Mike’s Digital Laboratory

From Wire & Twine: 50 Ways to Help the Planet

“Going green” doesn’t have to be a daunting task that means sweeping life changes. Simple things can make a difference.

The contents of this list might not be new, but they bear repeating. Sometimes it takes a few reminders for things take root.

Bruce Perens on Open Source License:

The Open Source initiative has, to date, approved 73 licenses. How many do you really need? If you’re a company or individual producing Open Source software, no more than 4. And you can get along with just 2 of them.

It’s hard enough trying to explain what open source licensing is to the legal department, but just go ahead and trying explain the differences between all 73 existing licenses.  Forget about it. I like Bruce’s idea.  Let’s just settle on a handful we an all agree on and simply things a bit.

Here’s Bruce’s final four:

1. Gift license: The Apache License 2.0

This is similar to the MIT and BSD licenses, but provides a little more protection from software patent lawsuits to the Open Source developer.

2. Sharing-with-rules license: GPL 3

Descended from the GPL, the most popular Open Source license, this license is updated to deal with the vastly larger amount of copyright and case law that exists today.

3. In-between license: LGPL 3

This is for making software libraries under the “sharing with rules” paradigm, but which are usable in proprietary software.

4. A special license to cope with the SaaS phenomenon: Affero GPL3.

This license is specifically engineered to keep Google from running away with your product without sharing their improvements to it. Well, actually, it deals with the software as a service problem. The GPL class of licenses does not require that anyone share source code until they actually distribute the software. But Google doesn’t distribute software, it performs it on its own site.

Works for me, this  simplifies the situation.  You  only need to understand two licenses Apache and GPL3.  The last two are simply GPL3 variants.  (Read  Bruce Perens article for more on this.)

Today I gave a 10 minute presentation as a panel speaker for Part 5 of the  Semantic Wiki mini series. These  are very quick presentations and it did seem like I could say a lot in such a short time. Regardless I felt all the presentations given by the other panelists were very good and taken as a whole I feel the experience would be valuable  for anyone interested in developing semantic wikis. My slides as well as the presentations for all the other speakers are up on the  wiki page for this session.  The series of virtual events has one more session which will dovetail into the face-to-face workshop: “Social Semantic Web: Where Web 2.0 Meets Web 3.0” at the AAAI Spring Symposium, March 23-25, 2009 at Stanford, California.

“This Semantic Wiki mini-series, co-organized by FZI Karlsruhe, Mayo Clinic, Ontolog, RPI Tetherless World Constellation and Salzburg Research, Austria, represents a collaborative effort between members from academia, research, software engineering, semantic web and ontology communities. The 6-month mini-series intends to bring together developers, administrators and users of semantic wikis, and provide a platform where they can conveniently share ideas and insights. Through a series of (mainly virtual) talks, panel discussions, online discourse and even face-to-face meetings, participants will survey the state-of-the-art in semantic wiki technology and get exposure to exemplary use cases and applications. Together, they will study trends, challenges and the outlook for semantic wikis, and explore opportunities for collaboration in this very promising technology, approach or philosophy that people has labeled “semantic wiki.”

Today we attended the New York Ice Wine Festival.  And we did not have to travel far, just down the road and up the hill to Casa Larga. When it comes to U.S. wines it seems New York state is often playing second fiddle to California.  But the truth is we make some excellent wines here, and sorry California, you can’t make ice wine like we do.  The grapes are hand picked when they are frozen on the vine, when it is at least 20 degrees Fahrenheit. (-6C). Boy I have a lot of respect for those grape pickers.   Brrrrr and yummm.   Because the grapes are partially shriveled and frozen there is a very high sugar content in the grape.  The juice from these grapes ferments for about twice as long as regular grapes as a result.  This also produces a thicker sweeter wine, making ice wine an excellent desert wine.

It was a pleasure to participate in RIT’s National Teach-In on Global Warming, The event was part of a national initiative to bring awareness to this ever growing concern. The 3 sessions I attended were  very constructive.  It’s heartening to see students, faculty and community leaders coming together on this issue.

Communities of Practice for local governments

…a community platform supporting professional social networks across local government and the public sector. It provides a secure environment for knowledge development and sharing through online communities of practice.

I recently was invited to join a Scottish group on “shared representation using semantic technologies”.  I noticed this site has recently won the 2008 eGovernment national award in the UK. And rightly so, it is a very good example of a site for people who care about people.  This collaborative tool features forums, library (document management), wiki, news feeds (RSS) and user blogs.  All entries are tagged so one can navigate and search more effectively.  A member can start up a  new community of practice (CoP). To do this the site provides a “create new CoP wizard” that asks the creator to agree a number of  principles and responsibilities for positive, effective collaboration, although a usability hurdle I can see how  it really would make one think about what they were about to start up. Apparently the site is a success as there seems to be  a very large number of groups collaborating on it.  I think it’s a good benchmark for social software to support communities of practice.