- When does code you create become copyrighted?
- As soon as the idea gets transferred from your brain into a tangible form. If you're eating dinner somewhere and a brilliant idea hits you, you can write it down on a napkin and it's copyrighted.
- If you could wave a magic wand, and open source any piece of proprietary software, what software would you choose?
- I would carefully aim the wand at Apple's OS UI and apps, just because I like the look and feel of the Apple OS and would love to hack on it. I would have said Microsoft Windows, but I figure a lot of other people are going to pick that.
- If the software above was open sourced, would it's company remain stable? How would the company continue to make money?
- I would argue that Apple makes a ton of money just from developing hardware that by default has to run their software, so I don't think they would really take all that big of a hit from open sourcing what I mentioned...but they won't do it.
- What do you feel like was the most beneficial thing to learn in the class?
- All of the legal stuff - Copyright, Copyleft, Patent, Trademark, Licensing, TOS, etc. It was like my eyes were opened to a whole other world, and suddenly everything made sense.
- Also really thought the business models were really beneficial to learn.
- Explain some of the motivations a company may have to open source software.
- Direct connection to customers
- Lots of eyes make any bug small
- Basically giant stream of free workers
- Quick fixes
- Trust and reliability
- Customization
- Are there any changes you would suggest making to the profile template? What parts did you find most interesting or important?
- I think we should go more in depth on the business models for each company. I also think it would be cool to have a whole section for any controversies, serious issues, recent news, or lawsuits that the company has run into, as I know my group found these things to be really fun to look in to. I think the community architecture and organizational details are crucial.
- If you could have spent more time, say an extra week, on any topic, which would you have liked to cover more in depth?
- Any of the legal things - patents, trademarks, etc.
- Definitely the different business models
- Why are you using insert license X here for your open source project?
- I usually talk to people about my project before deciding on a license because I am too lazy to choose one myself. Alternatively, if other people are working on the project, I let them decide and hope they didn't make a mistake.
- If you would suggest a video to be watched as part of this course, what would it be?
- Decause's Ted Talk(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZxI2ZqSyrA)
- TPB AFK(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2608732/)
- The Internet's Own Boy(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3268458/)
- Shrek(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126029/)
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Final Post
As part of our "final exam" type thing for Business and Legal Aspects of FOSS class, I get to answer some reflective questions that we chose as a class. Here are the final questions and my responses below:
Sunday, May 17, 2015
Weekly 15
Finals Week = pretty awful
Pretty big chunk of this blog post might just be me complaining and talking about how much work I have to do.
I had my Production Studio Final and peer evals on Friday. I had a Casual Game Development Final Project due on Monday. I had a final cumulative exam for music class on Tuesday. I also had my FOSS final on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday, I have 2 papers due...These are the worst. One essay has to be 10 pages long and the other has to be 5 pages. They are also both due at 12 which I find kind of annoying because neither of my scheduled exam times are at that time. So basically I have a ton of work and haven't been getting very much sleep lately, but good news is, come Thursday I'll be at home in a comfy bed with no work hanging over me :)
I was happy to be able to spare about 3 hours this past weekend to watch Mad Max with my friend - pretty awesome film.
Even as I write this blog post, I am frantically putting the finishing touches on my BizLegFoss blog.
On a totally different note...
I would be lying if I said the last meeting for this BizLegFoss class wasn't extremely bittersweet. I enjoyed this class waaay more than I thought I was going to, and I actually already thought I was going to enjoy it.
I honestly think this class had the perfect combination of a set of students who were all very interested in the class topics, and a professor who was as engaging as a prof could possibly be. I feel like I probably learned more in this class than any of my other classes, and I think I found it more interesting than my other classes, which is pretty nuts because I'm a software developer and this class was mainly huge on research with the software development mainly being working on the course repo. I'll miss this class the most and I'm super sad that I won't be able to complete the decause trilogy of classes(I only took HFOSS and BizLegFOSS) on account of him moving onto bigger and better things with Red Hat Fedora - very cool stuff.
