- 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
Profile 3
Check out my Profile for Gratipay: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wsBEhv2h224GmOUcDj3uBpCeAqel5ZkxJd__F8UvwV4/edit?usp=sharing
Profile 2
Check out my Profile for Coinbase here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rkbXQGf1052JaSBlct6ATvZeKwZVN5anp9zxx6YdTBk/edit?usp=sharing
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Weekly 14
Last week of classes, and it wasn't even a full week :)
We finished up our profiles for my Business and Legal FOSS class(the class this blog has mainly about) and we started pushing them up onto a Git Book. This was yet another awesome idea by teh #1 Prof decause (github.com/decause). It was really cool because we got to see all of our research pushed to production and put up somewhere where the information can benefit others - super cool stuff!!! We also did peer evals, the templates for which were standardized through conversation with aforementioned #1 prof and the students. Personally, I ported over my team's profile for SFC and the commit got merged :)
In other news, we watched our last film for German Cinema class called "The Wave" which was a really freaky movie about a fictional event where a teacher essentially established an autocracy in his classroom. The film was very interesting and entertaining and an overall great choice to end the semester on. In my Japanese Film class, we talked about one last reading of the short story "Kitchen" which is about a woman in modern Japan dealing with the loss of her grandmother. Kind of a sad note to end on, but very relevant.
My Casual Game Development classes were dedicated to finalizing our Project 3 game. My friend and I continued some steady work on our horror game and decided to call it Dark Room. My Music class wrapped up with the Modern Era of music, talking about jazz, avant-garde, and film music.
Last thing worth mentioning is that we finally finished my Production Studio project once and for all. I can easily say that this was one of the most stressful projects I had this year. I worked on adding some diversity to the scene. Specifically, if you refresh the app in the browser, it will either load with a land theme, that populates with a ground terrain and some mushrooms, towers, and deer, or it will load with a water theme that has an octopus, some aquatic plants, and different towers. I also worked on getting the models to spawn on top of the floating islands to make the scene more interesting. I was actually pretty surprised by how quickly this last project milestone came together and it looked a lot better than I thought it was going to. I would link to the project, but its private on Github under RIT-MAGIC :(
My week literally ended with peer evals for my Production Studio class on Friday. It was sad to say goodbye to everyone :(
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Final Questions
As my Business and Legal FOSS Class heads into its last 2 weeks of this semester, we've been called to come up with some reflective questions to answer about the course.
Here's some questions I came up with:
Here's some questions I came up with:
- Are there any changes you would suggest making to the profile template? What parts did you find most interesting or important?
- If you could have spent more time, say an extra week, on any topic, which would you have liked to cover more in depth?
- If you could have spent less time on any topic, which would you have said could be shortened?
- What was your favorite assignment, or at least, which did you find to be the most crucial to the class?
- What was your least favorite assignment, or which did you find to be the least important for the class?
I'm gonna miss this class :(
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Weekly 13
Almost done!
My friend and I started on our Casual Game Development Final Project this week. The guidelines are extremely open and non restrictive(which we like in the FOSS world). We decided we were going to make a 3D game using the three js library. The reason I am so stoked for this game, is because we decided to give it a creepy horror theme, which is something I have never done before, but I always wanted to try!
We also continued learning three js by doing some ICE's. In the assignments, we had to gradually create a 3D version of the classic arcade game "Pong". This was a pretty cool assignment, and especially by the last update, the game looked really cool. We implemented shadows, lighting, and made a camera system that was pretty complex looking. Again I highly suggest checking out three js if you're interested in 3D development of any kind within the browser world (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/)
Japanese Film class began wrapping up this week. We started watching our final film Tora-San, which is actually a lighthearted comedy about a "lovable oaf". There is a lot of, kind of, low level slapstick comedy that people who like wittier jokes might not enjoy, but I actually thought the movie was hilarious, and its a great change of pace from the more serious films we usually watch.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otoko_wa_Tsurai_yo).
We watched our second to last film "The Baader Meinhof Complex" in my German Cinema class. This film was pretty awesome, and it fuses elements of real historical events with dramatized action sequences. Some people did not like this combination because they felt it made the movie to fictionalized, but I thought it made the movie way easier to watch. In other news, I wonder what would happen if they made a Hollywood movie script an open source project...
My friend and I started on our Casual Game Development Final Project this week. The guidelines are extremely open and non restrictive(which we like in the FOSS world). We decided we were going to make a 3D game using the three js library. The reason I am so stoked for this game, is because we decided to give it a creepy horror theme, which is something I have never done before, but I always wanted to try!
We also continued learning three js by doing some ICE's. In the assignments, we had to gradually create a 3D version of the classic arcade game "Pong". This was a pretty cool assignment, and especially by the last update, the game looked really cool. We implemented shadows, lighting, and made a camera system that was pretty complex looking. Again I highly suggest checking out three js if you're interested in 3D development of any kind within the browser world (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/)
Japanese Film class began wrapping up this week. We started watching our final film Tora-San, which is actually a lighthearted comedy about a "lovable oaf". There is a lot of, kind of, low level slapstick comedy that people who like wittier jokes might not enjoy, but I actually thought the movie was hilarious, and its a great change of pace from the more serious films we usually watch.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otoko_wa_Tsurai_yo).
We watched our second to last film "The Baader Meinhof Complex" in my German Cinema class. This film was pretty awesome, and it fuses elements of real historical events with dramatized action sequences. Some people did not like this combination because they felt it made the movie to fictionalized, but I thought it made the movie way easier to watch. In other news, I wonder what would happen if they made a Hollywood movie script an open source project...
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Weekly 12
This week was at a pretty good point in the semester. It was not quite at the point where I had a ton of work to get done for finals, and yet we were also kind of cruising towards the end of the year. We added another profile for my Business and Legal FOSS class - always enjoyable, check it out in my blog post for Crowdfunding in Gratipay.
Biggest thing worth mentioning this week was that we started going over Three.js in my Casual Game Development class. This library is awesome. I can't stress that enough. The library is open source(https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/). It is also logical, easy to understand, quick for demoing things, and it supports so much different stuff. It was also great to finally formally learn about this library from a professor whereas for this whole semester, I was kind of just hacking away at the thing for my Production Studio class.
Right off the bat I learned things that I wish I knew in the beginning of the semester while working on my Production Studio demo. We did an ICE that involved making a little 3D scene in Three js with some different primitive objects thrown together to look like a house and some trees. We also manipulated lighting, fog, and animation using the update function. I have always loved how in javascript you can basically create a game loop function just by calling a RequestAnimationFrame in a method("function" whatever). If you know a bit about programming and want to develop some awesome 3D apps that run right in the browser, check out these examples to get started in three js: http://threejs.org/examples/
I guess I should talk about my other classes now. I had to write a short response to the film we watched last week for my German Film class. Then for my Japanese Film class, I gave film review presentations in a group for 2 films we had to watch. 1 was a samurai flick called Harakiri - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056058/ and the other was a modern film called Taste of Tea - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0413893/
If you like quirky, stylistic, melancholy films, watch Taste of Tea. If you like crazy samurai revenge movies, watch Harakiri. I liked both of them :)
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Weekly 11
This week it finally happened - we watched a film in my German Cinema class that wasn't extremely old and obscure. We watched a movie called Run Lola Run, which actually did extremely well even internationally. This was a great change for the class, because the film was very modern, upbeat, and even had some animation in it. In terms of a national cinema, the movie showed a lot of the recently united Germany of the time. Run Lola Run - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0130827/
In my Japanese Film class, we had to read a novel called Kokoro, and watch a movie called Tokyo Story. I would rather not talk about these because they are pretty sad, and also honestly kind of boring. They do a great job of showcasing the transition from Meiji to Modern Japan though. Unfortunately, Kokoro is a novel all about being lonely and miserable, and Tokyo Story is all about a family that has drifted apart, and then something tragic happens to them.
