minded users, rather than everyday end users.
The paper discusses at length the contrast between the open source model of leadership, in which there is no “formal authority” that must be obeyed, but only the “real authority” of respected peers who have made leading contributions that are congruent with the developer’s goals. The paper cites evidence that there is little mirroring in commercial software development operations of the open source principles of community visibility of individual contributors and the general desire to make the project accessible to all potential contributors.
Three commercial strategies embracing open source are outlined: the symbiotic relationship, in which companies provide components of an open source project that are either missing from or complimentary to the community’s development; the “code release” strategy, in which companies find it profitable to release internally-developed code as open source in order to stimulate other parts of their profit model; and the support model, in which companies provide products that assist the mass success of the open source model itself, rather than working within it.
In its examination of the first question (why do people work on open source projects?), this paper highlights a point essential to my thesis – that there is a substantial group of software users who are incapable of being software developers – i.e. that the “users as developers” model (von Hippel, 2001) is at best partially true. A subset of users who are either computer hobbyists or “hackers” are the ones doing the actual development of open source software. The article lists several potential motivations: a intellectual gratification similar to that found in scientific research, a passion for the art form of software development, a pleasure taken in an unrestricted creativity not found in today’s corporate world, and (as in Crowston, et al, 2003) visibility to potential employers.
This paper describes the genesis of an open source project as stemming from an “unfilled market” – an individual has a problem for which no commercial product exists, identifies others facing the same problem, and as progress is made in solving that problem, the community of people working to solve their common problem builds and is fostered by constant communication of progress. Leadership emerges naturally from this process – those most involved in the project and most willing/able to progress the project become natural leaders. Specific tasks are not delegated – the project relies on the willingness of its members to solve problems of their choosing as they arise. If this does not effectively solve the project’s problems, an impasse is created, and the project will fade.
This model relies on the assumption that all problems faced by a project will be interesting to and solvable by some member of that project. This paper points out that this is not always the case – certain “non-sexy” problems, including user-friendliness, documentation, and support, fall by the wayside. Their solution in the open source community has been brought by commercial ventures with a “hybrid” business model – that is, they rely on volunteer efforts for the product themselves, but then profit by providing the elements not provided by volunteers themselves. This establishes the essential symbiosis between open source projects and commercial ventures in which the benefits of the volunteer/community model are present, yet corporate sponsorship lends both security and profitable, requisite gap filling.
This paper is less clear in its answering of the third question (how can open source projects challenge established commercial standards?) although it introduces two important points. The first is that there exists “the tendency for that which is ahead to get further ahead, for that which loses advantage to lose further advantage.” The second point the paper introduces is that choice of a product is influenced less by total popularity of that product and more by popularity within a social network.
Crowston, Kevin et al. Defining Open Source Software Success,Twenty-Fourth International Conference on Information Systems, 2003.
This is a paper in the scholarly tradition that examines previous attempts to define what makes an open source software project successful, and then “reexamines” the culture of open source projects to suggest new measures. The article closes by analyzing measures of success suggested by a primary source from the open source community – the forums on a popular site dedicated to the movement.
The traditional measures of success listed are fairly predictable – most notably “quality” in the general sense. A number of measures from computer science literature three decades old are listed – among them understandability, completeness, testability, and efficiency. Proposed measures of user satisfaction in the open source community are dismissed as non-representative, since measurable feedback requires involvement in the projects themselves, which is not necessarily a complete sample of users not to mention not likely to encompass users with negative opinions. Amount of use is similarly difficult to measure due to the idiosyncrasies of open source distribution.
The paper’s own suggestions include measures much more specific to open source development: project output, level of activity on a project in a given timeframe, professional development as a result of contribution to projects, etc. While these measures certainly speak to contributors to open source projects, questions must be raised about the overarching goals of open source projects implied by these measures. If the goal is to solely to stimulate the developers involved, then these measures can be seen as appropriate, however this hobby-group mentality cannot be solely responsible for the fact that large parts of the global economy rely on open source. These measurements speak nothing to the need to create quality products that serve a real purpose, or the need to serve that purpose better than competitive commercial products.