Anyways, overall this semester was pretty great. Had a way heavier class load than I would have preferred, but I also learned a ton, and actually had a great time.
Wishing everyone in my BizLeg class good luck in the future. Shameless plug for Liam: http://www.reddit.com/r/decausegonewild
Pretty big chunk of this blog post might just be me complaining and talking about how much work I have to do.
I had my Production Studio Final and peer evals on Friday. I had a Casual Game Development Final Project due on Monday. I had a final cumulative exam for music class on Tuesday. I also had my FOSS final on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday, I have 2 papers due...These are the worst. One essay has to be 10 pages long and the other has to be 5 pages. They are also both due at 12 which I find kind of annoying because neither of my scheduled exam times are at that time. So basically I have a ton of work and haven't been getting very much sleep lately, but good news is, come Thursday I'll be at home in a comfy bed with no work hanging over me :)
I was happy to be able to spare about 3 hours this past weekend to watch Mad Max with my friend - pretty awesome film.
Even as I write this blog post, I am frantically putting the finishing touches on my BizLegFoss blog.
On a totally different note...
I would be lying if I said the last meeting for this BizLegFoss class wasn't extremely bittersweet. I enjoyed this class waaay more than I thought I was going to, and I actually already thought I was going to enjoy it.
I honestly think this class had the perfect combination of a set of students who were all very interested in the class topics, and a professor who was as engaging as a prof could possibly be. I feel like I probably learned more in this class than any of my other classes, and I think I found it more interesting than my other classes, which is pretty nuts because I'm a software developer and this class was mainly huge on research with the software development mainly being working on the course repo. I'll miss this class the most and I'm super sad that I won't be able to complete the decause trilogy of classes(I only took HFOSS and BizLegFOSS) on account of him moving onto bigger and better things with Red Hat Fedora - very cool stuff.
Anyways, overall this semester was pretty great. Had a way heavier class load than I would have preferred, but I also learned a ton, and actually had a great time.
Wishing everyone in my BizLeg class good luck in the future. Shameless plug for Liam: http://www.reddit.com/r/decausegonewild
Saturday, May 16, 2015
Nick Soussanis Talk
Nick Soussanis swung by to talk about his dissertation about 2 weeks ago. If you don't know who Nick Soussanis is, he's an awesome guy who literally made a graphic novel for his dissertation. Nick was a PhD student at Columbia University who had this awesome idea of writing a comic book for his thesis.
The graphic novel is called Unflattening: A Visual-Verbal Inquiry into Learning in Many Dimension. I have not got around to finishing the book yet, but it covers topics like perceiving things from different points of view, or possibly challenging the way things are typically perceived. I think this in itself ties in extremely well with the fact that the book itself is a very atypical dissertation. The graphic novel sort of challenges the traditional form of a doctoral thesis.
Nick gave a brief overview of the project, his motivation for making the book, his background interest in comic books, his goals, and his struggles. What I found really interesting about his talk was how his dissertation had to still fit within certain specifications. For example, Nick said that any text had to be in a certain font and size with double spacing. He still had to abide by these rules, so what little textual paragraphs there are in the novel, they are all formatted strictly. Also, I thought it was kind of funny when Nick mentioned that all images had to be referenced in a specific way in a part of the book, and so he literally had to format these references for every single page, because every page of the novel was technically an image.
Nick talked a bit about how he changed the novel around when he pushed it to production. The thesis version of the book was longer in some respects because of the specific formatting, and there were changes he still wanted to make before releasing the product out to the public.
The talk was super interesting and relevant especially to my BizLegFoss class because Nick talked a lot about changing the traditional form of academia to suit creativity, innovation, and more modern trends. I think our FOSS classes share a lot of these topics in that we do things very differently than a traditional class and we dare to be very open and allow students to innovate, contribute, and develop rather than turn them into machines that just process information. That idea is also actually referenced to in the novel :)
Check the dissertation out, its really pretty amazing:
The graphic novel is called Unflattening: A Visual-Verbal Inquiry into Learning in Many Dimension. I have not got around to finishing the book yet, but it covers topics like perceiving things from different points of view, or possibly challenging the way things are typically perceived. I think this in itself ties in extremely well with the fact that the book itself is a very atypical dissertation. The graphic novel sort of challenges the traditional form of a doctoral thesis.
