Articles on AI governance, cybersecurity and systems architecture.
Publishing source code under an open source licence is not the same as surrendering know-how: what remains protectable as a secret and what becomes public, in the light of TRIPS art. 39, Reg. EC 772/2004 and arts. 98-99 of the Italian IP Code.
Read moreROS 1.0, released in January 2010 by Willow Garage under a BSD licence, organises robot software as a graph of processes that talk via publish/subscribe to separate drivers, algorithms and hardware. Architecture, design choices and limits against Player/Stage and earlier middleware.
Read moreArticle 69 of the Italian Digital Administration Code requires public bodies to grant their commissioned software for reuse, in source form and free of charge. I trace the legal chain that led here and the points where the obligation hollows out.
Read moreDoing knowledge management in a risk-analysis setting means indexing heterogeneous, versioned documents. What the open-source stack offers in 2009: semantic wikis, Lucene, Solr.
Read moreHow the National Library of Medicine's MetaMap links English biomedical text to Concept Unique Identifiers in the UMLS Metathesaurus: the lexical-variant pipeline, and the practical limits around ambiguity, language and coverage.
Read morePuppet 0.24, by Luke Kanies and Reductive Labs, describes a system's configuration as a set of resources with a desired state. Notes on its DSL, catalog, idempotency and agent/master architecture as they stand in 2009.
Read moreHow a visual editor for scientific workflows is translated into WS-BPEL executable on a Globus grid, and why the dataflow the biologist draws does not coincide with BPEL's web-service orchestration model.
Read moreTechnical notes on Xen paravirtualisation, live migration and the running cost of a server estate, written alongside a seminar on free software in public administration.
Read moreTechnical notes on the first year of Fab Academy: the digital fabrication course derived from MIT's MAS.863, delivered in a distributed way across local Fab Labs, with the CAD/CAM chain and public documentation as the deliverable.
Read moreTechnical notes on building, in 2009, the website for a bimonthly magazine: an open-source CMS, RSS/Atom feeds, PDF distribution, and the problem of keeping the conversation alive between one issue and the next.
Read moreOpenCV 1.0 is not a medical imaging library, yet its 2D operations cover much of what mammography, retinoscopy, dermatology and microscopy actually need. What the 1.x line offers in 2008, where its domain ends, and why DICOM and CT/MR volumes stay out.
Read morePloneGov brings a co-operative model for the public sector to Italy, built on Plone: bodies pooling code instead of re-purchasing the same applications. Technical notes and the limits of the model.
Read moreCompatibility between open licences, and between open and proprietary ones, depends on the clauses, not on the code. GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPL, MPL 1.1, BSD and Apache 2.0 compared, with Italian law 633/1941 in the background.
Read moreOn 9 February 2008 a RepRap 1.0 Darwin produced more than half of its own printed parts. Technical notes on partial self-replication, the GPL licence and the 2008 FDM software chain.
Read moreThe day before the second PyCon Italia, Python 2.6a3 and 3.0a5 ship: notes on migrating the language and on the state of the WSGI web ecosystem.
Read moreWireshark 1.0 shipped on 31 March 2008. The architecture weighs more than the version number: over a thousand protocol parsers reading hostile input, and the privilege separation that contains the damage.
Read morePostgreSQL 8.3, released on 4 February 2008, brings full-text search and HOT updates into the core. A technical note on MVCC, GIN/GiST indexes, and what it means for a database to absorb functions previously left to external modules.
Read moreMonths after GPLv3 and on the eve of Linux Day, a technical note on licences, proliferation and compatibility: what it now means to talk about free knowledge.
Read moreDrools 4.0 (July 2007) as an execution engine for clinical logic: the Rete algorithm, a working memory of POJOs and the unresolved data-binding problem, set against Arden Syntax and GELLO.
Read moreOn 29 June 2007 the FSF published version 3 of the GNU GPL. Anti-tivoization, an explicit patent grant and Apache 2.0 compatibility redraw the boundary of copyleft, while the Linux kernel stays on v2.
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