Category: 4. Society-at-large
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Open Source Explained Lecture in TUM Lecture Series on Digital Sustainability
Today I had the pleasure of giving a talk about open source in the TUM lecture series on digital sustainability, organized by Alexander Pretschner of TU Munich, bidt, and TU Wien. The talk was in German and streamed, but not recorded. Below please find my slides.
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The Pegel Alarm Open Data Challenge (a Thread)
The struggles of @LilithWittmann to make the Handelsregister of Germany freely available and easily accessible reminded me of our own struggles with different German state-level organizations, trying to get access to open data for rivers and water ways in 2014. 1/
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Open Source and the Hyphen
You may have seen the repeated fights over whether open-source software should be spelled with a hyphen or not. It just flared up on Wikipedia, again. The rules are clear, in my opinion. Still, the situation is a misery.
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Open Source is Not The Infrastructure of Modern Society…
Cloud services are the actual infrastructure. Open source is the blueprints and building materials of our digital infrastructure. Infrastructure should be built from open source, but it is important to understand the difference between software and a service, because there is a person in the middle, the one operating the service. There will be no…
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A Simple Fun Example of How a Computer Reads Intent Wrong
I read an article about India and wanted to know how much money “2 lakh” is in Euro. The search engine responded as follows:
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Whose Open Source Freedom is it Anyway?
It is 2021 and there is still a lot of fighting about “freedom” in open source software development. Here is an analytical breakdown of the issues. Freedom can refer to people or artifacts (source code). When it refers to people, it is typically freedom of choice regarding what to do. There are three main roles…