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Open Sourced( );
Breaking boundaries between
ownership and collaboration in
the information age.
Open Source Everywhere
Open Source Projects that Changed the World
Build it. Share it. Profit.
Vol. 1
Winter 2011
{ }
OpenSourced
EDITOR IN CHIEF: Chris Anderson
EXECUTIVE EDITOR: Thomas Goetz
MANAGING EDITOR: Jacob Young
FEATURES EDITOR: Mark Robinson
ARTICLES EDITOR: Robert Capps
STORY EDITORS: Jon J. Eilenberg, Sarah Fallon
SENIOR EDITORS: Chris Baker, Nancy Miller, Adam Rogers, Jason Tanz, Bill Wasik
SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR: Mark McClusky
SENIOR WRITER: Steven Levy
COPY CHIEF: Jennifer Prior
COPY EDITORS: Brian Dustrud, Holly Haynes
SENIOR EDITOR, RESEARCH: Joanna Pearlstein
ASSISTANT RESEARCH EDITORS: Rachel Swaby, Angela Watercutter
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC RELATIONS: Samantha Rosenthal
PR MANAGER: Rachel Millner
EDITORIAL OPERATIONS MANAGER: Jay Dayrit
ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR: Erica Jewell
CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Scott Dadich
DESIGN DIRECTOR: Wyatt Mitchell
SENIOR ART DIRECTOR: Margaret Swart
ART DIRECTORS: Alice Cho, Tim Leong
ART DIRECTOR, SPECIAL PROJECTS: Margaret Swart
CONTRIBUTING DESIGNER: Victor Krummenacher
SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR: Zana Woods
PHOTO EDITOR: Carolyn Rauch
DEPUTY PHOTO EDITOR: Anna Goldwater Alexander
PHOTO ASSISTANTS: Sarah Filippi
VIDEO EDITOR: Alexa Inkeles
PRODUCTION DIRECTOR: Ron Licata
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Ryan Meith
SENIOR MAVERICK: Kevin Kelly
FOUNDING EDITOR: Louis Rossetto
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR: Thomas J. Wallace
Culture
18 Open Source Creativity
20 Freeing Knowledge
DIY
12 Build it. Share it.
17 Arduino Developers
Community
02 OpenSource Everywhere
06 Change the World
DYK?
22 Social Media Revolution
24 Open Source Facebook
get ready for
the era when
collaboration
replaces the
corporation.
3
Open Source Everywhere( ){
Cholera is one of those 19th-century
ills that, like consumption or gout,
at first seems almost quaint, a malady
from an age when people suffered from
maladies. But in the developing world,
the disease is still widespread and
can be gruesomely lethal. When cholera
strikes an unprepared community, people
get violently sick immediately. On day
two, severe dehydration sets in. By day
seven, half of a village might be dead.
Since cholera kills by driving fluids
from the body, the treatment is to
pump liquid back in, as fast as possible.
The one proven technology, an intrave-
nous saline drip, has a few drawbacks.
An easy-to-use, computer-regulated IV can
cost $2,000 - far too expensive to deploy
against a large outbreak. Other systems
cost as little as 35 cents, but they're
too complicated for unskilled caregiv-
ers. The result: People die unnecessarily.
"It's a health problem, but it's also
a design problem," says Timothy Pre-
stero, a onetime Peace Corps volunteer
who cofounded a group called Design That
Matters. Leading a team of MIT engineer-
ing students, Prestero, who has master's
degrees in mechanical and oceanographic
engineering, focused on the drip chamber
and pinch valve controlling the saline
flow rate.
But the team needed more medical exper-
tise. So Prestero turned to ThinkCycle,
a Web-based industrial-design project
that brings together engineers, design-
ers, academics, and professionals from a
variety of disciplines. Soon, some phy-
sicians and engineers were pitching in,
vetting designs and recommending new
paths. Within a few months, Prestero's
team had turned the suggestions into an
ingenious solution. Taking inspiration
from a tool called a rotameter used in
chemical engineering, the group crafted
a new IV system that's intuitive to use,
even for untrained workers. Remarkably,
it costs about $1.25 to manufacture,
making it ideal for mass deployment.
Prestero is now in talks with a medical
devices company; the new IV could be in
the field a year from now.
ThinkCycle's collaborative approach is
modeled on a method that for more than
a decade has been closely associated
with software development: open source.
It's called that because the collabora-
tion is open to all and the source code
is freely shared. Open source harnesses
the distributive powers of the Inter-
net, parcels the work out to thousands,
and uses their piecework to build a bet-
ter whole, putting informal networks of
volunteer coders in direct competition
with big corporations. It works like an
BY THOMAS GOETZ
11.11.03
4 Open Sourced Winter 2011Vol. 1
Culture
18 Open Source Creativity
20 Freeing Knowledge
DIY
12 Build it. Share it.
17 Arduino Developers
Community
02 OpenSource Everywhere
06 Change the World
DYK?
