Source Sauce

It always seemed to me that scientific information was hidden far beyond the reach of normal man. Every time i wanted to look up the angular velocity of the sun I had to run to the library battle the dewey decimal system and sift through the formula and abstracts on the formula before I found the data.

This said I would hate to be a scientific researcher conducting my own study without the help of a vast resource of knowledge, freely avaible. And not just of those printed three years ago and acquired by the library. I can then truly appreciate the idea of using the commons license to scientific data.  The movites of these 45 or so scientists seem to be pure. I hope something can come of this. I’d had to see all those astronomers digging through dewey’s decimals any more than need be.

I recently read an interesting story about an open source voice recognition program. Not only is this a terrific idea I think it stirs ideas of what else could be accomplished via open source.

This Open Source Speech Recognition Engine collects voice recording and their transciptions, and converts them into a sort of usable data for recognition. Why is it so important that this is open source? first being open source those submitting are equally benifited as those creating the project. This is because as soon as the voice data is compiled into the program it is made avaible to the public for free. The user has givin input into a project that benifits them also. Usually if a company like microsoft was making such a program there would be a worker boss relationship, with a monetary exchange. however thanks to open source this is more of a community good. It may seem like that error that pops up when windows crashes to some. “please submit this error so that we can make windows better.” However in the case of windows you are submitting to make the product that you purchased better… or make the next product that you will have to buy better. however with open source you benifit the product that you receive, and in turn the technology benifits. The user determines how the technology works.
What are the possibilities of this outside the realm of this project. I could imagine user submitted data for all sorts of projects with social importance.  Data collected for pictures of your town to be compiled into a full 3 dimensional representation of the town.

Or perhaps something more useful as user submitted data to a program that could tell you average walk times to and from certain areas around a college campus.

I think the most important thing here is that this user input into a program can help the program to reach further than that of a commercial prouduct. A commercial product is limited by its budget and there for can only collect data in proportion to revenue. Where as this open source  alternative while dependant on having people willingly submit, is not bound by monetary balance.

The debate wages. Does digital rights management software fringe upon destroying the distribution of open source  and creative commons products? It’s not a simple question and its easy to see the problem on either side.

On the one hand everyone and and their chihuahua in the corporate music/film/media industry wants a way to protect their product once it turns digital. Enter DRM’s many people are aware of DRM’s in the form of MP3’s with time restrictions or burn restrictions, and share restrictions, this is traditionally all  been software based, normally embedded into the MP3 and recognized by software programs as Licensed ect. Wiki for a more precise description. These ensure that millions of copies of the digital file cannot be made of Paris  Hilton’s new cd, and forced upon 12 years olds under the guise of something good for free. In this Case the DRM is actually permissable. It is only applied to works known to be held under copyright law.
However things are begining to change. The Corporate media industry is unhappy that  there is a way to work around this, being software, it takes only a skilled software expert to …. work around the DRM, or just merely making mp3’s of the cds. So they have decided to go a level deeper into this protection and place the restricting ability into the hardware. A perfect example is the  zune, which has the built in feature that when a friend sends you a song to listen to it is a play for 3 days or 3 plays no matter what. even if your friend sent you a song that he has himself created it must follow these restrictions.
Obviously a problem for music that falls under different laws than copyright laws. Say for instance creative commons. The problem is that it would be difficult for these new DRM’s to really tell if the song was created by steve your old roomate or led zepplin and just reconfigured to appear to be Steve’s creation.

So who is right? Is it ok to block all content on the premise that everyone is just trying to get a loop hole added to a solid system that attempts eliminates piracy. Or is it inherently wrong to block all content based on cynicism.

At least one website seems to vehemently against this idea. Defective By design.

I wasn’t able to find a pro DRM site.. ..

ok so far I’ve gone off on a few tangents on how to get your media distributed online via some cool open source apps, however I haven’t offered any insight into how to first produce your video
so that you have something to distribute. Well I may have found a nice editing application, I have yet to try, I plan to give it a go after work. untill then I provide only the link to the site.

Jahshaka

It seems to be an ambitious project and one with some good community support.