Open Source Software

Last week, President Obama's administration released the Open Government Directive, or OGD, directing all federal government agencies to publish information online in an open format that can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed, and searched by commonly used web search applications. The Open Government Directive outlines these three core values:

The NZ SSC has rejected Microsoft's offers for a new licensing contract. This is a big loss for Microsoft (Though I'm sure MS would have you believe otherwise and try to paint the picture back to front) and big win for NZ Government and NZ's IT industry.

Vancouver is thinking open. A council meeting agenda calls for discussing "open data, open standards and open source software for all of its data and information resources," according to the ReadWriteWeb post linked above. The benefits of governments going open are immense and arguably fulfill the role of government in serving its people. Indeed, Open Source is, by its very nature, a form of digital democracy.

What does Free Software have to do with ending poverty? More than you probably think. It is not just at the core of consumer products like the Android loaded G1 phone from HTC, or the One Laptop Per Child XO. Linux operating systems like Ubuntu are deployed by community technology centers around the globe providing access to the internet, and all the information, data and resources that come with it. The Free Software (while having $0 in licensing costs) also reduces the cost of hardware, and allows programmers to improve upon it, and share their improvements without fear.

Google will pay high school kids aged 13 to 18 up to $500 for their participation in their newest endeavour to promote open source in the general public. Google Highly-Open-Participation Contest is a new programme that follows on from the success of Summer of Code. The first round is a bit of a trial and has only ten projects involved, and Drupal is one of them! The others are;

• Apache Software Foundation
• GNOME
• Joomla!
• MoinMoin
• Mono
• Moodle
• Plone
• Python
• SilverStripe

It is both impressive and interesting how many of them are web-content tools (CMS, web-application frameworks, wikis etc).

Dries wrote on his blog recently that the Software Freedom Law Center will assist the Drupal Project on various licensing issues.

This list is one of the most comprehensive directories of the FOSS replacements for commercial software: Use FOSS and Live Free! (as in speech, not beer)

CEO Jonathan Schwartz, of Sun Microsystems, recently announced the company will participate more fully in the Mac OS X version of the NeoOffice free and open-source (FOSS) software project. Edward Peterlin, Chief Visionary of NeoOffice.org, has sent an open letter to Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz regarding Sun's announcement:

A new article on ZDNet says that Microsoft is claiming that free and open-source software violates more than 230 of its patents. Microsoft top lawyer Brad Smith alleges that the Linux kernel violates 42 Microsoft patents, while its user interface and other design elements infringe on a further 65. OpenOffice is accused of infringing 45, along with 83 more in other free and open-source programs.

Two years and six weeks ago, when I first was introduced to Drupal, I was amazed by the way it could be so easily customized with new modules and custom functionality. At that time, Drupal had almost 30 modules, which seemed enough to make about any type of site one could imagine. It's hard to believe that now we now have almost 30 CivicActions Drupal Modules ourselves! Most recently, Doug Green released the vocabperms module which allows you to set the permissions on a vocabulary so only certain people can edit it. Initially, it was created for Progressive States Network for propagating content to certain pages and sections. When using vocabperms module, some people can create the node, but others can set or view the vocabulary. The term can then be used in views to determine where the content should be displayed. Another one of Doug's modules, views_fastsearch is also really hot and getting some good traction in the Drupal community. Some Drupal senior developers believe it could be the future of Drupal search. Of course, when it comes to search, Jonathan is playing at the web's bleeding edge. The current release of the the Drupal faceted search module is suitable for the Semantic Web, and can provide drop-in support for CCK and Taxonomy. Arthur recently developed two of my favorite modules to show off the power of Drupal. Media Mover is a YouTube site recipe for Drupal, which we've already deployed for Flunk Arnold, EQ.tv and on shiftinaction.com. The other is SignIt module, which allows users to enable a set of functionality that is often associated with petitions to any cck content type. The functionality includes allowing users (anon or authenticated) to "sign" a node enabled with SignIt functionality. The best part is that SignIt works with CiviCRM, though it is not required. If CiviCRM is installed, SignIt can draw the list of targets from a CiviCRM group and use CiviCRM profiles to supplement the information collected when a user signs a node. Of course, if you want to add free, simple, fast and customizable AJAX chat to your Drupal site, the phpfreechat module module, written by Owen, is all you need. Admin Role module, written by Jacob, is a little helper for Drupal to maintain an admin role which will always keep full permissons. You can use it by simply selecting a role which will be a "admin" role from the settings page, then when you submit the modules page, it will automatically assign all perms available to that role. Notwithstanding, Jacob's most massive contributions have been at the intersection of CiviCRM and CivicActions especially with great projects like the McConnell Foundation Scholarship project. Yes, we've been a busy bunch... We'll plan to keep the blog updated with even more CivicActions Drupal module development as it happens (and show-off some of the cooler, yet older, stuff too)!