My world on the web
Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue #395. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.
“Open source” is supposed to mean that everyone can see and use all the parts of the AI model, just like sharing games where everyone can see, use, and understand all its parts. But some companies say their AI models are open-source even when they aren’t sharing everything. This continues to confuse, dislocate, and disrupt individuals.
Most Big Ideas Have Loud Critics by Ian O’Byrne
This reminds me in part about Google and Android. Maybe it is all a part of the same story.
Our perhaps unsatisfying conclusion to this seven-app showdown exposes an important truth: the photo management software world is too complex for a one- or two-person dev team to properly handle. Unless we see some of these app-makers start to pool their resources together, it could be a while before we get a truly excellent self-hosted option to pry many of us away from Google.
A free and open-source operating system for various devices, based on the Android mobile platform.
Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.
ᔥ in Troy Hunt: Home Assistant, Pwned Passwords and Security Misconceptions ()
How a student project became one of the world’s most popular open-source apps, powering much of modern-day media, without ever creating a huge windfall for its developers.
Mapbox found themselves in a similar position to Mongo and Redis: they were subsidizing R&D for a handful of trillion-dollar tech giants.
In the Death of an Open Source Business Model, Joe Morrison laments at the new licensing restrictions of Mapbox, a reversal from the company’s previous business…
Lissa did not report Dan to the SPA. His decision to help her led to their marriage, and also led them to question what they had been taught about piracy as children. The couple began reading about the history of copyright, about the Soviet Union and its restrictions on copying, and even the original United States Constitution. They moved to Luna, where they found others who had likewise gravitated away from the long arm of the SPA. When the Tycho Uprising began in 2062, the universal right to read soon became one of its central aims.
we have to demand of our technology what we have of our food, clothing, medicine and other essential needs: visibility into how they’re supplied & sourced, understanding the workers & working conditions that shape them, and accountability when the system has failures. When the supply chain for Tylenol was vulnerable, the manufacturer addressed the issue directly. When consumers wanted to know their tuna was dolphin-safe, companies responded.
That raises a few key questions: Who makes your apps? Where are they sourced? Which apps do you use that were made by people you trust?
VCV Rack is an open-source virtual modular synthesizer.
How to find the millions of journal articles, ebooks, images, and other media available on JSTOR and Artstor as Open Access or free to everyone.
So WordPress and Wix are fighting one another – and I’m not talking about them competing for customers. Instead, the two website building heavyweights are having a brawl via the blogosphere. Here’s everything you need to know: Matt Mullenweg Calls Out Wix A few days ago, WordPress’ Founder Matt Mullenweg took
I’d love to see a lot more money poured into Free Software to solve some of the problems I’ve outlined above. A lot of it is due to a combination of:
- The massive mismatch between the number of developers working on Free Software projects, compared to the number of designers.
- The increasing amount of vendor lock-in, and decreasing interest in standards of interoperability .
- Duplication of effort and fragmentation across the Free Software landscape. Some of this is political, some social, and some (to be quite honest) because of ignorance.
We can do a lot better than this. I’d like to help, but right now I have more problems and questions than I do answers.
Ben Werdmüller (werd.io)The time is right for tech companies to make the shift into open protocols, in a way that allows businesses to make money, users to own their data, and a thousand new social networking interfaces to bloom. And I think that’s a progressive move for the web.
The key will be rapid iteration in the public interest, repeatedly testing not just the feasibility of such a protocol (whether you can build and maintain it at scale), but also its desirability (user risk) and viability (business risk). In other words, it’s not enough to make something work. It also has to be able to win user trust, serve as the foundation of an ecosystem, and allow businesses built on the platform to become valuable. As yet, open standards processes have not shown themselves to be capable of this kind of product development.
Doug Belshaw is sceptical about what is being proposed and feels that it focused on investors and regulators.
Ultimately, Twitter’s announcement is a distraction to the important work of building viable, interoperable alternatives to Big Tech. The thought of Dorsey and chums building an alternative to ActivityPub sounds a lot like the Rainforest Alliance. Given the mention of blockchain, I should imagine there will be a ‘token’ or cryptocurrency angle in there, too. And I’m not sure that’s in the long-term best interests of humanity.
For Stephen Downes, this is a response to the rise of distributed networks.
The sceptic in me wonders whether Twitter is merely trying to undermine existing distributed networks who have been bleeding traffic from the centralized social network.
I think that Michael Bishop captures my feelings best in a short post on his blog:
This is a note I’m posting to my WordPress blog that syndicates to Twitter. If you heart it, it will show up on my blog too. Open standards.
say, there are options. And I suspect there will be more open source options emerging in the future as interest among both organizations and individuals looking for more self-hosted cloud-like options that put the emphasis on privacy, data sovereignty, and local control grows.
Malcolm Blaney (unicyclic.com)It took me many years to join the FSF as a member, even though I have considered myself a supporter of Free Software for as long as I have written code. I’ve only been a member for a year, but today I emailed the FSF to cancel my membership. This makes me very sad as I really believe in the Free Software movement, but I refuse to contribute to an organisation that supports RMS and the views he is currently sharing.
This is part Google rolling a great new service and part Google taking one more step to destroy the open web. The concept of ‘HyperDocs’ emerges from the tools GSuite provides enabling teachers and students to create using Google Docs. Greg Kulowiec doesn’t define ‘HyperDocs’ directly but instead talks about the ways student and teachers can interact using Google Docs. What would be really great would be an open web designed with that capacity – much the way Tim Berners-Lee intended it in the first place. Maybe something like that is coming. In the meantime, we can use Google Docs.
Resist the siren song of the quick fix dietary advice of social media conglomerates, and setup your own blog and start building your course and disciplinary resources through a leafier, greener web.
I really think that the Raspberry Pi has been a very important event in the history of SBCs but today it falls behind in terms quality, performance and transparency. There are other affordable alternatives out there where developers have given more consideration to those issues.