This panel explores the relationship between Modern Monetary Theory and legal theory, as well as the role of legal professionals in the MMT community, and lessons from prior law & economics movements for the development and operationalization of MMT ideas.
It's fortunately more common now in Free Software communities today to properly value contributions from non-developers. Historically, though, contributions from developers were often overvalued and contributions from others grossly undervalued. One person trailblazed as (likely) the earliest non-developer contributor to software freedom. His name was Robert J. Chassell — called Bob by his friends and colleagues. Over the weekend, our community lost Bob after a long battle with a degenerative illness.
I am one of the few of my generation in the Free Software community who had the opportunity to know Bob. He was already semi-retired in the late 1990s when I first became involved with Free Software, but he enjoyed giving talks about Free Software and occasionally worked the FSF booths at events where I had begun to volunteer in 1997. He was the first person to offer mentorship to me as I began the long road of becoming a professional software freedom activist.
I had worked a night shift. The dog woke me at lunch time. Re must have just left for work. I tried to sleep more but I was awake. I took the dog down the beach for a walk. Picked up some beer, food and milk on the way home …
Max killed himself this week. I found out from a message on my phone. I was sitting in the cab of my ute after a day at work. I stared at my phone.
I thought I’d misunderstood the message. I read it again, the words became disjointed and I …
Why is it all so fucking hard?
I am not reinventing the wheel. I just wanted a simple way to post text and the odd picture online. I do not want to post via some ‘service’ in which I end up being owned by them. I did not want to …
I encourage all of you to either listen to or read the transcript of Terry Gross' Fresh Air interview with Joseph Turow about his discussion of his book “The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, And Define Your Power”.
Now, most of you who read my blog know the difference between proprietary and Free Software, and the difference between a network service and software that runs on your own device. I want all of you have a good understanding of that to do a simple thought experiment:
How many of the horrible things that Turow talks about can happen if there is no proprietary software on your IoT or mobile devices?
There are a lot of problems in our society, and particularly in the USA, right now, and plenty of charities who need our support. The reason I continue to focus my work on software freedom is simply because there are so few focused on the moral and ethical issues of computing. Open Source has reached its pinnacle as an industry fad, and with it, a watered-down message: “having some of the source code for some of your systems some of the time is so great, why would you need anything more?”. Universal software freedom is however further from reality than it was even a few years ago. At least a few of us, in my view, must focus on that cause.
Shane would like to say thank you and God bless you to all the people who are offering kind words... Read more »
The post THERESE MACGOWAN RIP appeared first on Shane MacGowan.
[ This blog was crossposted on Software Freedom Conservancy's website. ]
As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I had the privilege of attending Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC EU) and the OpenWrt Summit in Berlin, Germany earlier this month. I gave a talk (for which the video is available below) at the OpenWrt Summit. I also had the opportunity to host the first of many conference sessions seeking feedback and input from the Linux developer community about Conservancy's GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers.
ELC EU has no “BoF Board” where you can post informal sessions. So, we scheduled the session by word of mouth over a lunch hour. We nevertheless got an good turnout (given that our session's main competition was eating food :) of about 15 people.
I’ve been a registered nurse for a mere six months now and am very aware of my ignorance. University did not teach me about the paperwork and associated procedures to arrange things like outpatient xrays. However I know I’ll figure that stuff out with experience. In the meantime …
There are plenty of mailing list threads to read, and I don't actually recommend the one that I'm talking about. I think it went on too long, was far too “ad hominem” rather than real policy. Somewhere beneath the surface there was a policy discussion being shouted down; if you look close, you can find find it underneath.
As he always does, Jon Corbet did an excellent job finding the real policy details in the “GPL defence” ksummit-discuss thread, and telling us all about it. I am very hard on tech journalism, but when it comes to reporting on Linux specifically, Jon and his colleagues at lwn.net have been, for nearly two decades, always been real, detailed, and balanced (and not in the Fox News way) tech journalism.
According to the Wayback Machine tregeagle.com has been running my blog for over 16 years now. I’m pretty sure I had it running in some sort of decrepid state a bit before that even. So, maybe not posting anything for almost a year and a half is OK …