What is telling is that in the article’s analysis of forum comments by those involved in open source projects reveals a similarly self-centered attitude. The top three measures of success found in this analysis were developer satisfaction, user involvement, and developer involvement, with user satisfaction, an important concern in the development of any product, ranking only fourth. It seems curious that open source has seen success as a model at all, given that the satisfaction of those creating the products is much more highly valued than the satisfaction of those actually using them. While other literature specifically points out that developer and user are supposed to be one and the same (von Hippel, 2001), this is only partially true in software development (Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2003), and I argue that open source will enjoy only niche success if a developer-centric attitude prevails.
The article acknowledges the prevailing wisdom that user innovation communities “shouldn’t exist,” and that product development has traditionally been the dealing of manufacturers and commercial enterprises in general. These commercial enterprises benefit from the economies of scale that come from developing a product that can be sold to many users and protected from competition, rather than lone users developing products and obtaining marketplace protection for them.
However, the article continues, these communities do exist, and can be even more successful than competing commercial ventures. It outlines three conditions for the existence of successful user innovation communities: a sufficient incentive to innovate, an incentive to reveal any innovations made, and a competitive distribution of such innovations relative to commercial products.
The article’s most salient emphasis, however, was that on the sensitivity to specific user needs available in user-innovated products. While this was repeatedly cast as a positive point – that the users themselves naturally have better and more up-to-date information about their needs and that manufacturers with conflicting goals could create sub-optimal products, thereby costing the users an “agency cost” – this point has its negative aspects as well. This condition is only a positive one when communities are homogenous; that is, they all have the same needs. Given similar communities with slightly different needs, the tendency to create products that conform perfectly to those needs could create a fragmented marketplace of many similar products with essentially superficial differences. With this type of fragmentation, it could hinder the ability of any one product to gain enough momentum to continually fund or stimulate development. Specific to the software case, a fragmented market also decreases compatibility, an issue of paramount importance in today’s networked world.
Blizzard Entertainment sued a group of volunteer gamers who created free, noncommercial, open-source software to allow Blizzard game owners to play the games over the Internet. Claiming that the gamers reverse engineered Blizzard’s own Battle.net server software to make their own BnetD server software, Blizzard cited anti-circumvention violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Both Battle.net servers and BnetD servers were available for free online to enable online game play. However, BnetD was created as an alternative to Battle.net to fix some connection difficulties that some users encountered while using Battle.net.
Blizzard attempted to stop distribution of BnetD, alleging that the software has been used to permit play of pirated Blizzard games. However, the volunteer developers did not design BnetD for this purpose, nor were they are using BnetD for this purpose. The free software was a legitimate use and could not be bluntly labeled as a piracy device. Blizzard argued that the developers reverse engineered sections of the game, thus violating Blizzard’s End User License Agreement (EULA). The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) represented the programmers and declared that BnetD was a legal free product which worked with the original product in order to benefit game owners. The court ruled in favor of Blizzard, ultimately stating that reverse engineering and emulating of Blizzard software in this case were illegal.
The consequences of the ruling were detrimental to game upgrades and user enhancements. If this decision set the precedent, user-developed programs that work with original products would be banned. Furthermore, consumer choice would be limited by the available products. Since users would only be authorized to use a certain company’s products with that same company’s accessories together, this would have a profound impact on software and game products. In a similar analogy, imagine if Brand A’s eraser had to be used in conjunction with Brand A’s pencil. What would happen if computer users were forced to run only Microsoft products with Microsoft Windows? What if gamers could only play certain games with specific designated programs and accessories? Inevitably, such precedent would drastically reduce competition in the marketplace in addition to loss of both innovation and user-generated creativity.
Howver, the opinion of the court written by Justice Brown finds that Pavlovich cannot be forced to stand trial in California for the publishing of DeCSS on his web site. Pavlovich is not a California resident, performs no business in California, and was not actively encouraging California residents to use his algorithm to harm Californinan businesses. Brown determined that he cannot be held responsible for any negative economic impacts on California businesses that his posting caused.
The outcome of this case is important when considering the Dmitry Skylarov situation. Skylarov was detained for months for breaking a law of a country which he was not a citizen of, nor was he present in at the time he allegedly violated the DMCA. Not too long after, the courts are ruling that the liability can be restricted by state lines.
Another interesting aspect to this case is the dissenting opinion by Justice Baxter, particularly his wording. He critizies Pavlovich's "network of 'open source' associates'" in their efforts "to undermine and defeat the very purposes of hte licensed CSS encryption." Baxter tries to connect open source and piracy, a misconception that many people have. This association hurts legitimate developers and their efforts.
