Category: FOSS

GPL3 Seminar in Sydney – November

The University of NSW CyberLaw Centre will be running a GPL3 Seminar sometime in November. They are after input, speakers and feedback about what needs to be covered. Contact them to have your say to ensure the conference covers issues that affect developers and our community. The CyberLaw centre have been doing a bunch of great events and research about FOSS licensing, copyright and other legal issues. It should be a very interesting event 🙂

AWESOME! OpenSource WA to stay open!

I love it when community efforts can lead to tangible positive outcomes!

So now the Opensource WA resource centre is staying open.

Mr Grocott denied there was any threat to funding and said the Government recognised that greater investment in open-source software was needed for WA to stay competitive in a market of increasing importance to both business and consumers.

Rock!

The space between two moments

These last four weeks have been pretty crazy. I haven’t had a moment to really catch up on anything, but I’m slowly getting there so for people waiting on me please keep being patient 🙂

First there was two weeks on the road. A week in Canberra talking to Government people, universities, corporate types and of course community people about FOSS. I’m putting together some pretty interesting documents which should get some good support from Australian Government Agencies, so stay tuned for that.

Then I helped run a seminar for ASK-OSS and spent a few days in Brisbane running the same conference up there. Both events were a lot of fun and very interesting. It was great to meet Dan Ravicher who is a great speaker, and his partner Alex who is a street smart lawyer defending the rights of disadvantaged people in New York! Alex was a very cool lady to meet! It was wonderful to meet with Mark Webbink again, I hope everything is going ok Mark.

Then this last two weeks, I’ve been sick. ‘The flu with my RSI starting to play-up again’ sick. Not very nice, particularly when one has soooo much to do!

I had loads of wonderful people from SLUG come around on the 26th and pitch in to help pack up all the global Software Freedom Day team packs for shipping on Monday. It was a great day, and we packed up basically 150 packages in just under a day. Many thanks to all those people (plus Jeff and Sridhar) 😉 who put in a champion effort!

What else. We’ve had teams register late for Software Freedom Day almost every day, so it looks like there will be over 200 teams this year, and it is only the third year! I’ve got an event running in Sydney which has technologists, journalists, politicians and culturalists giving talks, as well as some useful workshops so it should be a lot of fun for anyone in Sydney who can come along 🙂 And I’m chatting to Alice Brennan today from Triple J about covering Software Freedom Day on HACK, the week day afternoon news on Triple J (and one of my favourite radio shows). More details on that when I know.

Phew! What are we doing today, Brain? …

Am I a “Young Achiever”?

I was very excited to be nominated by Brenda Aynsley for the Pearcey Award for Young Achievers. I’m not sure exactly what they are looking for, but if I am awarded it I’ll be one of two women to ever get it 🙂 I’m pretty happy just to have been nominated and I hope that I get a chance to get up and talk about how FOSS has helped me have all the opportunity in the world to do great things alongside great people.

Rock on 🙂

Thanks Canberra FOSSites :)

Yesterday afternoon a bunch of wonderful people came to meet for a coffee/beer at the All Bar Nun in Canberra. It was a great few hours and awesome to catch up with everyone that came (and a few new faces to attach to nicks :). I met up with Chris Smart who is behind the Kororaa project, Kristy Bennetts, David Symons (bimberi), Paul Wayper, Steve Walsh, Ingrid Finnane, Antti Roppola, Justin Freeman and more 🙂 Thanks everyone! I’ll definitely be coming back to Canberra soon as there were so many yummy dinners offered 🙂

I’ve also been talking to a bunch of Government agencies about FOSS and there will be some great new case studies of FOSS in research available on the ASK-OSS website in the coming weeks. Also, anyone in Sydney next week should take the opportunity to come along to a free legal and research seminar about FOSS, with Mark Webbink and Dan Ravicher speaking. Details on the ASK-OSS website.

Your freedom – a dream within an email

Below is something I’ve written up for one of the local universities to publish in their paper about Software Freedom Day. Feel free to copy and send to more people or organisations to try and get the point across. I’ve left the links there plain for easy copy and paste to an email 🙂

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights [1] is a set of basic human rights that most people would agree would be a bare minimum. Not often are our basic rights thought of in the context of technology, but with more and more our lives are dependent on technology, it is a rapidly growing concern. Technologies that matter to our freedom are used in our voting systems, our leisure, our work, education, art and our communication. What does this mean to you? It means that the basic human freedoms you take for granted are only as free as the technology they are based on.

Transparent and accountable technologies are vital to ensuring we can protect our freedoms. Think about e-Government systems such as electronic voting. When the systems running our voting is proprietary or closed, it means that we can’t be sure what the software actually does, so how can we trust the results? The issues with the Diebold [2] voting systems in the US is testament [3] to the need for transparent systems that are trustworthy. Think about other software you use everyday that is proprietary software and apply the fact that you can’t be sure what it is actually doing! Does your email system send copies of your mail to a third party? Is your web browser, logging and automatically sending your browse history to someone? The most interesting case recently was when Sony purposely added spyware [4] to theirmusic CDs that silently and automatically installed itself onto MicrosoftWindows systems to search for piracy breaches. Their greed has spawned a whole new wave of viruses and is a gross breach of privacy.

So what do I mean by transparent? Well some software gives you access to the source code, such as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) which ensures that you can know (or get checked) without any question what exactly a piece of software will do. It avoids nasty surprises, spyware, result rigging and all kinds of issues that we can’t be sure to avoid in proprietary software. Proprietary software keeps the source code locked away from public scrutiny which means that there is no way to know exactly what the software actually does, and no way to trust it to safeguard your human rights.

Software Freedom Day is a global initiative with over 150 countries participating on Saturday September 16th. Our event will be right here at UNSW and we will be having a full day of talks about this topic from political, media, arts and of course technology viewpoints. The day is completely free and there will be giveaways, prizes and further information about how you can do your bit to help ensure technology doesn’t act to lock down our human rights. Come along and meet a wide range of people, all working together to help ensure our freedoms are maintained by the technologies of tomorrow. The event information is up at http://softwarefreedomday.org/teams/oceania/au/sydney

[1] – http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
[2] – http://safevoting.org/videos/diebold_med.mov
[3] – http://www.bradblog.com/?p=2433
[4] – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4400148.stm