FOSS

Earlier this year I was tasked with migrating a 60K contact Kintera database to CiviCRM. To make matters more "interesting", the client also had a home-grown database with mixed information, some defining new contacts and some adding information to the Kintera contacts. As it was a custom database, I won't discuss the second database merge issue any further (perhaps I just want to put it all behind me) except where needed to fill in other points.

• Continue reading

Lots of buzz swirling around about Google+, Google's Facebook-like social networking site.  Much of the buzz surrounds trying to get invited into the test trial, especially as many have received "invites" but not been able to get in anyway.

• Continue reading

WebEnabled is a Free and Open Source (FOSS) hosted platform that "makes it easy for teams to focus on building awesome web applications." Provisioning applications from their library is fast. Bevan reported getting a Drupal 7 instance up and running in a few minutes. The service offers full SSH, SCP and SFTP access. You can also manage your code revisions and collaborate with others using SVN.

• Continue reading

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.

• Continue reading

The Obama administration has taken a big step back from transparency in one area of critical importance to the FOSS movement. Just like George Bush did, the President is asserting that draft trademark and copyright agreements with Japan and the EU are "state secrets," and has refused to release them to the public -- even though the same drafts have been widely distributed among corporate lobbyists.

• Continue reading

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has filed its first-ever copyright infringement lawsuit, accusing networking giant Cisco of refusing to distribute GPL’d source code embedded as firmware or used in router products sold under Cisco’s “Linkys” brand. In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, the FSF claims Cisco's Linksys routers violate terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2, and the GNU Lesser General Public License.

• Continue reading

If there's a theme for this election, it's "Change". I actually don't think change is going to come. It's already here. It's a foregone conclusion that the White House will be "Differently Occupied" in January (how's that for PC?). Change has already happened and history has already been made. Welcome to the 21st century. Now let's get to the discussion about addressing the issues of our day.

• Continue reading

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit -- the leading intellectual property court in the US -- has delivered a major victory to the Free and Open Source Software (“FOSS”) movement by explicitly holding, for the first time, that FOSS licensors are entitled to copyright infringement relief.

• Continue reading

Dries' blog notes a great video interview with Sun's Scott Mattoon on "What Makes Drupal Special". Scott is a good friend of the CivicActions crew, and we've been privileged to work with him recently on Architecture of Humanity's Open Architecture Network project, along with SUN.

• Continue reading