22 Social Media Revolution
24 Open Source Facebook
Software is just the beginning… open source is doing for mass
innovation what the assembly line did for mass production. Get
ready for the era when collaboration replaces the corporation.
ant colony, where the collective intel-
ligence of the network supersedes any
single contributor.
Open source, of course, is the magic
behind Linux, the operating system that
is transforming the software indus-
try. Linux commands a growing share of
the server market worldwide and even
has Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer warn-
ing of its "competitive challenge for us
and for our entire industry." And open
source software transcends Linux. Alto-
gether, more than 65,000 collaborative
software projects click along at Source-
forge.net, a clearinghouse for the open
source community. The success of Linux
alone has stunned the business world.
But software is just the beginning.
Open source has spread to other disci-
plines, from the hard sciences to the
liberal arts. Biologists have embraced
open source methods in genomics and
informatics, building massive databases
to genetically sequence E. coli, yeast,
and other workhorses of lab research.
NASA has adopted open source principles
as part of its Mars mission, calling
on volunteer "clickworkers" to iden-
tify millions of craters and help draw
a map of the Red Planet. There is open
source publishing: With Bruce Perens,
who helped define open source software
in the '90s, Prentice Hall is publishing
a series of computer books open to any
use, modification, or redistribution,
with readers' improvements considered
for succeeding editions. There are li-
brary efforts like Project Gutenberg,
which has already digitized more than
6,000 books, with hundreds of volun-
teers typing in, page by page, classics
from Shakespeare to Stendhal; at the
same time, a related project, Distrib-
uted Proofreading, deploys legions of
copy editors to make sure the Gutenberg
texts are correct. There are open source
projects in law and religion. There's
even an open source cookbook.
In 2003, the method is proving to be as
broadly effective - and, yes, as revolu-
tionary - a means of production as the
assembly line was a century ago.
In the beginning thousands of coders,
hackers, and developers answered Linus
Torvalds' call - and helped him build a
In the Beginning:
Message-ID:
From: [email protected] (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
To: Newsgroups: comp.os.inix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Hello everybody out there using minix-I'm doing a (free) op-
erating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional
like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones. This has been brewing since
april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback
on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it
somewhat
Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll imple-
ment them :-)
Linus
5Open Source EverywhereCommunity();
We are at a convergent moment, when a philosophy, a strategy, and a technology have aligned to unleash great innovation.
robust system that continues to pick up
steam. Yet what's amazing about Linux
isn't its success in the market. The
revolution is in the method, not the
result. Open source involves a broad
body of collaborators, typically volun-
teers, whose every contribution builds
on those before. Just as important, the
product of this collaboration is freely
available to all comers. Of course,
there are plenty of things that are
collaborative and free but aren't really
open source (Amazon.com's book reviews,
for instance). And many projects aren't
widely collaborative, or are somewhat
proprietary, yet still in the spirit of
open source (such as the music avail-
able from Opsound, an online record
label). Not to mention that, as with any
term newly in vogue, open source is
often invoked on tenuous grounds. So
think of it as a spectrum or, better
still, a rising diagonal line on a
graph, where openness lies on one axis and
collaboration on the other. The higher an
effort registers both concepts, the more
fully it can be considered open source.
OF COURSE, FOR ALL ITS NOVELTY, OPEN
SOURCE ISN’T NEW.
Dust off your Isaac Newton and you'll
recognize the same ideals of sharing
scientific methods and results in the
late 1600s (dig deeper and you can
follow the vein all the way back to Ptolemy,
circa AD 150). Or roll up your sleeves and
see the same ethic in Amish barn raising,
a tradition that dates to the early 18th
century. Or read its roots, as many have,
in the creation of the Oxford English
Dictionary, the 19th-century project where
a network of far-flung etymologists
built the world's greatest dictionary by
mail. Or trace its outline in the Human
Genome Project, the distributed gene-
mapping effort that began just a year
before Torvalds planted the seeds of
his OS. If the ideas behind it are so
familiar and simple, why has open
source only now become such a powerful
force? Two reasons: the rise of the
Internet and the excesses of intellectual
property. The Internet is open source’s
great enabler, the communications tool
that makes massive decentralized
projects possible. Intellectual property,
on the other hand, is open source’s
nemesis: a legal regime that has become
so stifling and restrictive that thou-
sands of free-thinking programmers,
scientists, designers, engineers, and
scholars are desperate to find new ways
to create.