In Casual Game Development, we learned some really cool new stuff involving Javascript and Ecmascript 6. There are a bunch of ways to try and implement classes and real Object Oriented Programming within Javascript, and we learned about them all today. While this is really great to learn about, I don't care much about utilizing classes in javascript as it has always felt hacky and wrong to me. Luckily, the newer methods we learned about did actually seem more promising.
My Production Studio class put together some new demos. I worked on the asset creation team where I got to model some towers and a bird in Maya! This was fun because I hadn't gotten to do any 3D modeling work in awhile and I really enjoy it. Unfortunately, after importing everyone's new changes, the projects all kind of broke, so for the next few weeks, we have to work on figuring out what is broken, and how we can fix the problems.
My Music class got our exams back from the Classical Era. I did pretty well. We also transitioned into the Romantic Era. This is a pretty traditional standard class, and its kind of hard to talk about.
In my Japanese Film class, we had to read a novel called Kokoro, and watch a movie called Tokyo Story. I would rather not talk about these because they are pretty sad, and also honestly kind of boring. They do a great job of showcasing the transition from Meiji to Modern Japan though. Unfortunately, Kokoro is a novel all about being lonely and miserable, and Tokyo Story is all about a family that has drifted apart, and then something tragic happens to them.
In Casual Game Development, we learned some really cool new stuff involving Javascript and Ecmascript 6. There are a bunch of ways to try and implement classes and real Object Oriented Programming within Javascript, and we learned about them all today. While this is really great to learn about, I don't care much about utilizing classes in javascript as it has always felt hacky and wrong to me. Luckily, the newer methods we learned about did actually seem more promising.
My Production Studio class put together some new demos. I worked on the asset creation team where I got to model some towers and a bird in Maya! This was fun because I hadn't gotten to do any 3D modeling work in awhile and I really enjoy it. Unfortunately, after importing everyone's new changes, the projects all kind of broke, so for the next few weeks, we have to work on figuring out what is broken, and how we can fix the problems.
My Music class got our exams back from the Classical Era. I did pretty well. We also transitioned into the Romantic Era. This is a pretty traditional standard class, and its kind of hard to talk about.
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Weekly 10
Week 10 almost done...
We started coming to the end of our Casual Game Development ICE's this week. We did this really neat assignment involving getting a Facebook developer account and hooking our game up as a Facebook app. Unfortunately, although the idea was cool, very few people got the functionality working. Most people could not even make their app require a Facebook login, let alone start loading the game. The professor admitted that this ICE probably needs some tweaking to be helpful, and that he would have liked to go more in depth with the exercise.
My Business and Legal Aspects of FOSS class continued on with making our 3rd Profile on Startup Companies. We chose Coinbase and you can read all about it in my other blog post! I chose Coinbase personally because I found bitcoin to be fascinating, but I really did not know much about it at all. I was also curious how a company based around bitcoin operated. Again my group got together on a Wednesday evening between classes and just started researching information.
My Production Studio class recovered from our Mid Term problems last week. What happened was students did not push any changes or work on the project until the very last minute. Which was a serious problem because we were given about 3 weeks to work on the project. Ultimately, I ended up sitting in the Innovation Labs literally all day and night to finish the project with some other students. The demo ended up looking very good, but the professor was pretty disappointed in how we handled the work. I was also pretty mad that we did not step up to complete this earlier.
Now we are working on splitting up into smaller groups and thinking of what we can add to the scene that is new and further expands the look and feel of the project. So far we had a few different types of islands that animate based on the beat of the song imported. The terrain also morphs based on the song, and there are various models that load to populate the scene. This project was both awesome, and a huge pain.
We started coming to the end of our Casual Game Development ICE's this week. We did this really neat assignment involving getting a Facebook developer account and hooking our game up as a Facebook app. Unfortunately, although the idea was cool, very few people got the functionality working. Most people could not even make their app require a Facebook login, let alone start loading the game. The professor admitted that this ICE probably needs some tweaking to be helpful, and that he would have liked to go more in depth with the exercise.
My Business and Legal Aspects of FOSS class continued on with making our 3rd Profile on Startup Companies. We chose Coinbase and you can read all about it in my other blog post! I chose Coinbase personally because I found bitcoin to be fascinating, but I really did not know much about it at all. I was also curious how a company based around bitcoin operated. Again my group got together on a Wednesday evening between classes and just started researching information.
My Production Studio class recovered from our Mid Term problems last week. What happened was students did not push any changes or work on the project until the very last minute. Which was a serious problem because we were given about 3 weeks to work on the project. Ultimately, I ended up sitting in the Innovation Labs literally all day and night to finish the project with some other students. The demo ended up looking very good, but the professor was pretty disappointed in how we handled the work. I was also pretty mad that we did not step up to complete this earlier.
Now we are working on splitting up into smaller groups and thinking of what we can add to the scene that is new and further expands the look and feel of the project. So far we had a few different types of islands that animate based on the beat of the song imported. The terrain also morphs based on the song, and there are various models that load to populate the scene. This project was both awesome, and a huge pain.
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Saturday, April 4, 2015
Weekly 9
Second Profile was due for Business and Legal Aspects of FOSS. You can read about that in my other blog post! This one was on Fiscal Sponsorship Organizations. My group handled the Software Freedom Conservancy. I really liked reading about this company not just because it serves as a great business model example, but also because the SFC seems like a great company to help FOSS developers.
We watched a very artistic film called Yesterday's Girl in my German film class. I would make a link to the film, but I don't know that its really worth watching because I am still trying to make sense of it. The film served as a departure from traditional German film making and was an extremely stylistic, artistic, experimental movie. It was very disjointed and hard to tell what was going on. I did enjoy the film, I just had trouble keeping up with it.
Our second Project was due for my Casual Game Development class. You can check out my final product here: http://alanleeson.com/ShapeShatter/shapeShatter.html. I am actually super proud of this game and I think is one of the best games I have worked on at RIT. The idea is, its a mobile casual game where you drag a line across the screen and try to destroy as many shapes as you can. The game is called Shape Shatter! We implemented some aspects from the Bubbles mobile ICE we made a few weeks ago and just went from there.
My Japanese Film class continued watching the 47 Ronin film and discussing a correlation to the Confucian relationships that governed who was to be loyal and sub servant to who.
We watched a very artistic film called Yesterday's Girl in my German film class. I would make a link to the film, but I don't know that its really worth watching because I am still trying to make sense of it. The film served as a departure from traditional German film making and was an extremely stylistic, artistic, experimental movie. It was very disjointed and hard to tell what was going on. I did enjoy the film, I just had trouble keeping up with it.
Our second Project was due for my Casual Game Development class. You can check out my final product here: http://alanleeson.com/ShapeShatter/shapeShatter.html. I am actually super proud of this game and I think is one of the best games I have worked on at RIT. The idea is, its a mobile casual game where you drag a line across the screen and try to destroy as many shapes as you can. The game is called Shape Shatter! We implemented some aspects from the Bubbles mobile ICE we made a few weeks ago and just went from there.
My Japanese Film class continued watching the 47 Ronin film and discussing a correlation to the Confucian relationships that governed who was to be loyal and sub servant to who.
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
LitReview: Value of Open Hardware
Who?
- Joshua M. Pearce
What?
Quantifying the Value of Open Source Hardware Development
Where?
When?
2015, 6, 1-11
Le Gist
Basically, this was an article literally attempting to give an equation and case study on how to calculate how valuable an open source hardware project is. This is done mainly in terms of money. The article is relevant due to modern ability to reproduce hardware especially through means like 3D printing.
The Good
- Super
- 4 Ways to Win was extremely helpful information. Great to learn the major types of business models for profiting off FOSS.
- I really like the point that FOSS allows businesses to directly interact with customers. I hadn't thought of this before, but I think it is extremely powerful given how many companies constantly talk about wanting to be close to the customer, and how much companies stress their relationship and trust with customers.
