Computer

• It is a machine for manipulating data according to a list of instructions.

Computer software

• It consists of programs, enables a computer to perform specific tasks.

Computer hardware

• It is the physical part of a computer, including the digital circuitry.

People ware

• They are computer users.

Internet

• It is a worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It is a “network of networks”.

Open source

• It is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge. The term is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions. This allows users to create software content through incremental individual effort or through collaboration.

   

Web browser

• It is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, and other information typically located on a Web page at a website on the World Wide Web or a local area network. A very good example of this is the Mozilla Firefox.

Web page or webpage

• It is a resource of information that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser. This information is usually in HTML or XHTML format, and may provide navigation to other web pages via hypertext links.

Hyperlink

• (often referred to as simply a link), It is a reference or navigation element in a document to another section of the same document, another document, or a specified section of another document, that automatically brings the referred information to the user when the navigation element is selected by the user.

Data

• It may be raw (unprocessed) numbers, characters, images or other outputs from devices to convert physical quantities into symbols, in a very broad sense.

Information

• It is the result of processing, manipulating and organizing data in a way that adds to the knowledge of the receiver. In other words, it is the context in which data is taken. Also called “processed data”.

William Henry Gates III known as Bill Gates

• He is the co-founder of Microsoft Corporation (born October 28, 1955) is an American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft he has held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and he remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8% of the common stock.

Richard Stallman

• In 1985, he published the GNU Manifesto, which outlined his motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU, which would be compatible with Unix. The name GNU is a recursive acronym for GNU’s Not Unix.

Linus Benedict Torvalds

• born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland, is a Finnish software engineer best known for initiating the development of the Linux kernel. He now acts as the project’s coordinator.

Operating System (OS)

• It is a set of computer programs that manage the hardware and software resources of a computer.

Linux

• It is a Unix-like computer operating system. It is one of the most prominent examples of free software and open source development; its underlying source code can be freely modified, used, and redistributed by anyone.

HTML

    (Hyper Text Mark-up Language)

Steven Paul Jobs

• (born February 24, 1955) is the co-founder and CEO of Apple and was the CEO of Pixar until its acquisition by Disney.

Wifi

(Wireless Fidelity)

FOSS bill

September 11th, 2006I read through the draft FOSS bill that Chin Wong provided and I have to say that while it was not exactly what I expected, it is a good start.
I was very hopeful on the FOSS bill (as I wrote here) and I had a couple of expectations:

1. It should recognize the legitimacy of common FOSS

licenses such as GPL.

2. It should raise awareness and understanding of FOSS

solutions.

3. It should urge Filipinos to develop FOSS solutions.

4. It should promote the use of FOSS in schools.

5. It should promote the use of FOSS in the government.

The FOSS bill has met my expectations, except for the last. And I think Teddy Casino’s bill overdoes it.

Section 6.2 reads that “the government shall apply only FOSS or FOSS solutions . . . in all ICT projects and activities.”

And while section 6.3 does allow for exceptions, it basically means that by default, the government can only use FOSS solutions. This, for me, is much too restrictive. I would have preferred that the wording of the bill to allow the government to consider FOSS solutions, not that the government shall only apply FOSS solutions.

And as I read through the bill, I believe that Teddy Casino has misinterpreted the concept of Free and Open Source Software. It’s “free” as in “freedom,” not “free” as in “free beer.” This is most evident in the statement of policy in Section 2, where he states that FOSS should be considered because of economic considerations, and in section 9, where the bill gives preference to FOSS solely on total cost of ownership. It does not give weight to design, quality, coding standards, security standards, scalability, robustness, and so forth. Just cost. In my experience, cost is not the sole determinant.
What worries me is section 8, which states that the government shall “obtain full rights and control over derivatives, modifications and customizations of software that it uses or adopts.” This goes against the whole concept of the “free” in FOSS. Does this mean that if the government modifies a software code, they can choose not to divulge the code as a matter of “control?”

But it’s a good start. I just wished Teddy Casino published it earlier to let the public air its comments and recommendations. Just like software testing—a “beta” version should have been released.

Just a feed back…

—==_d@rk_@ngel_==—