What is green?

My understanding of green came over the years of hacking around European and national policies. I don't say I've been there for 10 years, it's close to more than half of that.

1. Green is responsibility,
for your own actions, how you live and what impact that have. Environment is the top issue here, but there are others. Others like

- you buy a product, where it came from? You may have idea what the company behind it put there, but is it the whole story? Ain't. It may be produced under some anti-human rights government, in some "let's be quickly a millionaire" company and also giving boost somewhere to stock market. Does it sounds complicated? Yes it does, and Yes you should care because you are responsible for it. People tend to say, it's not my problem. It is. Because now you can see the responsibility in the wrong countries under extreme governments, slavery in some let's be rich ASAP companies, destroying everything on the way, nature, people, rights. And the stock market? Don't get me started, you should watch news for last two years where the responsibility is there.

- corporations, I've been told many times that they have the right to stabilize their position on the market. That is true but they missed the point. There are too many obvious examples of stabilization in the market by corrupting government officials, money playing the only role and purpose, nature vandalism and species extinction, doing pretty much anything to drive competition out of the market, burning the ships, enslaving consumers into software and hardware technologies, vendor lock-in. People who know me will go, ah Microsoft again, this is not only Microsoft, this is any regular Corporation style and there are thousands of them. You just don't see that.

2. Green is transparency and openness,

I like some of the Nordic countries approach to that, citizens can actually read emails of high government officials. One Minister got busted lately for some nasty stuff with hookers, and this was actually found by newspaper people. This is what I call transparency. People should be able to see what is getting done by their money,
it's not only projects and spending of tax payers money, it's also the position who
execute them. We deserve to know why and how the deals were made, at the end we are
the ones paying for it.

3. Green is nature,

We as a species are failing this world. Driving other species to extinction who were
living here for so many years, even before we came here and whack the whole place. Stuff like climate change, decrease of drinking water, decrease of earth lungs. This is not only about others, this is also about ourselves. Do you think in 20 years we will have enough clean air and drinking water for around 9 billion of people?
That is the problem, we tend to make decision based on local, or better say present information. The big picture is almost always missing.

- climate change

It's here already for many decades, it's just get rapidly into public spotlight few years ago. Did you know that we are really living in age where if we don't make
serious changes in the way we live that in few years some things will happen on this planet regarding changing of environment that nobody cannot make it like before? This is the reality which I totally understood in Copenhagen three weeks ago, explained by the top world scientist on climate change.

- extinction of species

Extinction of species seems to be "relaxed" by the way we live, and some people even say it's the natural selection. When the species are hunted down by us, or we tend to destroy their last habitats, this isn't really a natural selection. This is a crime.
It's getting even worse, we are now hunting down to extinction predators which are the
top part of the ecosystem and which are actually responsible that we us humans developed into what we are. In a sense it's killing your own grandfather, destroying his house in the village to build a shopping mall.

4. Share

Money driven world isn't the right thing. When you put money on top of everything, copyright, patents, knowledge. In the end what really does matter here is only the money, not the content or the added value of sharing, for people to know, to live better. I believe that everybody deserve to know everything which was developed. It's maybe internet content, piece of software, access to technology. Of course the product need to consume resources. But why so many people work around it and get nothing form it, no added value, and only few benefit. In the end these few also try to rip you off even more, ruin your market and enslave you to be their customers. This isn't really the future I believe in.
I believe that people should have the same opportunity for anything.

- open source is green, because it shares the added value in the creation process, it tends to give your possibilities, opportunities and options.

- open standards are green

- open content is green

I'm tired, but only today.

Australian open source workers earn more money

Interesting article about how IT open source professionals in Australia earn more than regular IT people, I would say the answer is quiet easy, open source people are better professionals :)

IT workers who specialise in free and open source software are earning more than the national average for IT, according to the results of Australia's first open source census.

more at itnews.com.au

23,000 Linux PCs forge education revolution in Philippines

Providing high school students with PCs is seen as a first step to
preparing them for a technology-literate future, but in the Philippines
many schools cannot afford to provide computing facilities so after a
successful deployment of 13,000 Fedora Linux systems from a government
grant, plans are underway to roll out another 10,000 based on Ubuntu.

read the story at computerworld.com.au

EUPL released under 22 languages of EU

EUPL, European Union Public Licence is a Open Source like licence, developed by the European Commission for usage in the public sector of member states.

Why Open Source like? Well, by the meaning it is open source but it wasn't approved by Open Source Initiative in US, actually no one even submitted it.

You can reach the licence in 22 languages here.

Wikidot released under GNU Affero General Public License v3

The Wikidot Team is happy to announce the open-source release of the Wikidot software. We are opening both the Version 1 codebase that currently powers Wikidot.com and the new development code for Wikidot 2, our next generation wiki platform, both under GNU Affero General Public License version 3.

more at wikidot.com

Open Source in science and education conference

We will have a one day Open Source event durring the Aplimat 2008, which is 7^th International Conference on Applied Mathematics hosted every year in Bratislava. Our Open Source day started last year durring the 6th year of this conference and we officially started the openacademy.eu project there. Openacademy.eu focus on developing Open Source project for their usage in education in Slovakia, and we are planning to make the project available for more European countries in the future.

http://www.aplimat.com/
http://sk.openacademy.eu/node/157

Council of Ministers calls on members to use Open Standards and also use Open Source

The Council of Ministers, the Council of Europe's highest decision-making body, calls on its' members to ensure a diversity of software models by mixing Open Source, free and proprietary software.

In a statement the council last week adopted recommendations on measures to increase the public service value of the Internet. The councils' members "should develop strategies which promote sustainable economic growth via competitive market structures in order to stimulate investment into critical Internet resources and ICTs." Ensuring a diversity of software including Open Source should be part of these strategies.

The council also recommends that members ensure their policies on telecommunications, broadcasting and the Internet make these IT systems interoperable by using open standards.