The Bad
- Some reiteration on reasons why FOSS is great. I have heard the bulk of the reasoning behind these benefits over and over again. I would have saved myself some time by just reading the business model specific stuff.
- Only gives 4 business models, although does offer a link for further investigation. Would have liked some lists of examples, especially considering fellow students complaints at some of the dated examples(*cough*Netscape*cough*)
- GPL guide section 12.1 talks about how the GPL does not restrict, but promotes free usage of software under the license, but does not explain how one would control that usage.
Questions
- What business model currently is the safest for developers like myself? Would I fall under that startup category?
- Is there a way to regulate usage of software, but still keep it open source? Is it possible to put source code up for people to see, but not let them use it? Is this still Open Source Software?
- I've heard time and time again the benefits of making software Open Source, to the point that I feel like I can only argue towards everything being open source. What are some examples of when closed source would be the way to go?
Review
This was a great quick read. I'm happy to start transitioning from the legal side to the business side of Business/Legal Aspects of FOSS class, and think this was a great jumping off point. Having said that, I would have liked a less biased, more informative, more up to date version.
7/10
Sunday, March 29, 2015
Weekly 8
Spring Break - I went home where my family and I did some snowboarding, and I tried to stay away from any schoolwork :)
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Weekly 7
Had to write an essay for my German Film class this week. That was kind of a bummer. The assignment was to analyze any of the films we watched in class based on what genre the movie was. So for example, I chose to write about how the film La Habanera was an Escapist Melodrama. I chose this movie because I thought it was interesting that these types of films were prominent during WWII in Germany. I initially believed the market to overwhelmingly be made up of propaganda films, but the motivation was really to distract the viewers from the terrors of the war.
In Japanese Film class, we wrapped up Seven Samurai and discussed it in class. I thoroughly enjoyed this film because it was action packed and had a very diverse range of characters, who were all very cool in their own way. A lot of other students like the film as well and it averaged about an 8.5 from the class reviews. We also started doing an in depth look at Confucianism and the different major relationships involved in traditional Confucian beliefs. Next, we are supposed to watch a film about the 47 Ronin, who were samurai whose master was wrongfully sentenced to commit suicide. The 47 Ronin then infamously seeked vengeance for their master's death.
In my Business and Legal Foss class we went to RocPy! You can read about this meetup in my other blog post! Basically, RocPy is always fun and productive and you should attend if you can.
In other news, still hammering through the classical Era for Music class. This week was kind of a wind down before spring break.
In Japanese Film class, we wrapped up Seven Samurai and discussed it in class. I thoroughly enjoyed this film because it was action packed and had a very diverse range of characters, who were all very cool in their own way. A lot of other students like the film as well and it averaged about an 8.5 from the class reviews. We also started doing an in depth look at Confucianism and the different major relationships involved in traditional Confucian beliefs. Next, we are supposed to watch a film about the 47 Ronin, who were samurai whose master was wrongfully sentenced to commit suicide. The 47 Ronin then infamously seeked vengeance for their master's death.
In my Business and Legal Foss class we went to RocPy! You can read about this meetup in my other blog post! Basically, RocPy is always fun and productive and you should attend if you can.
In other news, still hammering through the classical Era for Music class. This week was kind of a wind down before spring break.
Thursday, March 19, 2015
Profile1
Check out my Software Freedom Conservancy profile here: https://docs.google.com/a/g.rit.edu/document/d/1c_xVONX7ISMkBR8y2e3Pud9tZVy33LwtsfEX3F2eNWU/edit?usp=sharing
TeamProp2
List your other team members below
- Will Paul - dropofwill (whp3652@rit.edu)
- Kocsen Chung - kocsen (kxc4519@rit.edu)
Which Entity did your team choose to profile?
CoinBase
Description of the Organization
Coinbase is a private corporation that aims to provide a safe and reliable bitcoin wallet for users, as well as handle bitcoin transactions between users.
Describe each team member's role
We ended up dividing the project as such: Myself - service overview, Will - Organizational details, Kocsen - community architecture
Organization/Project Source Code Repo URL
- github.com/coinbase - toshi is there big project, everything else is wrappers for support
Upstream Mentors and Communication
- IRC: #coinbase
- Twitter: @coinbase
What do you anticipate the easy parts will be?
Lots of information on them on the internet, and it's not hard to sift through. Pretty up to date company which is good.
What do you anticipate the hard parts will be?
Organization is private, so may be hard to find certain private information about them.
How will you overcome both?
Get together with our group and just start diving into the internet.
If something goes wrong, what contingencies do you have in place?
Google docs saves all changes and is unparalleled for simple collaboration. We will revert back to older changes if something goes awry. Alternatively, the information we are researching is readily available on the internet, so we can just find it again.
When will your group meet regularly outside of class time?
Much thanks to Kocsen for setting up this nifty meetup calendar: http://www.when2meet.com/?2782271-P9cG4
We usually meet 2 or 3pm on Wednesdays.
RocPy Meetup!
Roc.py meetup was awesome! Bizlegfoss class met at the University of Rochester for a Python User Group meeting. It's been so long since I last attended Roc.py that I completely forgot about the weird setup of the room we usually set up in. All the seats are facing the back of the room because, as my friend explained, it helps the professors see what the students are doing on the computers.
Anyway, the vast bulk of the time was taken up by a really awesome open source Python web project called "toyz" by a U of R PhD student named Fred (fred3m - https://github.com/fred3m/toyz). The project is extremely useful for reducing and displaying things like gigantic images. The specific example that Fred gave was astronomy images which can be several gigabytes in size, but load extremely quickly through toyz. Fred said he made the program to help with his PhD and because he wanted to know he made something cool and worthwhile. The program was "initially created as a way to view and interact with FITS images stored on a remote server as well as perform data reduction", and it is meant "to meet the needs of 'Big Data' scientists".
Personally, I thought this program was awesome, and was especially intrigued to find that Fred has put the project on Github and would encourage people to check it out. His demo of the application framework was super cool, as he proved that it could load giant space images in mere seconds, which could then be zoomed in on for higher quality. The user interface was also very legitimate and professional looking, along with some really cool graph display abilities.
Fred said he wanted to bring attention to the idea that this type of technology needs to be updated and made more accessible, and it was really cool to see that he was trying to do something about that. After the toyz talk, there was still a bit of time left so anyone was allowed to give a lightning talk. One of my fellow bizlegfoss students AJ(ajman1101 - github.com/ajman1101) gave an awesome talk about how all of the elements of multiplayer games have already been defined. This was an extremely interesting topic for me being a Game Designer and Developer myself, and it was fun trying to categorize games that people have played into the categories that AJ gave. Overall, a fun filled Roc.py!
Anyway, the vast bulk of the time was taken up by a really awesome open source Python web project called "toyz" by a U of R PhD student named Fred (fred3m - https://github.com/fred3m/toyz). The project is extremely useful for reducing and displaying things like gigantic images. The specific example that Fred gave was astronomy images which can be several gigabytes in size, but load extremely quickly through toyz. Fred said he made the program to help with his PhD and because he wanted to know he made something cool and worthwhile. The program was "initially created as a way to view and interact with FITS images stored on a remote server as well as perform data reduction", and it is meant "to meet the needs of 'Big Data' scientists".
Personally, I thought this program was awesome, and was especially intrigued to find that Fred has put the project on Github and would encourage people to check it out. His demo of the application framework was super cool, as he proved that it could load giant space images in mere seconds, which could then be zoomed in on for higher quality. The user interface was also very legitimate and professional looking, along with some really cool graph display abilities.
Fred said he wanted to bring attention to the idea that this type of technology needs to be updated and made more accessible, and it was really cool to see that he was trying to do something about that. After the toyz talk, there was still a bit of time left so anyone was allowed to give a lightning talk. One of my fellow bizlegfoss students AJ(ajman1101 - github.com/ajman1101) gave an awesome talk about how all of the elements of multiplayer games have already been defined. This was an extremely interesting topic for me being a Game Designer and Developer myself, and it was fun trying to categorize games that people have played into the categories that AJ gave. Overall, a fun filled Roc.py!
