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Freeze Peach is an internet cafe in Astoria, Queens that runs Ubuntu on all of its public computers! The cafe also maintains a not-for-profit community site called Astorians.com.
It reminds me of “linuxcaffe” in Toronto.
Perhaps I can donate my spare copies of TheOpenCD for distribution at Freeze Peach.
Big news from the Standards Blog: Andy Updegrove writes, “OpenDocument Approved by ISO/IEC Members.”
Updegrove begins, “The six month voting window for ISO/IEC adoption of the OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard closed on May 1, and at midnight (Geneva time) last night it was announced internally that ODF had been approved by the ISO members eligible and interested in casting a vote. The vote passed with broad participation and no negative votes (there were a few abstentions), and ODF is now ISO/IEC 26300. While there are still some procedural steps internal to ISO/IEC that are required before the official text of the standard will be finalized and issued, these steps (described below) are formalities rather than gating factors.”
“With adoption of ODF by ISO/IEC now assured, software that implements the standard will now become more attractive to those European and other government purchasers for whom global adoption by ISO/IEC is either desirable, or required. Given the ongoing unhappiness in Europe with Microsoft over what the EU regards as unacceptable bundling and other practices, this may be particularly significant, especially when taken with the desire of many European and other purchasers to use open source products whenever possible. Offerings such as OpenOffice and KOffice therefore should receive a boost in appeal and usage, as well as for-sale versions, such as Sun’s StarOffice and IBM’s Internet-based offering.”
The OpenOffice.org team also issued a press release on ISO approval today.
We are planning to attend Wikimania 2006!
“As well as being a forum for research and ideas about the Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikimania will bring together those interested in free and open source software, free knowledge initiatives, and other wiki projects worldwide. Wikimania will serve as a venue for people across fields, including software and hardware development, library and information science, knowledge management, journalism, law, policy, and education to share ideas about the future of free knowledge and open-source content projects.”
It would be great to find people interested in Wikipages.com while we’re out there, and I always like traveling to Boston.
There is also a Call for Participation soliciting ideas for workshops, tutorials, panels, papers, posters and presentations.
The Participatory Culture Foundation announces the beta release of Democracy Player for Linux. Packages are available for Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora.
It’s also mentioned on Slashdot, but the discussion seems to have gotten quickly distracted.
Appleseed is the way that social networking will inevitably evolve: it is an open source, distributed social networking platform. Just as anyone can set up an email server and send emails to users on any other, when this project reaches fruition, anyone will be able to set up a social networking server and befriend users on any other.
In addition, its modular architecture will allow users and developers to create plugins for it (like Firefox’s extensions), that will surely make it grow in many unexpected directions. I’d like to see filesharing (in particular, for open source programs) and bookmark sharing (like del.icio.us) implemented as modules.
We arrived at Swarthmore just in time for the very end of Lawrence Lessig’s talk, which I had really wanted to see. Everyone felt that it had been very informative and interesting! Hopefully I can find a transcript somewhere.
We also had the Pirate Party (pictures coming soon)! I learned about Electric Sheep for the first time, which was projected on a screen as a visual backdrop for the party.
Saturday included a number of sessions of interest, and in the evening I presented Wikipages in a “Lightning Talk.” There was a high level of interest among attendees. We also learned about the free culture aspects of games, whose rules apparently cannot be controlled by patent or trademark. Nelson taught us “Stairball,” which has recently been invented at Swarthmore. (See Adam Lizzi’s website for more.)
I also sold three copies of The Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org, and found a high level of interest in OpenOffice among attendees (of course!).
Christian Einfeldt tipped me off to this news: Portland, Oregon, will “operate a citywide Wi-Fi network that will provide free wireless Internet access and substantially improved public services to Portland residents.”
Mobile Tech News is running the story.
“MetroFi, the leader in designing, building and operating free citywide Wi-Fi networks, announced today it has been selected by the City of Portland, the 28th largest city in the United States, to deliver and operate a citywide Wi-Fi network… The announcement demonstrates Portland’s cutting-edge vision for citywide smart parking meters, universal wireless connectivity and affordable Internet access for its residents. The MetroFi Portland system will be built at no cost to the city, and the City of Portland expects to save millions of dollars in productivity and wireless Internet service fees by using the network.”
Cities save millions by making their existing processes more efficient, and the cost of letting citizens use the extra capacity is essentially zero. So why would any government listen for half a second to a predatory company trying to defend its network monopoly against something clearly better in all respects? (Remember the law passed in Pennsylvania making this sort of wireless network illegal?)
“The City of Portland, which spans 134 square miles and has a population of approximately 540,000, will be blanketed by a state-of-the-art Wi-Fi mesh network. Residents and visitors of Portland will have wireless access to 1Mbps Wireless Internet at no cost. Portland’s public works field personnel and first responders will have greatly expanded access to wireless network services to facilitate more responsive data communications.”
I am extremely excited and pleased by this development!
The FreeCulture.org 2006 National Summit will be held at Swarthmore College this coming weekend (April 21-23).
I am hoping to see Lawrence Lessig speak (here’s the schedule). Also presenting will be EFF, Downhill Battle, Creative Commons, myself (for Wikipages), and others. There are remixing workshops on the agenda, and of course, the Pirate Party.
The next step in Firefox’s web domination is a community-organized video ads contest, Firefox Flicks.
KOffice is a competitor to OpenOffice, yes, but it is also a strategic ally: it has transitioned to using ODF as its default file format.
The press release states, “The spread of the OpenDocument file format is widely regarded as one of the most important developments in the whole IT industry right now. It will give users world-wide the possibility to control their own documents and also ensure that all documents can be read at any time in the future.
KOffice was the first office suite that announced support for OpenDocument and now the second to announce it as the default file format after OpenOffice.org. This makes KOffice a member of a very select group and will lead to new deployment opportunities. Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability with other office software that also use OpenDocument.”
Congratulations and thanks to the developers on this major release!