Image by Ilya Pavlov, CC0. Last week the White House finalized the Federal Source Code Policy to improve access to software code developed by or for the federal government. The policy is a step in the right direction toward making software accessible and reusable across U.S. government agencies, as well as for the general public.…

Photo by Tirza van Dijk, CC0. A few weeks ago we submitted comments to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) draft federal source code policy. The purpose of the policy is to improve access to custom software code developed for the federal government, and would require that: (1) New custom code whose development is…

The basic idea of Creative Commons, offering free copyright tools, is copied from the free software movement. However, CC licenses are not intended to be used to release software, as our FAQ has always said. One important reason why Creative Commons licenses should not be used to release software is that they aren’t compatible with…

Last week, we interviewed Ton Roosendaal, head of the Blender Institute, on his new open animated short film called Sintel. (Blender is an awesome open-source 3D creation suite, and the Institute is the studio that creates content like Sintel that employ amazing Blender-enabled techniques like smoke simulation and volumetrics.) The film was made possible with…

Thanks to The Wired Campus, I recently stumbled across this new wiki whilst looking for a visualization tool for a ccLearn research project. The new wiki is called Digital Research Tools, also known as DiRT. DiRT is edited by a team of librarians from Rice University’s Digital Media Center and Sam Houston State University’s Newton…