LitReview: Market Power and Regulation
Who?
- Jean Tirole
What?
Nobel Prize winning article on Market power and regulation
Where?
When?
2014
The Gist
A cropped version and summation of the Nobel Prize award winning article about how regulation applies to different markets. It also explains some interesting tools and strategies for regulation and competition in markets.
The Good
- Very quick read for an award winning article
- Talks about oligopolies and monopolies, which I find very interesting
- The thing won a Nobel Prize - doesn't get much better than that!
The Bad
- Could see this being completely boring for those not interested in business.
- Lots of different cases to think about
- Would like to read the actual prize winning piece
The Questions:
- What other cases exist worth mentioning?
- Are patents good or bad in this sense?
- What is the most broadly applicable way to regulate markets
My Review
This was an interesting read, and it was really cool to get to know about something that won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for 2014. This was a very recent article although I would still like to know how it holds up in this immediate time.
7/10
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Weekly 6
After going over Business Models last week, we actually made our first company profile this week. I really like this assignment because I find I am learning a ton about a legitimate business and how they work. I think my enjoyment of this project is also very much thanks to my teammates dropofwill(github.com/dropofwill) and Kocsen(github.com/kocsen) because we did a great job of managing our team and our meet up times. Ultimately we just got together at the time we set and populated the profile with information. It went very smoothly and the presentation was done in no time.
My Casual Game Development class started on a new ICE today. I really like this assignment because it handles mobile development in a browser. I thought this was amazing because I didn't even know that mobile browsers supported HTML5 games. The game we have to make is very simple, it resizes to the screen size and spawns "bubbles" that float to the top of the screen that the player can pop by clicking on. The ICE was not too hard or time consuming and I think it was a very beneficial assignment to do. My friend and I are thinking we probably want to incorporate mobile gaming into our next project for this class.
We continued watching Seven Samurai in my Japanese Film class. For those of you who don't know, the film is set in Warring States Era Japan, and features a town that is threatened by bandits. To defeat the bandits, the villagers seek help from masterless wandering samurai called ronin. After trying to recruit many samurai by offering food and shelter, the villagers are finally able to assemble a team of 7 samurai - hence the title. The movie then follows the samurai's plans to save the village from the bandits.
Not much else worth noting. My music class was working on the Classical Era this week, which was awesome because we are finally listening to music that I can enjoy, from concertos to sonatas. These aren't exactly the songs I listen to on a daily basis, but they are not as bad as the very old songs we listened to last unit.
My Casual Game Development class started on a new ICE today. I really like this assignment because it handles mobile development in a browser. I thought this was amazing because I didn't even know that mobile browsers supported HTML5 games. The game we have to make is very simple, it resizes to the screen size and spawns "bubbles" that float to the top of the screen that the player can pop by clicking on. The ICE was not too hard or time consuming and I think it was a very beneficial assignment to do. My friend and I are thinking we probably want to incorporate mobile gaming into our next project for this class.
We continued watching Seven Samurai in my Japanese Film class. For those of you who don't know, the film is set in Warring States Era Japan, and features a town that is threatened by bandits. To defeat the bandits, the villagers seek help from masterless wandering samurai called ronin. After trying to recruit many samurai by offering food and shelter, the villagers are finally able to assemble a team of 7 samurai - hence the title. The movie then follows the samurai's plans to save the village from the bandits.
Not much else worth noting. My music class was working on the Classical Era this week, which was awesome because we are finally listening to music that I can enjoy, from concertos to sonatas. These aren't exactly the songs I listen to on a daily basis, but they are not as bad as the very old songs we listened to last unit.
Thursday, March 12, 2015
TeamProp1
List your other team members below
- Will Paul - dropofwill (whp3652@rit.edu)
- Kocsen Chung - kocsen (kxc4519@rit.edu)
Which Entity did your team choose to profile?
Software Freedom Conservancy
Description of the Organization
The Software Freedom Conservancy is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and FLOSS projects. They aim to provide a home and infrastructure for FLOSS projects and allow developers to focus more on developing. So basically they deal with the legal side of FLOSS projects so that the contributors can make the software without fear or distraction.
Describe each team member's role
We ended up dividing the project as such: Myself - service overview, Will - Organizational details, Kocsen - community architecture
Organization/Project Source Code Repo URL
- Not Applicable, the Conservancy simply helps open source projects
Upstream Mentors and Communication
- IRC: #conservancy
What do you anticipate the easy parts will be?
Pretty straightforward, fairly large company, with lots of information available. Company is centered around helping open source projects, so its pretty cool and likeable.
What do you anticipate the hard parts will be?
Unlike the other companies we make profiles for, this one does not actually have a github main project. Instead, this company helps open source projects.
How will you overcome both?
Good communication, good individual research, and collaboration via google docs. We usually just get our brains together and start mashing information into a google doc :)
If something goes wrong, what contingencies do you have in place?
Google docs saves all changes and is unparalleled for simple collaboration. We will revert back to older changes if something goes awry. Alternatively, the information we are researching is readily available on the internet, so we can just find it again.
When will your group meet regularly outside of class time?
Much thanks to Kocsen for setting up this nifty meetup calendar: http://www.when2meet.com/?2782271-P9cG4
We usually meet 2 or 3pm on Wednesdays.
Profile0
Plug for my Company Profile on Webkit here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h0Bh47JupolD2BBNuMl1-YHTeZR8xRXysOKS8nYk3iU/edit?usp=sharing
Sunday, March 8, 2015
Weekly 6
This was coming pretty close to midterm week...yay...
I got assigned my midterm for Production Studio which was basically a smaller working version of what the final product was supposed to be. The demo was to fully incorporate audio aspects hooked up to change the graphics of the scene. So far, we had split into smaller groups to get things done quicker on a smaller scale. This was really nice and I got to work with 2 kids who I had never worked with before. One of them is really smart and the other one does not really do any work.
In my Japanese History class, my professor gave a full overview of the Warring States Period. Apparently it was a period in Japan where there were a ton of different regions owned by various warlords, and they all fought constantly for control of the country. We also looked at Zen Buddhism which was a branch of Buddhism that was easy for samurai to quickly adapt to. We started watching Seven Samurai, which I am told will take us about 3 classes to finish.
In my Casual Game Development class, we handed in our final projects. You can check out my project on my friend's website here: http://alanleeson.com/BunnyBombs/bunnybombs.php. We were really proud of the project for several reasons. My friend enjoys web development and I also am a pretty big fan of javascript, so it was nice to get to program the game in that and HTML5. We were also very clean in how we organized the programming of the game. We used a module system and gave everything its own values. I personally handled collisions, design, sound, and some other minor fixes,
In BizLegFoss we started transitioning from Legal to Business studies by doing our first profile, which you can see on my blog!
I got assigned my midterm for Production Studio which was basically a smaller working version of what the final product was supposed to be. The demo was to fully incorporate audio aspects hooked up to change the graphics of the scene. So far, we had split into smaller groups to get things done quicker on a smaller scale. This was really nice and I got to work with 2 kids who I had never worked with before. One of them is really smart and the other one does not really do any work.
In my Japanese History class, my professor gave a full overview of the Warring States Period. Apparently it was a period in Japan where there were a ton of different regions owned by various warlords, and they all fought constantly for control of the country. We also looked at Zen Buddhism which was a branch of Buddhism that was easy for samurai to quickly adapt to. We started watching Seven Samurai, which I am told will take us about 3 classes to finish.
