Knowledge Unlatched

Open research library

The Open Research Library (ORL) will include all Open Access scholarly book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 20,000 Open Access books. This comprehensive collection of peer-reviewed Open Access books will be openly accessible for everyone. Libraries investing in the Open Research Library contribute to the development of a vital infrastructure for the global research community, while participating libraries have the opportunity to benefit from a set of exclusive services.
- About Open Research Library

Aaron Swartz

Information still wants to be free. It's sad that there are tragedies along that road. Such a waste.

Beautiful tribute from Tim Berners-Lee:

Aaron is dead.

Wanderers in this crazy world,
we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.


Hackers for right, we are one down,
we have lost one of our own.


Nurtures, careers, listeners, feeders,
parents all,
we have lost a child.


Let us all weep.

timbl - source

Aaron Swartz bio
Corey Doctorow: RIP, Aaron Swartz
Lawrence Lessig: Prosecuter as Bully

eben moglen to tim o'reilly, "you have wasted ten years"

moglen versus o'reilly video

moglen understands the ephemeral and potentially dangerous nature of web2.0 (eg. google aggregates our data centrally in exchange for free apps, its not certain what they will do with it in the future), looks behind it to more fundamental issues - freedom, property, money

his critique of o'reilly and the OS part of FOSS is spot on, IMO

some moderating commentary here from Peter Rock

bug one

Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace.
This is a bug, which Ubuntu is designed to fix

Microsoft has a majority market share | Non-free software is holding back innovation in the IT industry, restricting access to IT to a small part of the world's population and limiting the ability of software developers to reach their full potential, globally. This bug is widely evident in the PC industry.
Steps to repeat:
1. Visit a local PC store.
What happens:
2. Observe that a majority of PC's for sale have non-free software pre-installed
3. Observe very few PC's with Ubuntu and free software pre-installed
What should happen:
1. A majority of the PC's for sale should include only free software like Ubuntu
2. Ubuntu should be marketed in a way such that its amazing features and benefits would be apparent and known by all.
3. The system shall become more and more user friendly as time passes.

- https://launchpad.net/bug1.html

• Mark Shuttleworth wiki
• Mark Shuttleworth blog