Open Source (OS) can be associated with several things, a community, a movement, a revolution, a mode of production, a culture, a non-propietary computer software. Its wide connotations make open source difficult to grasp, to comprehend. In this essay I reconstruct the OS revolution as a modern mythmaking process and elaborate a critique of it. […]
Continue reading →In July of 2004, Steve Coast, a 24-year-old British computer scientist and entrepreneur, started OpenStreetMap (OSM) with the objective of creating a free editable map of the world. Tired of the problems data proprietary companies generate by the restricting geographical information (In the UK, as in other European countries, geographic information is very expensive and […]
Continue reading →On January 12 2010, after the catastrophic earthquake (magnitude 7.0 Mw) near Port au Prince that triggered a humanitarian crisis, hundreds of volunteers distributed across the globe worked together to create an updated and complete digital map of Haiti. Using computers, photographic imagery, and the tools from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, they were able to […]
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