I wanted to share this very interesting video lecture by Yochai Benkler with you.

In this lecture, Yochai talks about the shift in power in the core economic activities to the hands of the population at large - all because of the computer. He talks about how open source is very visible in the software world because it’s easy to see - but that this actually happens throughout the web.

This is just a bit from the beginning of the talk - instead of summarizing it all for you, I’m going to let you listen for yourself

Hmmm. I was pointed to this article from a commenter on this blog. The good news is that Microsoft is adding support to Office 2007 for ODF … the not so surprising news is that they’re not doing it to help support open source users … it’s because their format OOXML is harder to sustain than ODF.

In Microsoft’s announcement, the company said it was adding native support for ODF due to increasing pressure from customers “and because we want to get involved in the maintenance of ODF”. The company now says OOXML support would require substantially more work.

So, good news for the open source world - but not really a giant leap for the people at Microsoft.

This news via oss4lib:

Horowhenua Library Trust and Katipo Communications in New Zealand are pleased to annouce the release of Kete Version 1.0.

Kete provides a platform for developing community contributed content. It allows uploading of different types of content: topics (html text based content), documents, audio files, images, movies and links. Kete is the māori word for basket, in the Kete system a basket is the overall organising structure for content. Beyond baskets content is organised by the community using tagging and relating pieces of content to each other.

Kete is developed with Ruby on Rails, utilizes Zebra z39.50 full text indexing engine developed by IndexData, is fully compatible with Koha, and is released under a GNU General Public License (GPL).

Kete recently won the 2007 3M Award for Innovation in New Zealand Libraries, and a Special Mention at the 2007 World Summit Awards for the North America - Oceania Region in the e-inclusion section.

Full documentation, contacts and links to the code repository can be found at the project site http://kete.net.nz

Joann Ransom.

Project Manager.

Last month I announced that Relais International was open sourcing it’s interlibrary loan software. Yesterday I read that Relais International will now be partnering with LibLime.

LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, and Relais International, Inc. world leader in resource sharing solutions for libraries, are pleased to announce a new strategic partnership between the two companies. This development comes shortly after Relais International’s announcement of its intent to release the Relais resource sharing and document delivery products under an open-source license.

Read more.

This from DownloadSquad:

Mozilla is attempting to break a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in 24 hours with its upcoming Firefox 3 release.

“Download Day” is nothing new for the Firefox crew, and it’s really a great way to spread the word to the world about software. Sure, people can download things whenever they want, but there’s something cool about all doing it at once…it’s like Hands Across America. Except it has little to do with hands, and it’s global. You get the idea.

Learn more at DownloadSquad and sign up to download Firefox 3!

Technorati Tags: Guinness World Record, Firefox

Facebook and open source addicts unite - we can soon help out with the Facebook Platform. I read this today (a day late):

Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications and have them run on those social networks, too.

And then I saw this:

A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed to us that the social networking company will announce an open-source initiative around its Facebook Platform sometime today or tomorrow. We originally broke this story we broke yesterday. We’ve also learned from another source that the name of the initiative will be fbOpen.

Not on Facebook? Start by adding me as a friend and becoming a fan of LibLime.

I have added a section to the sidebar of this blog to include my most recent deli.icio.us bookmarks that are tagged as ‘opensource’. If you’d like to subscribe to my open source bookmarks you can with this feed address.

I just learned about a neat tool that combines my two passions, open source and web 2.0. Sun Wiki Publisher is an OpenOffice extension that lets you publish to any MediaWiki that you have credentials for. What a neat addition to OpenOffice.

Brian Herzog writes an interesting piece about how his library switched the browser on their public computers to Firefox.

My library is in the process of re-doing all of our public computers. One major change we’re making is to switch to Firefox for our web browser, instead of the Internet Explorer/Public Web Browser combo we’ve always used.

The reason we’re switching is a simple one - Firefox is just cooler. It lets us have more control over how the browser functions, and lets us offer more tools integrated right into the browser. Better for us, better for patrons.

This is a great guide if you’re considering switching over your public computers to an open source alternative. He lists the add ons they used, settings and customizations. If you’re thinking about making the switch, give his post a look.

Check it out! An open source toolkit for creating your own virtual world.

Project Wonderland is a toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds. Within those worlds, users can communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio, and can share live applications such as web browsers, OpenOffice documents, and games.

This is very cool! I can’t wait to see what library techies come up with!