Nick gave a brief overview of the project, his motivation for making the book, his background interest in comic books, his goals, and his struggles. What I found really interesting about his talk was how his dissertation had to still fit within certain specifications. For example, Nick said that any text had to be in a certain font and size with double spacing. He still had to abide by these rules, so what little textual paragraphs there are in the novel, they are all formatted strictly. Also, I thought it was kind of funny when Nick mentioned that all images had to be referenced in a specific way in a part of the book, and so he literally had to format these references for every single page, because every page of the novel was technically an image.
Nick talked a bit about how he changed the novel around when he pushed it to production. The thesis version of the book was longer in some respects because of the specific formatting, and there were changes he still wanted to make before releasing the product out to the public.
The talk was super interesting and relevant especially to my BizLegFoss class because Nick talked a lot about changing the traditional form of academia to suit creativity, innovation, and more modern trends. I think our FOSS classes share a lot of these topics in that we do things very differently than a traditional class and we dare to be very open and allow students to innovate, contribute, and develop rather than turn them into machines that just process information. That idea is also actually referenced to in the novel :)
Check the dissertation out, its really pretty amazing:
Homestretch Hackathon
I attended a Homestretch Hackathon last week on Wednesday, April 13th. The name "Homestretch Hackathon" is derived from the fact that it was during our last few days before final exams, and it was obviously a hackathon where students could come together to do work, study, or socialize. This was probably one of the best hackathon's I have attended. I only wish I could have come earlier at 6 when it started. Unfortunately, I had a class and wasn't able to get to the hackathon until 8.
I had a ton of work that I technically could have been hacking away at, but instead my friend MrNex(github.com/MrNex) convinced me to hack on his homemade game engine. The game engine, called NGen, is a 3D graphics and physics engine programmed in C, that MrNex had been working on for at least 2 years. He also demoed some simulations in the engine at ImagineRIT.
From about 8 to 12:30am, MrNex and I worked on creating a parkour based running platformer game in the NGen game engine. I vamped the speed up really high in the engine because I wanted the game to be like a first person version of Sonic the Hedgehog. People noted that it was very similar to the game Mirror's Edge, in its movement controls.
I think the game came out really well as I know Nick put a ton of time into making his engine really high quality. Nick would implement new game mechanics and then tell me to place platforms in the 3D space to both make a level, and also allow him to test the new mechanics. The process went pretty well and we got a pretty cool rough draft of a first level made.
You can check out the engine here: https://github.com/MrNex/NGen
I recommend people take advantage of the Hackathons on campus because they are way more fun than just sitting at home studying or hacking away on a project. It's also great because there are so many resources available at the hackathon in terms of people that could help with problems. I know that there were a ton of super smart people at the hackathon and they were definitely willing to help out a friend in need. I also always enjoy queuing up songs on the #foss_groovebot :) Was super fun seeing decause, loothelion, dropofwill, ajman, bewhitty, and MrNex at the hackathon!
I had a ton of work that I technically could have been hacking away at, but instead my friend MrNex(github.com/MrNex) convinced me to hack on his homemade game engine. The game engine, called NGen, is a 3D graphics and physics engine programmed in C, that MrNex had been working on for at least 2 years. He also demoed some simulations in the engine at ImagineRIT.
From about 8 to 12:30am, MrNex and I worked on creating a parkour based running platformer game in the NGen game engine. I vamped the speed up really high in the engine because I wanted the game to be like a first person version of Sonic the Hedgehog. People noted that it was very similar to the game Mirror's Edge, in its movement controls.