In my Casual Game Development class, we handed in our final projects. You can check out my project on my friend's website here: http://alanleeson.com/BunnyBombs/bunnybombs.php. We were really proud of the project for several reasons. My friend enjoys web development and I also am a pretty big fan of javascript, so it was nice to get to program the game in that and HTML5. We were also very clean in how we organized the programming of the game. We used a module system and gave everything its own values. I personally handled collisions, design, sound, and some other minor fixes,
In BizLegFoss we started transitioning from Legal to Business studies by doing our first profile, which you can see on my blog!
Thursday, March 5, 2015
Team Proposal 0
Lol at the 0 index in the title of this blog post :)
List your other team members below
- Will Paul - dropofwill (whp3652@rit.edu)
- Kocsen Chung - kocsen (kxc4519@rit.edu)
Which Entity did your team choose to profile?
KDE/Apple/Adobe/Google/Opera - Webkit and Blink
Description of the Organization
Collaboration of giant leading software companies to create a powerful and extremely widely used open source project web tool.
Description of the project
Webkit was authored by KDE and has been contributed to, and implemented by the mammoth aforementioned software companies. It is written in C++ and functions as the layout software for webpage rendering used in web browsers. Where WebKit powers Apple's Safari, the "fork(though possibly more than just a fork at this point)" project Blink powers Google's Chromium. Webkit technology has a larger browser market share than the engines used by Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Webkit is licensed predominantly under the BSD 2.0.
Describe each team member's role
I really like the way Will(dropofwill) organized this in his blog post, and I think we will stick to the idea of dividing the work based on this:
-Organizational details for each enterprise
- Apple
- Adobe
- Opera
- KDE
-Webkit communication channels
-Blink communication channels
-Webkit community architecture
-Blink community architecture
-Webkit technology/product overview
-Blink technology/product overview
Organization/Project Source Code Repo URL
- WebKit - https://github.com/WebKit/webkit
- Blink - https://github.com/ChromiumWebApps/blink
Upstream Mentors and Communication
Might try and contact the folks at Google or Apple via some customer service links, if we have a burning question. I could also be devious and probably shoot some emails to the email addresses listed in the contributions to each project :)
What do you anticipate the easy parts will be?
It's a lot of information. Should be easy to find sources because we're looking at a collaboration between giant companies, and a project that is extremely important to the major web browsers today. I also think this should be interesting to research into.
What do you anticipate the hard parts will be?
It's a lot of information. WebKit is a huge project with a lot of history divided amongst several huge companies. Blink is probably the same way. It might be hard not only to have to deal with all of the information from both projects, but also to find differences between the project and its "fork".
How will you overcome both?
Not really sure of a milestone list, but I will probably just determine what role I will play in our team role list and then start hitting the points from the rubric here: http://bizlegfoss-ritigm.rhcloud.com/static/hw/profile.html I'll try and only grab at information that is really relevant to the point that I am working at. We will overcome through filtering and consistent work input - basically just good researching.
If something goes wrong, what contingencies do you have in place?
I will probably default to asking my groupmates if they have any information or suggestions of places to look for what I need. If that doesn't work, I might try and get information straight from the companies, or just keep searching until some light is shed on the subject.
When will your group meet regularly outside of class time?
Much thanks to Kocsen for setting up this nifty meetup calendar: http://www.when2meet.com/?2782271-P9cG4
Looks like we line up times on Mondays/Fridays 3-5pm, and Wednesdays from 3-4pm.
LitReview: OSI Business Models and GPL Guide Ch. 12 Section 1
Who?
- Bradley M. Kuhn
- Anthony K. Sebro, Jr.
- Denver Gingerich
- Folks at the OSI and SFLC
What?
GPL Compliance Guide(Chapter 12.1) and Open Source Case for Business
Where?
GPL Guide: http://bizlegfoss-ritigm.rhcloud.com/static/books/comprehensive-gpl-guide.pdf#section.12.1
OSI Business Models: http://opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_business.php
When?
2014 updates on both
Le Gist
GPL Guide section on basically how the GPL deals specifically with copying, distributing, and modifying, but does not really cover usage at all, which can be helpful to businesses. OSI article is all about the benefits of Open Source Projects to businesses, and the "4 Ways to Win" which are 4 effective business models that make money with Open Source Software.
The Good
- Great transition into the business side of this class. Also interesting to acknowledge the benefits of the freedom of using open source software in house.
- 4 Ways to Win was extremely helpful information. Great to learn the major types of business models for profiting off FOSS.
- I really like the point that FOSS allows businesses to directly interact with customers. I hadn't thought of this before, but I think it is extremely powerful given how many companies constantly talk about wanting to be close to the customer, and how much companies stress their relationship and trust with customers.
The Bad
- Some reiteration on reasons why FOSS is great. I have heard the bulk of the reasoning behind these benefits over and over again. I would have saved myself some time by just reading the business model specific stuff.
- Only gives 4 business models, although does offer a link for further investigation. Would have liked some lists of examples, especially considering fellow students complaints at some of the dated examples(*cough*Netscape*cough*)
- GPL guide section 12.1 talks about how the GPL does not restrict, but promotes free usage of software under the license, but does not explain how one would control that usage.
Questions
- What business model currently is the safest for developers like myself? Would I fall under that startup category?
- Is there a way to regulate usage of software, but still keep it open source? Is it possible to put source code up for people to see, but not let them use it? Is this still Open Source Software?
- I've heard time and time again the benefits of making software Open Source, to the point that I feel like I can only argue towards everything being open source. What are some examples of when closed source would be the way to go?
Review
This was a great quick read. I'm happy to start transitioning from the legal side to the business side of Business/Legal Aspects of FOSS class, and think this was a great jumping off point. Having said that, I would have liked a less biased, more informative, more up to date version.
7/10
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
LitReview: SFLC Legal Primer Chapter 3
Who?
- Richard Fontana
- Bradley M. Kuhn
- Eben Moglen
- Matthew Norwood
- Daniel B. Ravicher
- Karen Sandler
- James Vasile
- Aaron Williamson
What?
FOSS Primer - A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects (Chapter 6)
Where?
When?
4 June 2008
The Gist
This chapter of the FOSS Primer was all about Common Organizational Issues, and it talks all about different types of organizations while leaning heavily towards nonprofit corporations because at the time, that was the preferred/recommended corporate form for FOSS projects.
The Good
- Lists and discusses 4 major corporate forms - unincorporated organization, nonprofit corporation, umbrella organization(insert Half Life 2 joke here), and individual acting independently. I thought this was interesting and helpful.
- Gives benefits to forming each different organization, but also lists weaknesses.
- Great information for anyone looking to start a nonprofit corporation and get it registered for tax exemption.
The Bad
- It was mentioned in class that the nonprofit corporation is no longer the recommended corporate form for FOSS projects, and this chapter goes much more in depth on nonprofit corporations than I would have liked. I would have really liked a similar amount of information on for profit structures.
- Makes it seem like forming an organization is a lot of time and effort, which it most likely is, but it becomes more unappealing in my eyes.
- IRS seems kind of obnoxious.
The Questions:
- Is a non-profit organization definitely not the way to go if you want to make money off of your open source project?
- Why does the IRS allow only 27 months from formation for a nonprofit to become tax exempt if they also require 3 years of financial history to even apply for tax exemption?
- What are some ideal cases of successful non profit open source organizations?
My Review
My professor (github.com/decause) made a point in class that we don't have many(if any) courses even similar to my Business and Legal FOSS class, and he proceeded to ask who was hearing/learning of things like "corporate forms" or "trademarks" for the first time. I among many other students in the class raised my hand in response to this question. This chapter serves as another example of something I am finding very interesting that I wish we had more time in the semester to go deeper into along with patents, trademarks, copyright, licensing, etc.. Having said that, I wish this chapter went more into corporations in FOSS that were profitable.
6/10
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Weekly 5
This week was a nice slow down after the pretty eventful last 4 weeks. In my Casual Game Development class, our teams of 2 presented what we had so far and everyone voted on what demo was their favorite, to give that project extra credit points. I liked doing this because I found it made all of the teams work harder on their deliverable because we all wanted to be voted the favorite game. We actually did end up scoring some extra credit points for what we had!