6 Open Sourced Winter 2011Vol. 1
We are at a convergent moment, when a philosophy, a strategy, and a technology have aligned to unleash great innovation.
we are at a convergent moment, when a
philosophy, a strategy, and a technology
have aligned to unleash great innovation.
Open source is powerful because it’s an
alternative to the status quo, another
way to produce things or solve problems.
And in many cases, it’s a better way.
Better because current methods are not
fast enough, not ambitious enough, or
don’t take advantage of our collective
creative potential.
Open source has flourished in software
because programming, for all the romance
of guerrilla geeks and hacker ethics, is
a fairly precise discipline;
It’s relatively easy to run an open
source software project as a meritocracy,
a level playing field that encourages
participation. But those virtues aren’t
exclusive to software. Coders, it could
be argued, got to open source first only
because they were closest to the tool
that made it a feasible means of produc-
tion: the Internet.
The Internet excels at facilitating the
exchange of large chunks of information,
fast. From distributed computation projects
such as SETI@home to file-swapping systems
like Grokster and Kazaa, many efforts have
exploited the Internet’s knack for network-
ing. Open source does those one better: It’s
not only peer-to-peer sharing - it’s P2P
production. With open source, you’ve got the
first real industrial model that stems from
the technology itself, rather than simply
incorporating it.
“There’s a reason we love barn raising
scenes in movies. They make us feel great.
We think, ‘Wow! That would be amazing!’”
says Yochai Benkler, a law professor at
Yale studying the economic impact of open
source. “But it doesn’t have to be just a
romanticized notion of how to live. Now
technology allows it. Technology can
unleash tremendous human creativity and
tremendous productivity. This is basi-
cally barn raising through a decentral-
ized communication network.”
7Open Source EverywhereCommunity();
you’re only as good as your code.
}
here are seven projects that have, quite
literally, changed the world.
Culture
18 Open Source Creativity
20 Freeing Knowledge
DIY
12 Build it. Share it.
17 Arduino Developers
Changed the World( ){
GNU: The grand-daddy of them all, and
everyone’s favorite recursive acronym,
the GNU project was founded in 1984 on
philosophical grounds that software
should respect users freedom. GNU is
the founder of several other projects,
but possibly the most important in
sheer scope is the GNU General Public
License, the GPL. The GNU project also
tried for years to come up with a
complete desktop system based around
the Hurd kernel, but found another ker-
nel that quickly leapfrogged GNU’s
efforts, and was quickly adopted.
LINUX: Linux is now used to refer to a
class of operating system that gener-
ally uses GNU userspace tools and the
Linux kernel. Developed by Linus Tor-
valds as a college project to clone the
Minux kernel, Linux has taken off in
ways that were unimaginable a few years
ago. Linux runs on the largest main-
frames, and the smallest cell phones.
APACHE: In the early ’90s, the most
popular web server was a public
domain http server developed by the
National Center for Supercomputing
Applications. That project fell to
the wayside, leaving webmasters all
over the world developing their own
patches and fixes. The Apache project was
started to bring all of these patches
together in one server, which made it A
“Patchy” Sever. In less than a year, the
Apache web server became the number one
server on the Internet, and stays at
the top today. Ease of access of the
Linux kernel, the GNU userland tools,
and the Apache web server created a
perfect environment for businesses large
and small to start hosting their own
web sites in the fledgling Internet.
MYSQUL: The worlds most popular open
source database, MySQL powers all or
part of the b most popular web sites.
Corporate backing ackend of many of the
worlds and ingenuity have made help
MySQL make inroads against some of the
biggest competitors in databases. MySQL
has deep integration with Linux and the
BY JON BUYS
08.09.10
Community
02 OpenSource Everywhere
06 Change the World
DYK?
22 Social Media Revolution
24 Open Source Facebook
Open Source Projects that
8 Open Sourced Winter 2011Vol. 1
9Open Source Projects that Changed the WorldCommunity();
With almost religious fervor, open source
evangelists have been fighting the good fight
for freedom of code
DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THE NEXT
GREAT OPEN SOURCE PROJECT?
10 Open Sourced Winter 2011Vol. 1
open source community,but also has a
successful corporate identity as well.
Acquired first by Sun, and more recently
by Oracle, the corporate side of MySQL
provides the support necessary for open
source software to thrive in the enter-
prise data center.
LANGUAGES: Normally seen together as PHP/
Perl/ Python, the “P” of the LAMP stack
(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) encompasses
the interpreted languages that form the
glue of a massive number of sites. Word-
press, Drupal, Expression Engine, Movable
Type and more are all built on the back
of PHP.
MOZILLA: Risen from the ashes of Netscape,
Mozilla’s Firefox browser has stormed
the world by showing how far a browser’s
capabilities could be pushed. The first
browser with tabs, the first browser
with extensions, the first cross-platform
browser, Firefox has pushed the industry
forward. Features of the original Firefox
can now be found in Safari, Chrome, and
even Internet Explorer.