I think the game came out really well as I know Nick put a ton of time into making his engine really high quality. Nick would implement new game mechanics and then tell me to place platforms in the 3D space to both make a level, and also allow him to test the new mechanics. The process went pretty well and we got a pretty cool rough draft of a first level made.
You can check out the engine here: https://github.com/MrNex/NGen
I recommend people take advantage of the Hackathons on campus because they are way more fun than just sitting at home studying or hacking away on a project. It's also great because there are so many resources available at the hackathon in terms of people that could help with problems. I know that there were a ton of super smart people at the hackathon and they were definitely willing to help out a friend in need. I also always enjoy queuing up songs on the #foss_groovebot :) Was super fun seeing decause, loothelion, dropofwill, ajman, bewhitty, and MrNex at the hackathon!
John Resig Talk
I recently attended a presentation by John Resig, the guy that made JQuery(https://github.com/jquery/jquery). The presentation was called "Hacking Art History for Fun and Profit" and it was held in the Golisano Auditorium at 3 on April 17.
The whole presentation was about John's side project of http://ukiyo-e.org/ which is a database for Japanese woodblock print art. John showed the main backbone of the site and how he uses different libraries like Node js(https://github.com/joyent/node), mongodb, Digital Ocean, Amazon S3, and Amazon Cloudfront to make the site function. John also gave some history about Japanese woodblock art, and the problems that arise when trying to catalog the works.
Basically, the problem was that there was not a reliable way to tell if woodblock prints had already been cataloged, or even if the correct artist was credited with each print. The solution was John's brilliant Ukiyo-e website. The site is populated with the different images of the prints and translates the authors' names to store them in a database. The program then visually compares the pixels of the photos to pair duplicate uploads together and get a probability of who the artist was.
John also talked about how he is trying to implement this kind of technology into other forms of art and in different museums. The idea all came from John Resig's appreciation of Japanese Wood prints and yet it evolved into a side project that is now looking to be a very helpful tool.
Personally, I found this talk to be extremely interesting for a number of reasons. First, he was John Resig, a graduate of RIT, and he literally made JQuery. Second, I am in a Japanese History course so the whole topic of Japanese Woodblock Prints actually resonated very well with me and the background information I had from that course. Furthermore, I have also taken classes where javascript and utilization of different web technologies and API's are huge topics, so that aspect of the talk was really important to me.
Overall, it was really cool to see someone passionate talking about their interest and how it evolved into a great project that is quite profitable.
The whole presentation was about John's side project of http://ukiyo-e.org/ which is a database for Japanese woodblock print art. John showed the main backbone of the site and how he uses different libraries like Node js(https://github.com/joyent/node), mongodb, Digital Ocean, Amazon S3, and Amazon Cloudfront to make the site function. John also gave some history about Japanese woodblock art, and the problems that arise when trying to catalog the works.
Basically, the problem was that there was not a reliable way to tell if woodblock prints had already been cataloged, or even if the correct artist was credited with each print. The solution was John's brilliant Ukiyo-e website. The site is populated with the different images of the prints and translates the authors' names to store them in a database. The program then visually compares the pixels of the photos to pair duplicate uploads together and get a probability of who the artist was.
John also talked about how he is trying to implement this kind of technology into other forms of art and in different museums. The idea all came from John Resig's appreciation of Japanese Wood prints and yet it evolved into a side project that is now looking to be a very helpful tool.
Personally, I found this talk to be extremely interesting for a number of reasons. First, he was John Resig, a graduate of RIT, and he literally made JQuery. Second, I am in a Japanese History course so the whole topic of Japanese Woodblock Prints actually resonated very well with me and the background information I had from that course. Furthermore, I have also taken classes where javascript and utilization of different web technologies and API's are huge topics, so that aspect of the talk was really important to me.
Overall, it was really cool to see someone passionate talking about their interest and how it evolved into a great project that is quite profitable.
Biella Coleman Talk
Biella Coleman and Astra Taylor came to my school, Rochester Institute of Technology on April 21! They gave a talk in the Carlson Auditorium at 7pm and it was awesome.