In my Global Cinema - German Film class, we watched something called a "Rubble Film" which takes place in the ruins of Berlin in Post WWII Germany. It was pretty amazing to watch especially because they actually filmed in the ruins of the war, so the damage was very real. In my Modern Japanese History in Film class, we started discussing the Warring States Period.
In my Production Studio class, we worked on merging the "audio team's" work with the "graphics team's" work. This was a total pain because since the group in total had about 12 people, everyone just relied on someone else to do all the work, and very few people ended up committing changes until last minute. Ultimately, we did manage to pull together a very simple, but pretty broken demo fusing the music and sound.
In other news, my Introduction to Music class had its first quiz on reading music and describing music objectively, as well as our first exam on the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Eras. I did extremely well on both exams although not without long hours of studying. I think this is one of those classes that people will assume is a lot easier than it actually is.
In my Global Cinema - German Film class, we watched something called a "Rubble Film" which takes place in the ruins of Berlin in Post WWII Germany. It was pretty amazing to watch especially because they actually filmed in the ruins of the war, so the damage was very real. In my Modern Japanese History in Film class, we started discussing the Warring States Period.
In my Production Studio class, we worked on merging the "audio team's" work with the "graphics team's" work. This was a total pain because since the group in total had about 12 people, everyone just relied on someone else to do all the work, and very few people ended up committing changes until last minute. Ultimately, we did manage to pull together a very simple, but pretty broken demo fusing the music and sound.
In other news, my Introduction to Music class had its first quiz on reading music and describing music objectively, as well as our first exam on the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Eras. I did extremely well on both exams although not without long hours of studying. I think this is one of those classes that people will assume is a lot easier than it actually is.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
VidReview: Trademarks and Your Free and Open Source Software Project
Who?
Karen Sandler - CEO of Software Freedom Conservancy
What?
All Things Open 2014 - Karen Sandler - Trademarks and Your Free and Open Source Software Project
Where?
When?
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Posted on youtube: Nov 14, 2014
The Gist
Presentation on Trademarks, what they are, how they are enforced, and a bunch of real life examples of cases involving trademarks.
The Good
- Nice to hear someone talking about trademarks who really knows her stuff and is extremely qualified to give the talk.
- Lots of example cases involving very well known companies from the FOSS world.
- Provided both cases where it was determined it was not worthwhile to enforce a trademark, and cases where it was very important to take action.
The Bad
- The guy with the big hair could not stop shaking his foot, which I found very distracting.
- Kind of a giant recap of a lot of the points I already learned about in the reading from my previous LitReview post.
- Seems like there is a lot of stuff that has to be argued in cases involving trademarks - not very concrete
Questions
- How is the scope of distribution determined for a project distributed through the internet
- How do we enforce trademarks internationally especially if it is an extreme case where you would want to enforce - Any examples of these cases?
- Is there a concrete definition or explanation of how it can be determined that a trademark is no longer in use? At what point can it effectively be argued that a trademark is obsolete?
Review
A lot of repetition from my last reading on Trademarks, but it was helpful in further solidifying my understanding on the topic. It was also nice to hear someone talk about trademarks in a presentation setting rather than having to read about them. I also greatly appreciated the relevant examples from the qualified speaker.
7/10
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
LitReview: FOSS Primer Chapter 5
Who?
- Richard Fontana
- Bradley M. Kuhn
- Eben Moglen
- Matthew Norwood
- Daniel B. Ravicher
- Karen Sandler
- James Vasile
- Aaron Williamson
What?
FOSS Primer - A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects (Chapter 5)
Where?
When?
4 June 2008
The Gist
This chapter of the FOSS Primer was all about trademarks, from what they are, to how to go about registering one. It also describes situations in which a trademark can be lost, and how a FOSS Project might want to make use of a trademark.
The Good
- Great quick general description of what a trademark is. I found this helpful because I really did not know what a trademark was prior to reading this.
- I like how this explains how trademarks work, but always tries to focus on how they would apply in the world of FOSS, for example when they recommend using class 9 for classification of goods.
- It's nice that the primer explains the scare tactic behind cease and desist letters, because I think my first reaction to a cease and desist would be to panic.
The Bad
- Does not constitute legal advice so might not be what someone in a specific situation is looking for
- I would have liked explanations of other goods classifications aside from just the recommendation of class 9.
- I wish it was not so expensive to register trademarks.
Questions
- Exactly how is the scope of a product distributed through the internet determined in trademark issues?
- At what point is a trademark legally no longer in use due to circumstances like genericide or failure to enforce?
- Using the "R" symbol, how do you determine whether it is registered by state or federal level?
Review
Next to the Patent Chapter, I think this was my favorite chapter of the Primer so far. It is extremely to the point and very helpful for someone like me with little prior knowledge in the legal areas. I also like that although this does not constitute legal advice, the primer does give extremely solid examples of possible scenarios and suggestions of what action to take in such scenarios.
9/10
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Weekly 4
So this week was pretty heavy on work.
My Global Cinema German Film class had our first essay due. I chose to write about the expressionist art style prominent in the movie Metropolis. In the movie, characters are given an outward image that directly correlates to their inner emotions. The film also uses special effects to further convey how characters are feeling internally.
My Japanese Film class finished up Rashomon and we discussed the film afterwords. Overall reaction to the film was pretty good, with the average rating being around a 7 or an 8. I was closer to the higher ratings as I think this is one of the best, most innovative films ever made.
My Casual Game Development class assigned teams of 2 and started coming up with game ideas for our project 1. My friend Alan(github.com/AlanLeeson) came up with the idea for a game where the player controls a rabbit that can burrow into the ground by planting bombs. The theme for the game is "Chain Reaction" so we kept that in mind when first coming up with the idea.
My Production Studio class put together a demo where I worked really hard to make the terrain, and ultimately, I realized that we didn't have floating islands in the scene, so I added those as well. We are currently using Three.js for the 3D scene building, and sonic.api for music analysis.
My Global Cinema German Film class had our first essay due. I chose to write about the expressionist art style prominent in the movie Metropolis. In the movie, characters are given an outward image that directly correlates to their inner emotions. The film also uses special effects to further convey how characters are feeling internally.
My Japanese Film class finished up Rashomon and we discussed the film afterwords. Overall reaction to the film was pretty good, with the average rating being around a 7 or an 8. I was closer to the higher ratings as I think this is one of the best, most innovative films ever made.
My Casual Game Development class assigned teams of 2 and started coming up with game ideas for our project 1. My friend Alan(github.com/AlanLeeson) came up with the idea for a game where the player controls a rabbit that can burrow into the ground by planting bombs. The theme for the game is "Chain Reaction" so we kept that in mind when first coming up with the idea.
My Production Studio class put together a demo where I worked really hard to make the terrain, and ultimately, I realized that we didn't have floating islands in the scene, so I added those as well. We are currently using Three.js for the 3D scene building, and sonic.api for music analysis.
Thursday, February 19, 2015
LitReview: Various Patent Promises
Who?
The folks at:
- Red Hat
- IBM
What?
- Red Hat - "Statement of Position and Our Promise on Software Patents"
- IBM - "Statement of Non-Assertion of Named Patents Against OSS"
- Google - "Open Patent Non Assertion Pledge"
- Red Hat Patent Promise: Encouraging - Patent Pledge Comparisons
Where?
- http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html
- http://www.ibm.com/ibm/licensing/patents/pledgedpatents.pdf
- https://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/pledge/
- https://www.redhat.com/magazine/001nov04/features/patents/
When?
- Red Hat - 2014
- IBM - 2005
- Red Hat Comparisons - 2004
The Gist
Description of the promises made by Red Hat, IBM, and Google granting permission to infringe upon patents held by each company without fear of enforcement of said patents. Also, a comparison by Red Hat highlighting differences on how individual types of pledges work and exactly what is promised by each pledge.
