Licenses are an important topic within open source. Without licenses, information or code can be publicly available but not legally available for reuse or redistribution. The open source software community’s most common licenses are the MIT license or the GNU GPLv3. When you read the MIT or GNU license, you can see they are rather specific: and They aim to cover primarily software, not other forms of information such as, for example, data.

I have recently started to move my personal code repositories away from GitHub, in favor of hosting them with a smaller, independent and collectively managed alternative - including for this static website. In the same spirit, I was also interested in whether I could be doing my small part to diversify my overall web hosting approach.

A video of Panoramax in action. Starting out with a map view which has small orange lines for where images are available. Then going into the actual 360 degree images and moving around. Above: a video showcasing the panoramax viewer, with a map to see where (most ^[1] ) images are, and the 360º views.

In the last blog post, I had mentioned that I was looking to move away some of my personal code hosting away from GitHub (GH), to avoid being locked in into yet another tech giant. Instead, I wanted to move to a proper free alternative. On Mastodon, lots of folks recommended checking out Codeberg as a potential alternative that is based on forgejo and provides static page hosting.

Or: Why 2024 is my personal year of Linux on the desktop According to Doctorow, enshittification might be coming for absolutely everything . I’ve more and more felt this was for my own digital devices and means of digital production: Be that Apple’s just increasing love for walled gardens - especially since having the opaque app review processes (c.f. cpython’s --with-app-store-compliance), Microsoft’s (successful?)

**Europe PMC POSI update – 2 years on ** Two years have sailed by since Europe PMC adopted the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) in February 2021. POSI is a set of guidelines for open scholarly infrastructure providers and outlines how these organisations should be run and sustained. It offers a framework to uphold transparency and accountability.

Lässt sich der Gedanke von offenen Lizenzen auch auf die Landwirtschaft übertragen? Die Initiative Open Source Seeds formuliert Lizenzbedingungen für Open-Source-Saatgut. Das soll die Vielfalt erhalten und Konzern-Monopole eindämmen – auf dem Acker genauso wie auf unseren Tellern. Die Landwirtschaft ist durchzogen von Patenten und Privatisierung.

30 Jahre Freie Software in 30 Minuten Podcast: Der Bayerische Rundfunk spürt in einer hörenswerten Sendung den Ideen hinter Linux und Freier Software nach – und erläutert, wie sich die Bewegung für herstellerunabhängige Programme bis heute entwickelt hat. Still und leise im Hintergrund: So charakterisiert ein aktueller Podcast des Bayerischen Rundfunks die Funktionsweise von Linux.

Since the very start of GigaScience we’ve been strong proponents of Data Citation, helping promote and practice the procedure of affording data the same importance in the scholarly record as citations of other research objects such as publications (see examples of this in GigaBlog and BMC Res Notes ). These efforts by the wider community culminated

GigaScience has always had a focus on reproducibility rather than subjective impact, and it can be challenging for our reviewers to judge this, especially now that more and more tools are being created – bringing data science to the masses.  This also means more efficiency and ease is required especially when multiple collaborators and contributors on a specific project are involved.