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Code Rush

The documentary Code Rush from 2000 is about the open-sourcing of the Netscape code base and the beginning of the Mozilla project. Here is a comment from IMDB

Watch this film and you will get to see the things that a college computer science course could never prepare you for: having to sleep at the office for days in order to meet a deadline, alienation from family, caffeine addiction, having one’s release blocked by intellectual property concerns, and other cold realities of Silicon Valley. If you’re thinking about getting a career in software engineering or software project management, Code Rush is a must-see.

This documentary also gives insight into a few of the major milestones in the history of the software industry, such as the opening of the Netscape source code, which is code named “Mozilla”. If it weren’t for this release, we wouldn’t have Mozilla Firefox, one of the most popular Internet browsing solutions today. The footage also covers one of the most notable company acquisitions of that time period.

Code Rush is now released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. There is also a dedicated homepage for the film, with links to stream or download the film in various formats.

Posted on by mklang

Remix available for download

Lawrence Lessigs book Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy is now  is now Creative Commons licensed and ready for download from the Bloomsbury Academic page.

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‘Lessig’s proposals for revising copyright are compelling, because they rethink intellectual property rights without abandoning them.’
Briefly Noted The New Yorker

‘Lessig… has written a splendid combative manifesto – pungent, witty and persuasive.’
Financial Times

‘… Lessig is surely right that digital culture requires governance that is more subtle and ecological, judging a balance of forces between commerce and community, than precise and draconian.’
Books of the Week, The Independent

‘Prof Lessig is formidably qualified…his latest book, REMIX will enhance his cult status on the web.’ The Guardian

To hear Lawrence Lessig talk about his book Remix you can listen now to the NPR interview (37 min 51 sec)

Posted on by mklang

The Hunt for Gollum

How’s this for an amazing project? A group of over enthusiastic filmmakers have created a film based on Lord of the Rings. The title is The Hunt for Gollum and it will be released for free online from their website on 3 May.

The script is adapted from elements of the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. The story follows the Heir of Isildur; the “greatest huntsman and traveller in Middle Earth” as he sets out to find the creature Gollum. The creature must be found to discover the truth about the Ring, and to protect the future Ringbearer.

About
The Hunt For Gollum is an unofficial not for profit short film by a group of enthusiast filmmakers. As a Lord of the Rings Fan Film, we are not affiliated with the Tolkien Estate or New Line Cinema and are producing this project as an entirely non commercial film. As with other fan films we are making this purely for the enjoyment of the material and the experience of making a high quality low budget film.

So Far…
Production began in early 2007 when writer-director Chris Bouchard started adapting the script from the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings. Since then, the first three days of filming were completed in September 2007 on location in N Wales.

Check out the cool trailer 1 and trailer 2

Posted on by mklang

YouTube & Creative Commons

YouTube has collaborated with Creative Commons to allow users to test the ability of users to upload & download video’s under Creative Commons licenses. Obviously users will be able to download the movies and be able to follow the licensing terms. Read more about this on the YouTube and Creative Commons blogs.

Posted on by mklang

Two New OA Books (+1)

This has been a busy week for books on Open Access. On Wednesday I blogged about the book Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors by Kylie Pappalardo. Today Open Access News wrote about two more new Open Access books:

E. Canessa and M. Zennaro at the Science Dissemination Unit of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste have put together an edited book Science Dissemination using Open Access.

From today’s announcement:

The book is a compendium of selected literature on Open Access, both on the technical and organizational levels, and was written in an effort to guide the scientific community on the requirements of Open Access, and the plethora of low-cost solutions available. The book also aims to encourage decision makers in academia and research centers to adopt institutional and regional Open Access Journals and Archives to make their own scientific results public and fully searchable on the Internet. Discussions on open publishing via Academic Webcasting are also included.

The other book is a 144 pp. collection of articles on OA by 38 authors, edited by Barbara Malina entitled Open Access Opportunities and Challenges: A Handbook, the German UNESCO Commission, July 2008. This is an English translation of Open Access: Chancen und Herausforderungen – ein Handbuch (2007).

Posted on by mklang