Software Freedom Day

                                      Worldwide, Saturday, September 17
  
In the words of its organizers, Software Freedom Day "is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business -- in short, everywhere! The non-profit organization Software Freedom International coordinates SFD at a global level, providing support, giveaways and a point of collaboration, but volunteer teams around the world organize the local SFD events to impact their own communities."

There are meeting sites in Boston, around the USA and rest of the world.  Check the various schedules for events and times.

Here's Pia Waugh's statement on Free and Open Software's importance for human rights.  The basic reference point is, of course, the United Nations accord, "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights."      

                       
                                                  

Great idea: little free libraries

My own love of books was first nurtured at a free public library in San Luis Obispo, one of the ones built with money from the Andrew Carnegie fortune.  Now a group of low budget philanthropists have initiated the "Little Free Library" project.  Fabulous!  

From the Utne Reader:

Andrew Carnegie built an impressive 2,509 libraries around the turn of the 20th century. Now Rick Brooks and Todd Bol are on a mission to top his total with their two-foot by two-foot Little Free Libraries, reports Michael Kelley in Library Journal.

The diminutive, birdhouse-like libraries which Brooks and Bol began installing in Hudson and Madison, Wisconsin, in 2009, are typically made of wood and Plexiglas and are designed to hold about 20 books for community members to borrow and enjoy. Offerings include anything from Russian novels and gardening guides to French cookbooks and Dr. Seuss.  

Each Little Free Library runs on the honor system, displaying a sign that asks patrons to Take a Book, Leave a Book. “Everybody asks, ‘Aren’t they going to steal the books?’” Brooks told Kelley. “But you can’t steal a free book.”

Lewis Mumford's thoughts on the terror of our times and who's to blame

                                                                                               Hiroshima, 1945

Preparing for a class recently, I happened upon an essay Lewis Mumford wrote in 1946 – “Gentlemen You Are Mad!"  It's his response to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to the distinct likelihood that the people and institutions that produced these atrocities would continue as a normal, acceptable feature of American life.  

The questions he raises are every bit as relevant to the past decade’s “War on Terror” and apparatus of “Homeland Security” as they are to the version of the death machine Mumford observed and condemned.

“Soberly, day after day, the madmen continue to go through the undeviating motions of madness: motions so stereotyped, so commonplace, that they seem the normal motions of normal men, not the mass compulsions of people bent on total death.  Without a public mandate of any kind, the madmen have taken it upon themselves to lead us by gradual stages to that final act of madness which will corrupt the face of the earth and blot out the nations of men, possibly put an end to all life on the planet itself. ….

“Why do we let the madmen go on with their game without raising our voices?  Why do we keep our glassy calm in the face of this danger?  There is a reason: we are madmen too.  We view the madness of our leaders as if it expressed a traditional wisdom and common sense: we view them placidly, as a doped policeman might view with a blank tolerant leer the robbery of a bank or the barehanded killing of a child or the setting of an infernal machine in a railroad station.  Our failure to act is the measure of our madness.  We look at the madmen and pass by.”