Creative commons is a not for profit organisation that enables "some rights reserved". The rights as the creator are chosen by you. Under these licensing schemes, I could write a book in english, and post it online with the creative commons license. Then a translator in England could translate my book into French. A illustrator in Canada could illustrate the book, and the book could then be used in Bolivia, helping teach young children how to read. Whilst this is possible under a regular license, the creative commons license makes it easier to access and download for free.
The other topic for this week was open source software. This is basically free to use software, that you can edit and change as you wish, upload and redistribute. In simple terms, open source software is basically a recipe, that upload on the internet. Your friends download it, and after trying it out, decide to change a little bit to make it better. After doing this, they upload the new version, and redistribute it on the internet. There are hundreds of open source software out there. OpenOffice, Linux, Firefox and VLC are just a few. If you're looking at changing your software, then Source Forge is the place to go.
Quite often open source software is a quicker and more reliable way to run your computer. In 2007, when Microsoft released Windows Vista, Windows XP users were unable to read Vista file types. Open source software had a patch for XP users within a week, Microsoft took months. If the job needs to be done, the community will comply, rather than waiting for the company.
Adam left us with a little homework.
Find a free piece of software, and use it for 10 days. Lets see how I go.
The who what when where why how blog
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