The Good
- Nice to see big companies promoting the development of Open Source Software as opposed to inhibiting innovation.
- IBM gives a long list of specific patents which is helpful for me to better understand what kinds of things are patented.
- Pledges are specific to Open Source Software, which really promotes the development of Open Source projects over proprietary software.
The Bad
- Each company states that they can terminate their promise. Makes it sound like they will just use the promise however they see fit.
- Promises are very broad and don't clearly explain how they specifically apply.
- Red Hat admits this, but they are being quite hypocritical by fighting against software patents and then still owning tons of patents themselves.
Questions
- Why are large companies able to acquire large libraries of patents that they could use against an ordinary person contributing to open source software who doesn't even know they are infringing a patent? This seems unfair.
- What do the patent promises for other companies look like? Specifically, I would like to see a company like Apple's stand on this type of thing.
- What are some companies that do not make patent pledges to help FOSS that would be helpful if they did.
Review
I liked this reading because the pledges are short and to the point, although I do really wish they made the pledges more clear. I also would like more specific examples that show holes in the pledges or ways in which the pledges completely protect people. The Red Hat comparison was helpful, but it did not list all that many examples.
7/10
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
LitReview: FOSS Primer Chapter 4
Who?
- Richard Fontana
- Bradley M. Kuhn
- Eben Moglen
- Matthew Norwood
- Daniel B. Ravicher
- Karen Sandler
- James Vasile
- Aaron Williamson
What?
FOSS Primer - A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects(Chapter 4)
Where?
When?
4 June 2008
The Gist
Chapter of the Foss Primer that I blogged about earlier, helping people interested in FOSS familiarize themselves with what patents are, how patents can be used to harm FOSS projects, and what contributors accused of patent infringement can do to defend themselves.
The Good
- Learned a lot about patents, what they are, how they are composed, what they do.
- Teaches people to defend against patents through - License, Non-infringement, Invalidity, and unenforceability
- Gets right down to how to read a patent, what parts to look at first, and what parts to use for backup information.
The Bad
- Tries to make patents not look scary, but still makes it seem difficult to take any steps to ensure prevention from patent infringement.
- Pretty heavy document on the legal side
- Everything is dependent on the situation, information is not specific to any single case.
Questions
- What is the simplest way to just avoid patent infringement through prevention.
- If I feel I am likely to infringe upon a patent, can I go about requesting a license? How?
- What are some examples of big patent cases in the FOSS world?
My Review
I thought this read was extra informative because I knew virtually nothing about patents prior to reading this chapter. It was not written too difficultly and I really liked how it gets right to the point explaining which parts of the patent to not worry about, and mentioning that the claims are the most important part.
9/10
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Weekly 3
This week in Bizlegfoss...we discussed the GPL license - see the litreview post for more on this. I like finally getting to dive deeper into the FOSS licenses that are a part of basically every project that I work on through github. I quickly realize that I know so little about what the licenses actually do, which is funny because it turns out it's all actually extremely interesting stuff!
In production studio, we split into 2 groups - 1 group for getting as much information from an audio file as we can, and 1 group for putting together a 3d scene with floating islands, terrain, and a sky in. Hence the project has been titled "Floating Islands" which I would link to if the project was not private on github :(
My Casual Game Development class continued working on our chain reaction circles game. The game involves a bunch of 2d circles floating around. When the user clicks one circle, it explodes and causes all circles around it to explode. The player wants to remove as many circles from the game as they can. This is all programmed in javascript and is playable on the web, although I do not currently have it hosted anywhere.
My German film class watched Metropolis, another old black and white infamous melodrama. My Japanese film class watched the even more infamous movie Rashomon by director Akira Kurosawa. This film is awesome if you are in to samurai culture, or even if you just want to see a revolutionary movie.
Last thing to note about this week is that my music class got started on the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Eras.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
LitReview: Various Agreements
LitReview Pending
Notes:
Itunes TOS: - more bad things - you're using their stuff
-1 Click licensed through Amazon - interesting that they have to state that
-A lot of obvious things said very verbosely
-Card value is 1/10 of one cent - wat
-Not a lot on preorders
-Why 6 members, why 5 authorized computers, why 25000 songs?
-A lot of things that you might want to consider before agreeing - ex. Family Organizer
-Apple is not responsible - they don't care
-"Apple is not responsible for typographic errors"
-interesting that the biggest section was for family sharing and I don't even use that
-pretty strict and binding
-exact opposite of licenses - "you shall not modify, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute, or create derivative works"
Fedora Project Contributor Agreement - more good things - they're using your stuff
-Not to be confused with licensing
-does not supercede the license
-does not apply to upstream code
-code vs content - specifying terms++
-MIT
-lol at defining "You"
-interesting copyright holder employer clarification
-goes to CDL if you haven't yet licensed it
Python Contributor Agreement - way shorter
-an actual form - you have more of a say
-More of a contract and agreement on both sides
-You pick your initial license
-Does not prevent contributor from licensing contributions under different terms from initial
Similarities
-all agreements
-regarding use of something by someone else
Notes:
Itunes TOS: - more bad things - you're using their stuff
-1 Click licensed through Amazon - interesting that they have to state that
-A lot of obvious things said very verbosely
-Card value is 1/10 of one cent - wat
-Not a lot on preorders
-Why 6 members, why 5 authorized computers, why 25000 songs?
-A lot of things that you might want to consider before agreeing - ex. Family Organizer
-Apple is not responsible - they don't care
-"Apple is not responsible for typographic errors"
-interesting that the biggest section was for family sharing and I don't even use that
-pretty strict and binding
-exact opposite of licenses - "you shall not modify, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute, or create derivative works"
Fedora Project Contributor Agreement - more good things - they're using your stuff
-Not to be confused with licensing
-does not supercede the license
-does not apply to upstream code
-code vs content - specifying terms++
-MIT
-lol at defining "You"
-interesting copyright holder employer clarification
-goes to CDL if you haven't yet licensed it
Python Contributor Agreement - way shorter
-an actual form - you have more of a say
-More of a contract and agreement on both sides
-You pick your initial license
-Does not prevent contributor from licensing contributions under different terms from initial
Similarities
-all agreements
-regarding use of something by someone else
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
LitReview: GPL Compliance Guide
Who?
- Bradley M. Kuhn
- Anthony K. Sebro, Jr.
- Denver Gingerich
- Free Software Foundation, Inc.
- Software Freedom Law Center
What?
Copyleft and the GNU General Public License: A Comprehensive Tutorial and Guide
Where?
When?
First Published 2008, up to date as of 2014
The Gist
A very helpful comprehensive guide that clarifies things like Software Freedom, Public Domain, Copyleft, Copyright, and licensing software. The guide specifically explains how the GPL v2 and v3 are meant to work and mentions some benefits and reasons for licensing software.
The Good
- Clarified a lot of topics. Questions I had after my last litreview were answered in this reading. Also really liked reading up on the 4 Freedoms of Free Software.
- Very up to date and tries to give full explanation of key concepts before diving straight into the license.
- I was very happy to read more about this license in particular because it is the most widely used free software license.
The Bad
- Software Freedom is not a legal concept so it's just going by what the FSF defines it as.
- Meant to explain a lot of information to a broad audience, so it is pretty dense and I had to read some parts multiple times.
- A lot of repetition of things I already knew, so I felt at points like parts were almost obvious to me.
The Questions
- Can I, depending on the license, open Github, find a project that I think is very good, compile the source code to an executable and sell that executable via perhaps CD or USB as long as I ship the source?
- What are some big reasons not to license under the GPL? V2 or V3?
- This question was asked in class but I am very curious - does Obfuscated code legally count as source code?
My Review
There were a lot of things about this article that I liked. I found it very helpful to read about the 4 Freedoms of Free Software and I liked clarifying the difference between software being Free as in freedom vs Free as in price. I think it was important that I read this document because I find the GPL to be the most interesting license, as it is the most widely used.