FREEBSD: FreeBSD is similar in function-
ality to Linux, but has a completely
different family tree, and a much looser
license. FreeBSD was adopted by NeXT to
provide the base of their NeXTStep
operating system, which provided the
base of OS X, the merger of NeXTStep and
the original Mac OS. OS X, in turn,
spawned the iPhone OS, now called iOS,
which powers the iPhone, iPod Touch, and
iPad. Apple’s mobile “i” devices changed
the entire cell phone industry, and
knocked the smart phone market on its ear.
The importance of open source projects
like those above cannot be underesti-
mated. The impact on the market, the
workplace, and even our culture is so
deep that it’s difficult to measure or
understand. What is known though is
that we are still at the beginnings of
the open source movement, and that
there are still great things waiting to
be done. Do you know of the next great open
source project? Sound off in the comments!
{ }
}
open source
software isn’t
just about
getting some-
thing for free...
11Open Source Projects that Changed the WorldCommunity();
it’s a statement about how
the world should be( );
it’s a statement about how
the world should be( );
Build It. Share It. Profit. ( ) {
14
BY CLIVE THOMPSON 10.20.08
Open Sourced Winter 2011Vol. 1
Culture
18 Open Source Creativity
20 Freeing Knowledge
DIY
12 Build it. Share it.
17 Arduino Developers
Community
02 OpenSource Everywhere
06 Change the World
DYK?
22 Social Media Revolution
24 Open Source Facebook
15
CHECK THIS OUT,” Massimo Banzi says. The
burly, bearded engineer wanders over to
inspect a chipmaking robot “pick and
place” machine the size of a pizza oven.
It hums with activity, grabbing teensy
electronic parts and stabbing them into
position on a circuit board like a
hyperactive chicken pecking for seeds.
We’re standing in a one-room fabrication
factory used by Arduino, the Italian
firm that makes this circuit board, a
hot commodity among DIY gadget-builders.
The electronics factory is one of the
most picturesque in existence, nestled
in the medieval foothills of Milan,
with birdsong
floating in through
the open doors and
plenty of coffee
breaks for the
white-coated staff.
But today Banzi is
all business. He’s
showing off his
operation to a group
of potential custom-
ers from Arizona. Banzi scoops up one of
the boards and points to the tiny map
of Italy emblazoned on it. “See? Italian
manufacturing quality!” he says, laugh-
ing. “That’s why everyone likes us!”
Indeed, 50,000 Arduino units have been
sold worldwide since mass production
began two years ago. Those are small
numbers by Intel standards but large
for a startup outfit in a highly special-
ized market. What’s really remarkable,
though, is Arduino’s business model: The
team has created a company based on
giving everything away. On its Web site,
it posts all its trade secrets for anyone
to take—all the schematics, design files,
and software for the Arduino board.
Download them and you can manufacture
an Arduino yourself; there are no
patents. You can send the plans off to a
Chinese factory, mass-produce the
circuit boards, and sell them yourself
pocketing the profit without paying
Banzi a penny in royalties. He won’t sue
you. Actually, he’s sort of hoping
you’ll do it.
That’s because the Arduino board is a
piece of open source hardware, free for
anyone to use, modify, or sell. Banzi and
his team have spent precious billable
hours making the thing, and they sell it
themselves for a small profit while
allowing anyone else to do the same.
They’re not alone in this experiment.
In a loosely coordinated movement, dozens
of hardware inventors around the world
have begun to freely publish their specs.
There are open source synthesizers, MP3
players, guitar amplifiers, and even
high-end voice-over-IP phone routers. You
can buy an open source mobile phone to
talk on, and a chip company called VIA
has just released an open source laptop:
Anyone can take its design, fabricate it,
and start selling the notebooks.
“
Build it. Share it. Profit.Do it Yourself();
Can Open Source Hardware Work?
Banzi admits that the concept does sound
insane. After all, Arduino assumes a lot
of risk; the group spends thousands of
dollars to make a batch of boards.
Then again, Linux sounded pretty in-
sane, too, back in 1991, when Linus
Torvalds announced it. Nobody believed
a bunch of part-time volunteers could
create something as complex as an
operating system, or that it would be
more stable than Windows. Nobody be-
lieved Fortune 500 companies would
trust software that couldn’t be “owned.”
Yet 17 years later, the open source
software movement has been crucial to
the Cambrian explosion of the Web
economy. Linux enabled Google to build
dirt-cheap servers; Java and Perl and
Ruby have become the lingua franca for
building Web 2.0 applications; and the
free Web-server software Apache powers
nearly half of all Web sites in the
world. Open source software gave birth
to the Internet age, making everyone,
even those who donated their labor,
better off.