First of all the Carlson Auditorium was a pain to find because for some reason I could not pinpoint its location using all of my mental effort. I thought I was getting different descriptions of the location from every person I asked because for some reason I was under the impression that it was in the basement of the Liberal Arts building. Luckily I texted dropofwill(github.com/dropofwill) to get a detailed description of the place. Turns out the auditorium was literally just in the Carlson building where I had Discrete Math 3 years ago...
Anyway, Biella gave a crazy awesome presentation on the hacker group Anonymous(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_%28group%29), which in itself was just a crazy awesome thing to experience because she's like the master of all information on Anonymous. It was very interesting to hear Biella talk about the group from a very research oriented, cultural anthropological study perspective. She focused mainly on the group's formation and evolution throughout time, and went in depth into the battle between Anonymous and Scientology. It was also pretty crazy when she showed the post that Anonymous made attacking her personally.
Astra Taylor talked more about protesting in general, especially with regards to causes like battling topics intertwined with school loans. She showed some quick videos she worked on to document the battle going on in these protests. She's a pretty awesome filmmaker(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1279083/).
After giving their respective presentations, both Biella and Astra sat down and talked about each others' books. Biella highlighted what she liked about Astra's book and then proceeded to read some passages, and then Astra did the same for Biella's book. The presentation in general was kind of a plug and extension of the books.
First of all the Carlson Auditorium was a pain to find because for some reason I could not pinpoint its location using all of my mental effort. I thought I was getting different descriptions of the location from every person I asked because for some reason I was under the impression that it was in the basement of the Liberal Arts building. Luckily I texted dropofwill(github.com/dropofwill) to get a detailed description of the place. Turns out the auditorium was literally just in the Carlson building where I had Discrete Math 3 years ago...
Anyway, Biella gave a crazy awesome presentation on the hacker group Anonymous(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_%28group%29), which in itself was just a crazy awesome thing to experience because she's like the master of all information on Anonymous. It was very interesting to hear Biella talk about the group from a very research oriented, cultural anthropological study perspective. She focused mainly on the group's formation and evolution throughout time, and went in depth into the battle between Anonymous and Scientology. It was also pretty crazy when she showed the post that Anonymous made attacking her personally.
Astra Taylor talked more about protesting in general, especially with regards to causes like battling topics intertwined with school loans. She showed some quick videos she worked on to document the battle going on in these protests. She's a pretty awesome filmmaker(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1279083/).
After giving their respective presentations, both Biella and Astra sat down and talked about each others' books. Biella highlighted what she liked about Astra's book and then proceeded to read some passages, and then Astra did the same for Biella's book. The presentation in general was kind of a plug and extension of the books.
- Biella's book is called Hacker, Hoaxer, Whisteblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous - http://www.amazon.com/Hacker-Hoaxer-Whistleblower-Spy-Anonymous/dp/1781685835/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_y
- Astra's books are The People's Platform, and Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age - http://www.amazon.com/The-Peoples-Platform-Culture-Digital/dp/0805093567
Personally, I really enjoyed these presentations. I knew of Anonymous, but always wished I knew more about them, and Biella really did a great job imparting a ton of information about them. I found it especially interesting the transition from being a group centered around trolling, to a serious hacktivist group, especially in the transitional case with the Church of Scientology. The video Biella showed us of Anonymous calling out the Church of Scientology was kind of chilling. I also thought Astra's presentation was super cool because I like to hear about when people are taking action to make a change, and the protests definitely relate to college students. Someone asked if the things that made Anonymous so successful could be applied to other activist communities. I thought it was interesting that no one really pointed out that Anonymous may have been successful because it kind of had roots as a type of gathering of friends to troll and make jokes. I think there is huge appeal in that kind of a group.
Profile 4
Check out my profile for Ushahidi here: https://docs.google.com/a/g.rit.edu/document/d/1EBRGDI_0Pl6O4Arm24R-RhRDMon1OmM6wCdrGFJkyOc/edit?usp=sharing
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)