8/10
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Weekly 2
This week picked up pretty quick especially when compared to week 1. We got our assignment for Production Studio. Basically, the entire semester is devoted to our class outputting a demo project based on the professor's requirements. Our project is supposed to ultimately be a web browser based application that takes in a song and crafts a 3d artistic scene based on the musical data. For this initial week, we were supposed to put together research presentations about present web technologies, api's, music data, and sound files to determine what tools we would end up using to make the project. I did a presentation on the visual style of Roger Dean(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Dean_%28artist%29) who was the main influence for this project, and the artist behind many 70's classic rock album covers. I also covered model loading in THREE.js.
For my Modern Japan Film class, we read some poetry collections from the Heian Period of Japan. In my other film class, Global Cinema - German Film, we watched the old German films The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and The Last Laugh. I enjoyed both of these classes and found the videos surprisingly entertaining despite the lack of any color.
In my Casual Game Development class this week, we did in class exercises to put together a chain reaction game called "Boomshine". In my BizLegFOSS class, we performed a FirstFlight assignment to hook us up to github, and we did a Literature Review and Video Review on Everything is a Remix(http://everythingisaremix.info/). The First Flight assignment was a breeze because I had already done the assignment last year in HFOSS. Last thing to note this week is that my music class started learning some basics about reading musical notes and figuring out how to objectively describe a song.
For my Modern Japan Film class, we read some poetry collections from the Heian Period of Japan. In my other film class, Global Cinema - German Film, we watched the old German films The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and The Last Laugh. I enjoyed both of these classes and found the videos surprisingly entertaining despite the lack of any color.
In my Casual Game Development class this week, we did in class exercises to put together a chain reaction game called "Boomshine". In my BizLegFOSS class, we performed a FirstFlight assignment to hook us up to github, and we did a Literature Review and Video Review on Everything is a Remix(http://everythingisaremix.info/). The First Flight assignment was a breeze because I had already done the assignment last year in HFOSS. Last thing to note this week is that my music class started learning some basics about reading musical notes and figuring out how to objectively describe a song.
Thursday, February 5, 2015
LitReview: FOSS Primer
Who?
- Richard Fontana
- Bradley M. Kuhn
- Eben Moglen
- Matthew Norwood
- Daniel B. Ravicher
- Karen Sandler
- James Vasile
- Aaron Williamson
What?
FOSS Primer - A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects(Chapters 1&2)
Where?
When?
4 June 2008
The Gist
An informational primer to help people interested in FOSS familiarize themselves with things like different licenses, different terms like "copyright" or "copyleft", and the enforcement of licenses and copyrights.
The Good
- I didn't find it too hard to read. Wasn't written in heavy legal jargon with citations everywhere
- I finally have a better understanding of different licenses now
- Makes it clear that you should search for more specific information if you are interested in something rather than just going straight off from the primer
The Bad
- This is a very important modern topic, and this version of the primer is from 2008.
- Some of the licenses could have been a bit better explained in more detail.
- The Apache License was talked about early on, but I don't think it was very in depth when describing the specific licenses.
The Questions
- Do we have certain default copyrights to our code, the second we start writing it?
- Which license could potentially allow for the most profit?
- Why are companies allowed to just claim rights to code written by their employees in free time on non-company machines?
My Review
As someone interested in FOSS with little knowledge on the different licenses, the meaning of copyright, and the enforcement of said licenses, I found this reading incredibly enlightening. I am very glad I got to read it and it sheds a lot of light on my understanding of FOSS in general.
9/10
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
VidReview: "Everything is a Remix"
Who?
Kirby Ferguson
What?
Everything is a Remix
Where?
or
When?
Published on youtube on June 25, 2012
The Gist
The video "Everything is a Remix" is an eye-opening video showing numerous examples of how everything is derived from everything else. The main parts of the video are titled "Song Remains the Same", "Remix Inc.", "The Elements of Creativity", and "System Failure", and the major point that gets repeated throughout the video is that progress is made through copying, transforming, and then combining.
The Good
- I really liked the number of examples that are given in this video. They make it hard to argue against the points of the video.
- The video is only a few years old and the information is still very relevant today. Problems stated are still around today.
- The video is segmented into parts quite well and is consistently interesting. I especially liked the portion about the hypocrisy of people acting towards copied work.
The Bad
- Although this gives a lot of objective information, it doesn't really provide any concrete solutions or changes that could be made to better benefit everyone.
- Jumped around to cover a lot of information
- At the end of the video, he tells the audience "it's up to us" but I'm not 100% clear on exactly what or how he wants us to change things.
The Questions
- What is arguably the most popular remix of all time? What is the heaviest lawsuit against a remix?
- How can we both protect unique ideas and allow people to profit off of their creativity, but still encourage people to copy off of original ideas.
- How can we prevent companies or people from amassing wealth simply by bullying innovators with copyright lawsuits.
My Review
I enjoyed this video. It was not too long and yet it covered a lot of ground. The video was very well put together and I like that every point was supported by tons of relevant examples. I did find the video very objective, which isn't bad, but it made me seriously question how we can find solutions for the problems in this world of remixes. Overall, the video was both enlightening and thought provoking.
8/10
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
First Flight
Welcome to another one of my FOSS blogs! This blog is mainly a place where I can put up posts for my Business and Legal Aspects of Free and Open Source Software Course. I am super excited to be taking this class especially after how great my Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Course was. One incredibly cool thing about this course is that it is 1 of the only classes in the world managed through a github open source repo website. This can be found and forked from here: https://github.com/decause/bizlegfoss or if you want to just see what the site looks like on the user side, check it out here: http://bizlegfoss-ritigm.rhcloud.com/
This website and repo are managed by the one and only awesome course professor Remy Decausemaker (github.com/decause). As a student in the BizLegFoss class, I am required to add things to the repo and this specific blog post is a part of one of those assignments. For this post, I am supposed to detail what my experience was like in terms of setting up a github account, making my blog, and editing the course repo.
I would be speaking about how I downloaded HexChat and used commands to register my IRC username(snapschott), and then proceeded to signup with blogger to make this blog that you are reading, and then signed up with github to work on open source projects, but I already did all of these things last semester. You can read my "first" first flight here: http://andrewhfoss.blogspot.com/2014/08/first-flight.html.
For this iteration of my First Flight, all I really had to do was make a new blog on my account, and then create a new file in the github repo I linked to in the first paragraph of this post. It was definitely nice to have already had a head start for this class and I really look forward to continuing in the Remy Decausemaker series of FOSS classes. Stay tuned for more posts coming soon!
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Weekly 1
Week 1 of classes
Classes started on Monday, August 25. This semester I originally grabbed these courses:
Classes started on Monday, August 25. This semester I originally grabbed these courses:
- Business & Legal Aspects of Free and Open Source Software
- Production Studio
- Casual Game Development
- Linux Software Development -Switched for Modern Japan in History, Fiction, and Film
- Global Cinemas
- Introduction to Music
Unfortunately, after a lengthy talk with my adviser, I decided to switch out my Linux Software Development class for Modern Japan in History, Fiction, and Film. I am still quite interested in minoring in Free and Open Source Software, but I made this move because my adviser and I decided it would be best to knock out my Immersion requirement before going full force at getting a minor. This new class fits the immersion of "Film Studies" which I am extremely interested in.
While I was sort of pleased with my final schedule, it was a real pain getting all of my classes sorted out because a lot of the one's I initially wanted to take filled up before I could even enroll. Another unfortunate outcome of this schedule is that I ended up enrolled in 6 classes whereas I have only ever taken 5 at a time.
Aside from the bad news of the somewhat heavier course load with 6 total classes, 3 of which are advanced Interactive Games and Media electives, my courses actually seemed pretty enjoyable. Nothing much to report this week aside from that initial positive reaction. All of my profs just went over the course descriptions.
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