Every open source project begins with
an itch that needs scratching. Linux
16
was launched when Torvalds decided he
didn’t like the operating systems
available to him. The top three—Micro-
soft’s DOS, Apple’s operating system, and
Unix—were all expensive and they were
closed; Torvalds wanted a system he
could tinker with. As it happened, a lot
of other geeks wanted the same thing.
So when Torvalds began working on Linux
and sharing his code, other hackers
were willing to pitch in and help
improve it for free—creating a virtual
workforce that was infinitely bigger and
smarter than Torvalds himself. That is
the central benefit of open source
projects: They’re like a barn raising in
which everyone gets to use the barn.
Somebody has a problem and creates a
tool to solve it. And once the tool is
created, hey—why not share it? The hard
work has already been done. Might as
well let others benefit.
Arduino began the same way. Banzi was a
teacher at a high tech design school in
Ivrea, Italy, and his students often
complained they couldn’t find an inexpen-
sive, powerful microcontroller to drive
their arty robotic projects. In winter
2005, Banzi was discussing the problem
with David Cuartielles, a Spanish micro-
chip engineer who was a visiting re-
searcher at the school. The two decided
to design their own board and enlisted
one of Banzi’s students—David Mellis—to
CAN OPEN SOURCE HARDWARE DO THE
SAME THING?
“ If you publish all your files, in one sense, you’re
inviting the competition to come and kill you,”
Open Sourced Winter 2011Vol. 1
Team Arduino
PHOTO: JAMES DAY
17
Team Arduino
Gianluca Martino
write the programming language for it. In
two days, Mellis banged out the code;
three days more and the board was com-
plete. They called it the Arduino, after
a nearby pub, and it was an instant hit
with the students. Almost anyone, even if
they didn’t know anything about computer
programming, could use an Arduino to do
something cool, like respond to sensors,
make lights blink, or control motors.
Then Banzi, Cuartielles, and Mellis put
the schematics online and spent 3,000
euros to make the first batch of boards.
“We did 200 copies, and my school bought
50,” Banzi says. “We had no idea how we’d
sell the other 150. We didn’t think we
would.” But word spread to hobbyists
worldwide, and a few months later there
were orders for hundreds more Arduinos.
Turns out there was a market for this thing.
So the Arduino inventors decided to
start a business, but with a twist: The
designs would stay open source. Because
copyright law—which governs open source
software—doesn’t apply to hardware, they
David Cuartielles
Massimo Banzi
Build it. Share it. Profit.Do it Yourself();
18
Arduino gadgets:
PHOTO: JAMES DAY
decided to use a Creative Commons license
called Attribution-Share Alike. It
governs the “reference designs” for the
Arduino board, the files you’d send to a
fabrication plant to have the boards made.
Under the Creative Commons license,
anyone is allowed to produce copies of
the board, to redesign it, or even to
sell boards that copy the design. You
don’t need to pay a license fee to the
Arduino team or even ask permission.
However, if you republish the reference
design, you have to credit the original
Arduino group. And if you tweak or
change the board, your new design must
use the same or a similar Creative
Commons license to ensure that new
versions of the Arduino board will be
equally free and open.
The only piece of intellectual property
the team reserved was the name Arduino,
which it trademarked. If anyone wants
to sell boards using that name, they
have to pay a small fee to Arduino. This,
Cuartielles and Banzi say, is to make
sure their brand name isn’t hurt by
low-quality copies.
Members of the team had slightly dif-
ferent motives for opening the design of
their device. Cuartielles—who sports a
mass of wiry, curly hair and a Che
Guevara beard—describes himself as a
left-leaning academic who’s less interested
in making money than in inspiring
creativity and having his invention
used widely. If other people make copies
of it, all the better; it will gain more
renown. (“When I spoke in Taiwan re-
cently, I told them, ‘Please copy this!’”
Cuartielles says with a grin.) Banzi, by
contrast, is more of a canny businessman;
he has mostly retired from teaching and
runs a high tech design firm. But he
suspected that if Arduino were open, it
would inspire more interest and more free
publicity than a piece of proprietary,
closed hardware. What’s more, excited
geeks would hack it and—like Linux fans—
contact the Arduino team to offer
improvements. They would capitalize on
this free work, and every generation of
the board would get better.
Open Sourced Winter 2011Vol. 1
}
}
Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson already has, designing two
Arduino-based autopilots for unmanned model aircraft: ArduPilot
and BlimpDuino (you can find them at diydrones.com). Here's his
formula for getting your creation out and into the world.