Baxter's opinions also details the inherent incompatabilities with the open source movement and closed DRM. An open source project could never be licensed by the DVD-CCA because the stipulations would never allow certain parts of the code to be revealed. He also compilcates the decision by discussing the fact that the whole point of the the DMCA to restrict playback ability. Whatever their motivations were, they were making use of a technology that the DVD-CCA should have full control of and was developed through illegal means under US law. Baxter determines that, jurisdiction issues asside, the LiViD developers should be held responsible for their development with an illegal technology.
In interpreting this case, the court claimed that BNETD was in violation of several provisions and was not protected by the reverse engineering for interoperability exemption. BNETD did not check to see if the user had a valid CD Key before allowing them to connect to the server. The court interpreted this as circumvention, as BNETD allowed users to experience online multiplayer games with illegal copies of Blizzard software.
This case determines that plug-ins could be held responsible for their functionality when applied to pirated software. Had the plug-in been designed to bypass CD Key checks and then connect to Battle.net, the decision would make more sense. However, BNETD wrote the program to connect to their own servers, and just didn't happen to check to for a valid software copy. Holding plug-in writers accountable for license checking is a dangerous precedent. Open source developers won't want to write a plug-in if they can be sued for the misuse of their product in combination with pirated software. The right to author extensions to software and market them has been around for years before the DMCA and now has been compromised by the misuse of its provisions.
Current proprietary systems attempt “security through obscurity.” The algorithms are often weak and prone to cracking, and simply hopes that no one will figure out the keys. Opening the format has the benefits of criticism. Everyone will be allowed to debate the merits and the strengths of the systems, as well as offer suggested improvements, ensuring that the open DRM will be the strongest.
It also suggests that an open standard can expand the market for DRM. While the market was generated by media content providers, Sun envisions that the needs of businesses and health care will far outweigh the media companies. Securely protecting business documents and health records is a need that DRM will logically be extended too.
The modularity of the architecture allows for adaptability with future technologies and compatability across multiple formats. While this system has its skeptics in groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it has received some backhanded complements from scholars like Lawrence Lessig, stating that if you have to DRM, you want Sun's version.
Sun's DReaM architecture is a strong example of how opinion source development can be used to help copyright holders and consumers by encouraging technological development.
Episode #6 of the Boing Boing Boing podcast is ready for downloading. Our guest for this edition is author Steven Johnson, whose new book "The Ghost Map" my blog-mate Pesco describes as:
An account of an 1854 cholera outbreak on London's Broad Street [and] a magnificent combination of science thriller, cultural history, and celebration of cartography as a powerful tool to help us understand the dynamics of urban life.
Stallman advocates more direct, individual ownership versus corporate or “unseen ownership”. Society needs more information made directly available to citizens, and our insistence that the author is more important than the user is misguided and harmful. Voluntary cooperation is needed to create an online commons, a world of resources and tools both academic and creative, that we can take and grow from. These essays illustrate how the public domain is good for society, and the most important thing to citizens is freedom.
Another brainchild of Stallman’s, the GNU Public License or GPL, is directly responsible for the emergence of Creative Commons licensing online. It was a way to take back the copyright protections and control that had been increasingly handed over to large corporations. It stresses the importance of the public domain and its necessity for all creative individuals.
There has been a recent moral schism between Open Source/GNU and the Creative Commons world. Stallman believes that Creative Commons is starting to veer away from the original ideals of Open Source, and does not have enough legal ground or strict-enough rules to govern it. He believes Creative Commons allows for too much misuse and misinterpretation, and no longer wants his name referenced with it. Stallman disagrees with the options Creative Commons allows for strictly commercial uses, and the restriction on derivative works. These are valid concerns for someone whose name is still attached to Creative Commons history. But giving more control to copyright content owners, and allowing people to license their work as they wish means just that – there needs to be room for everyone’s interests and goals. It is better to have these varied options and create the desired public domain, than to not have it at all.
The Tacos library project provides components and ajax behaviour for the Tapestry java web application framework. Most of the functionality is based on the exceptional dojo javascript library. Thanks dojo!
It's intent is to provide a library of high quality components that may be used in your tapestry application, as well as provide a core infrastructure for using ajax related logic in these and your own components and pages.
Nice javascript library that could be helpful. It has a widget for date and time...