Hot off the press – the latest FTISA e-poster has just been released! Thanks to Derek Keats for his contribution to the “Imagine if…” campaign, which we used as the inspiration for our latest image.
Imagine if there was no secret science. According to Derek, secret science is “where the output of research is only made accessible to a few elite people or locked up through patents, which are designed to withhold disclosure and creates a monopoly.” He explains this in the context of the number of scientific research papers that are published per year: Did you know that the United States publishes 690 scientific research papers per million people per year, compared to Africa’s 8.2 per million people per year? This is a worrying difference, one that Keats believes can be mended by lowering the barriers to innovation through the use of ‘open science’ i.e. free and open source software and open knowledge, which act as catalysts to stimulate innovation, and thus the growth of publicly funded scientific research. Closed science, on the other hand, signifies a very clear ‘No Entry’, creating barriers to entry and prohibiting innovation built “on the shoulders of giants.”
So does the stat above get you riled up, get your blood boiling and your eyes popping? Well, there are three things you can do:
Do some DEEP BREATHING exercises. This will increase the amount of oxygen in your body and make you feel relaxed, calm and serene.
SHARE this poster on your website, blog, social networking or IM profile, write a blog entry about it and get people to participate in the Imagine If… campaign to spread the word about this issue.
JOIN US at the AGM and play an active role in shaping the future of this organization and its activities. The event will be held on Wednesday, 27 January 2010 from 2.00pm until around 7.30pm at the University of the Witwatersrand, Administrative Block, Room CB8. Please RSVP to ftisa@africancommons.org should you wish to attend. There will be remote participation so let us know if you wish to participate via Skype.
If you’re new to the world of software patents, here’s a short introductory video to the issues raised in this debate (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). It explains how software patents inhibit innovation, about the high cost of registering and challenging a patent and how it excludes small players from the market.
Another key point made in this clip is how software development is an ‘instruction’ rather than a invention as such. The argument is that software development is a set of instructions which are written, and then implemented by the machine, like “a game, business method or abstract idea”.
I’d be interested to hear what software developers out there think about this point – when you’re writing code are you ‘inventing’ or ‘instructing’?
Last week I wrote a letter (viewable on my blog on the Chsimba Alpha code test site here) to Stafford Masie of Novell South Africa, which I copied to a couple of mailing lists, and which in turn was picked up an published on a number of news sites. I would like to clarify my concerns, and report on the conversation that I have had with representatives of Novell.
In the letter I expressed dissatisfaction regarding Novell’s covenant with Microsoft about software patents. I suggested that this covenant had created considerable discord within the Free Software community, and that this could constitute risk to the ability of Novell to deliver on our business requirements as a customer.
It is important to clarify that I have no objection in principle to the part of the agreement relating to interoperability between GNU/Linux and Windows. Indeed, I suspect that this will be benefit penetration of GNU/Linux into the enterprise.
The Free and Open Source Software ecosystem differs from proprietary software ecosystems in having a strong element of community, which is itself heterogeneous in nature. The success of Free and Open Source Software depends not only on the quality of the technology and the actions of companies, but also on the behaviour of this community. Read the rest of this entry »
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Hot off the press – the latest FTISA e-poster has just been released! Thanks to Derek Keats for his contribution to the “Imagine if…” campaign, which we used as the inspiration for our latest image.