Want to join the World of arduino Developers?( ) {
19
Download the Arduino schematic
and circuit board files from
arduino .cc. Use the free version
of CadSoft Eagle (from cadsoft.de)
to modify them for your particu-
lar creation.
If you want to produce and sell
the product yourself, use a
manufacturing service like
Screaming Circuits to assemble
the boards on robotic pick-and-
place soldering machines.
Upload your files to a board
fabricator like BatchPCB. Your
boards will be manufactured in
Chinese robotic-electronics
factories and sent to your house.
Typical cost is $10 each.
Alternately, an open source hard-
ware specialist like SparkFun or
Adafruit can make and sell the
product for you. They’ll add a
profit margin and pay you a
license fee.
Order bulk electronic parts from
digikey .com and solder the
components onto the board to
make a prototype. Test the board
and your code. You’re ready to
distribute your gizmo to the
Publish your revised schematics
and circuit board files so that
others can modify them. The
cycle begins again.
1
4
2
5
3
6
Culture
18 Open Source Creativity
20 Freeing Knowledge
DIY
12 Build it. Share it.
17 Arduino Developers
Community
02 OpenSource Everywhere
06 Change the World
DYK?
22 Social Media Revolution
24 Open Source Facebook
Arduino DevelopersDo it Yourself();
Open Source Creativity( ) {
Mitch is a technological Renaissance
man; he’s a hacker, author, instructor
and the inventor of TV-B-Gone, a device
that allows one to turn off any television
with a click of a special remote.
He and co-founder Jacob Appelbaum headed
to the Chaos Communication Camp near
Berlin, Germany in 2007. CCC is a creative
gathering that occurs every four years
and was founded by the Chaos Computer
Club. This German hackerspace that has
been instrumental in developing the new
wave of hackerspaces.
Hackerspaces started in the U.S. in like
the late 1980’s, early 1990’s,” says
Altman. “There were a handful of them.
There were different than the way they
are now. Back then, it was very small
groups of people who were incredibly
talented, almost always with software.
And they were not very open to other
people. They got together and did what
they loved, which is software and just
kept it amongst themselves... Occasionally
someone would come along who was doing
something just so cool they would let
them in. But… a lot of people thought it
was a bit elitist… They did a lot of
great work and a lot of what we take for
granted today with the internet is a
result of these people.”
By the ‘90's, a bunch of German hackers
called collectively the Chaos Computer
Club, they caught wind of what was
going on there. Of course, there were
ties from Europe to North America. And
they started doing hackerspaces in a
uniquely German way. And these people
have a lot of anarchist background, so
they were doing it with less… rules,
less control, less… leaders —no leaders.
And so they started having hackerspaces
that were more open, and then sharing
the model so that hackerspaces, little
ones, would open up
all over Germany in not only big towns,
but smaller towns as well. And that
BY JENNY OH
01.26.11
20
“ i hadn’t heard of hackerspaces prior to producing
this story about noisebridge, a hackerspace locat-
ed in san francisco’s mission district.”
Open Sourced Winter 2011Vol. 1
Culture
18 Open Source Creativity
20 Freeing Knowledge
DIY
12 Build it. Share it.
17 Arduino Developers
Community
02 OpenSource Everywhere
06 Change the World
DYK?
22 Social Media Revolution
24 Open Source Facebook
“ they caught wind of what
was going on here.”
went on for awhile, and there were
maybe 50 hackerspaces or so in the world
by 2007…Of course, people had been
hearing about Chaos Camp and hacker-
spaces and hacker conferences, which
were getting more and more popular. At
the same time, the do-it-yourself
movement is taking off with the help of
Make Magazine, and Maker Faires, which
are becoming huge at this point.” Upon
their return, Mitch and Jake were
inspired to start their own hacker-
space, along with several colleagues who
founded HacDC, The Hacktory (the found-
er has moved on to create Hive76) and
NYC Resistor.
Me and Jake told everyone we knew that we
were gonna start a hackerspace. If you
wanted to be a part of it, let’s do it.
And we put the word out in email lists;
there are a lot of geek email lists that
have existed in San Francisco for a long
time, and we created our own email
list. Really quickly, within a couple of
weeks, we had over 15 people. And within
like 3 or 4 weeks, we were meeting
every Tuesday in cafés around town.
21
Hackerspaces
Open Source CreativityCulture();
}
The project works on how to make precious
new information easily available to anyone
who wants it. Education professor and
project director John Willinsky has been
working on the project since 1998. He
began with the premise that research should
be made more widely available. Since then,
the project has taken a more technological
direction.
It revolves around free, downloadable
software that provides scholars with the
means to launch new or existing journals
and the option to make those journals free
and publicly available. With this “open-
source” option, the project aims to have
many scholars join it in its mission to
improve the quality of public research
not only in the U.S., but also all over
the world.
Freeing Knowledge( ) {
The project involves mainly software
developers, researchers and librarians,
who together created open journals and
conference systems and are currently
working on an open monograph press. The
journals system provides a publishing
platform that allows scholars not only
to make their hard-earned information
widely available, but also to easily
manage the journals, edit and peer-review
submissions and carry out the overall
publishing process.
The scholars who use the software to publish
their journals do not have to go through
commercial publishers. This means the
project does not publish the journals
itself. Rather, it facilitates the
publication process so scholars can do
so easily and efficiently.
More than 7,500 titles in 35 languages are
using the software, half in developing
countries. The journals address a wide range
of topics, from arts and poetry to medicine,
and can be published by anyone from a high
school student to a university professor.
BY KELSEY GEISER
01.26.11
22
“ we are trying to help developing countries
use their own language to contribute from
their own perspective but still with scholarly
standards,”
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17 Arduino Developers
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22 Social Media Revolution
24 Open Source Facebook
One of the journals is printed in
Kiswahili, making it the program’s first
journal in an African language.
Juan Pablo Alperin, a researcher and
systems developer in the project, has
spent time researching and running
workshops across Latin America to
discover how best to help editors in the
region publish research journals.
“I see the open-access movement and the
work that we do as aimed at helping
journals in these regions that are not
currently valued by the system achieve
visibility, recognition and prestige,”
Alperin said.
He and others working toward this goal
around the world have found it difficult
to encourage people to change how they
publish their work. Alperin has been
working to reverse this aversion to
open forums for research by “using
technology to shift the landscape of
what is possible.”
Jamie O’Keeffe, a fellow researcher in
the open-access movement, is making
similar strides in the medical field.
She is working on a journal researching
the impact of open journal resources by
looking at health care providers.
O’Keefe’s research is “an exploratory
study to investigate the ‘current’ state
of access,” she said in an e-mail to The
Daily. She found through interviews
with health care providers that critical
decisions physicians needed to make
depended on their access to particular
research articles.
The project’s open conference systems
allow users to easily manage large
meetings. It helps them to create webpages,
to schedule, to review submissions, to
create registries and to organize the
small but important details of
conference planning.
The program is also working on an open
monograph press, which will allow for
free access to monographs, edited volumes
and scholarly editions, many of which
are especially difficult for developing
countries to access.
The project plans on expanding its mission,
especially in the field of student
journals and in further supporting the
active participation of developing
countries in the global network.
The project has taken technological
leaps towards making journals easily
available. However, its long-term goal
is to make all scholarly information
openly accessible.
“About 20 percent of research is now
freely available, and we are not going
to stop until it is 99.9 percent,”
Willinsky said.
23
“ we can make knowledge
available online more
easily, more widely and
more cheaply,”{ }
Open Source EverywhereCommunity();
}
There seems to be a contingent out there that analyzes each of the globe's
various political conflicts and attempts to figure out, through plenty of
speculation and the occasional Wikipedia look-ups of far-flung sovereignties,
which uprising will mark the first true "social media revolution."
This sort of rhetoric has been going on
for nearly two years when an anti-government
uprising in Iran swelled up through
Twitter and, as a result of traditional
media crackdowns, became the primary
medium in which much of the world knew
about what was going on in the Islamic
nation. The activists' efforts ultimately
had far less impact on the government
than many of the breathless Twitter
observers expected, and for too many of
them it's now known as the movement in
which everyone tinted their Twitter
profile photos with green as a sign of
solidarity (which now seems awfully
passive). This, alas, wasn't "the social
media revolution." And so the pundits
moved on.
So let's look at the basic numbers. Facebook
has more than 600 million users around
the world, an inarguable lock on the
mainstream in much of the world and
significant penetration even in the
countries where it doesn't have as much
reach. Twitter is about one-third its
size, though its most active users tend
to be more in the vein of newshounds
and culture fans than FarmVille players
and vacation photo swappers--which may be
the reason why the smaller Twitter is
A dictator toppled by Twitter or ousted
through the efforts of a Facebook group?
It's an enticing idea, particularly for
those who are in the business of social
media and have a personal stake of sorts
in tallying each instance of social
media's global value making headlines.
Twitter punditry this week has been
peppered with speculation about whether
upheaval in Tunisia or the subsequent
anti-government protests in Egypt might
amount to the "first" true revolution
spawned by social media. But this just
isn't the right way to measure things:
the occurrence of a "social media revolution,"
at this point, should be neither
noteworthy nor remarkable. If a dictator
is overthrown or a government ousted,
it would be notable if Facebook or
Twitter weren't used.
That's because social media is a part
of the world we live in and has become
such a crucial form of communication
that it will factor into any political
movement nearly anywhere in the world.
In other words, the use of Twitter,
Facebook, or YouTube should not be what's
worth talking about. At this point, it
takes away from the substance of the
revolution (or lack thereof) itself.
BY CAROLINE MCCARTHY01.26.114:00 AM PST
There’s no such thing( ) {
Open Sourced Winter 2011Vol. 124
Culture
18 Open Source Creativity
20 Freeing Knowledge
DIY
12 Build it. Share it.
17 Arduino Developers
Community
02 OpenSource Everywhere
06 Change the World
DYK?
22 Social Media Revolution
24 Open Source Facebook
as important, if not more so, than Facebook
in political activism. Both social media
services are actively looking to expand
their reach in developing countries,
particularly Facebook, which has launched
mobile sites and applications geared to
lower-end cell phones and slower connections.
The truth is that smaller elements of
"social media revolution" have been all
around us already for over half a decade—
even in our own, comparatively humdrum
political system in which "revolution"
means a switch in the partisan balance
of a governing body accompanied by plenty
of red-and-blue news-ticker graphics on
cable networks. George Allen, a Republican
senator from Virginia, was in a tight
race for re-election in 2006 until a
video from a campaign rally surfaced on
YouTube in which he called one of his
opponent's campaign staff volunteers by
a bizarre epithet that turned out to be a
racial slur of sorts. The video went
viral, Allen lost, and his "macaca moment"
has been widely highlighted as the source
of his downfall--in spite of the presence
of countless strategists, publicists, and
glossy campaign ads, social media's power
prevailed.
Yes, social media can lead to the
improbable rise of leaders who otherwise
might never have had a shot. Without
Meetup and the readership of liberal
blogs, former Vermont governor Howard
Dean might never have had a shot at the
Democratic presidential nomination
(which, of course, he lost). In 2008,
Barack Obama's campaign team's digital
savviness was a crucial component in
the candidate's popularity among young
voters who heavily favored him at the
polls. Two years after Obama's inauguration,
these things should no longer surprise
us —nor should we be surprised that,
yes, social media is a vital instrument
in political change all over the world.
as ‘social media revolution'
Open Source EverywhereCommunity(); 25
}
Open Source Facebook Contender Releases Code to Public( ) {
26
DIASPORA, an open source challenger to
Facebook, hit its first milestone
Wednesday, releasing code for fellow
hackers to test drive and improve.
The code is not ready for general use,
and you can’t go to Diaspora.com to use
it. Instead, those with programming
skills can install it on their servers,
test the code, and work on it — adding
features via a shared code-hosting
service called Github, where the changes
can be pulled into the main code base.
Diaspora warned that there are known
security issues with the code, making it
clear this was a release for developers,
not early adopters. The code is based on
Ruby on Rails and MongoDB.
As its name suggests, Diaspora isn’t aiming
to turn Diaspora.com into a replacement
for Facebook.com, but instead is seeking
to create software that allows people
to have more control over their social
network, without having a single entity
holding all the data and making the rules.
The idea is to disperse social networking,
so that it works more like e-mail, where
users can sign-up for an account with
any number of providers or buy their
own domain name or use a hosted service
or even run their own e-mail server — but
all can still interact, regardless of how
or where their e-mail service is. Dias-
pora isn’t the only effort at creating
so-called federated social networking —
there’s a number of other active open
source projects, including the Appleseed
and OneSocialWeb.
Diaspora was founded earlier this year by
four New York University students as a
way to create a social network that put
users in control of their data. The four
tapped into this spring’s anti-Facebook
zeitgeist to collect $200,000 in online
donations, even one from Facebook founder
Mark Zuckerberg.
The founders moved to Silicon Valley this
summer and have remained largely silent,
except for very occasional blog updates.
On Wednesday, Diaspora made good on its
August promise to release its source code
in mid-September. On the Hacker News
message board, fellow start-up engineers
were generally pleased with the code,
which focused more on user interface issues
than packing in as many features as possible.
BY RYAN SINGEL
11.16.10
6:27 PM
Open Sourced Winter 2011Vol. 1
Culture
18 Open Source Creativity
20 Freeing Knowledge
DIY
12 Build it. Share it.
17 Arduino Developers
Community
02 OpenSource Everywhere
06 Change the World
DYK?
22 Social Media Revolution
24 Open Source Facebook
The idea is to disperse social
networking, so that it works
more like e-mail
27
Diaspora says it intends to keep devel-
oping the product and that an “alpha”
release aimed at users, not just devel-
opers, is scheduled for October.
Screenshot: The Diaspora Project’s
activity stream as implemented in its
developer release.
Follow us for disruptive tech news: Ryan
Singel and Epicenter on Twitter.
Open Source EverywhereCommunity();
{ }
}