“Collaboration can be so strong it forces hard boundaries. The boundaries can intentionally or unintentionally exclude the possibility to extend the collaboration. Potentially conflict can also occur at these borders”

For this years’ Transmediale Festival, the F/LOSS Manuals project took up the challenge to write, edit and publish a collaborative publication in 5 days while test [...]

In the train back from Stuttgart, I read Tools for Conviviality, a pamphlet by social philosopher Ivan Ilich (1973). A ‘convivial society’, he argues, is a society in which everyone can act autonomously, and this can be achieved through the design and use of ‘convivial tools’:
People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to [...]

Alessandro Ludivico proudly presents the latest issue of Neural with OSP-designed ad for By Data We Mean
At a conference in Amsterdam, the Ippolita collective proposes us to build (and use?) convivial tools, a method for users that ‘neither want to rule nor to be ruled by the Society of the Query’:

Detect and locate [...]

Yi and Femke consider cooking heartless vegan food from now on
We’re correcting the second edition of the Puerto Cookbook (first edition sold out!) and stumble over a trivial but frustrating small bug in Scribus. Maybe too long to explain here (you’re welcome to read our bug report), but it means a lot of scrolling back [...]

The transformer (Marie Neurath) at work
Today a long awaited booklet arrived in the post: The transformer, principles of making Isotype charts written by Robin Kinross & Marie Neurath. It is inspiring in its modest but precise description of unorthodox working methods developed by philosopher, sociologist, and economist Otto Neurath and his associates. To produce ‘pictures [...]

When budget is limited and time is short: PoDoFo tiling + wallpaper glue + NotCourierSans to the rescue!

Clementine mounts the Constant Verlag colophon for its launch last night in 17 Rue de la Senne

Can’t help but re-blog: friend & neighbour Michael Murtaugh is experimenting with SVG animation, using svgweb to make this cat spin
http://automatist.org/blog/?p=139

Before starting a fresh new OSP-season, first a post long due:
This conversation with Juliane de Moerlooze was recorded March 2009 in the context of Female Icons, a project by De Geuzen but I think OSP-readers might like to read it as well?

“when you hear people talk about women having more sense for the global, [...]

1. Unlimited Use License
Judging from the mysql errors flying around, the Open Records Generator software developed by David Reinfurt, is not actively maintained at the moment. Still, this GPL licensed software presents an interesting mix of buyers and users: “The buyer receives full rights to modify and reuse the software for future applications” (found [...]

Designing with TeX: episode IV

Today we drove up North to the headquarters of Pragma in Hasselt (NL), La Place from where ConTeXt, a document markup language and document preparation system based on TeX, is being developed. The goal of the journey was to resolve some of the issues we encounter while designing a multi lingual [...]

When we began to think about how to establish a more rich and warm collaboration with printers after the cold alerts we experienced during OSP production, Georges Charlier’s appetite for research and openness to exotic solutions reappeared in Pierre’s mind. And since we are preparing some new books, it was time for an update on [...]

22 June, 16:00 @ Puerto, Varkensmarkt 23, Brussels
Join us this afternoon for the long awaited festive launch of the Puerto Livre de Cuisine Kookboek: 70 delicious recipes, written, translated (Dutch and French) and illustrated in collaboration with the inhabitants of Puerto. Puerto is an organisation working from the center of Brussels, where they generously [...]

The Open Font Library is preparing a brand new site (an idea of what’s in store: http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki) and this sparked off an interesting discussion about terminology. How to name fonts that are made available on the OFL site?

I’m in Stuttgart for a week to teach a workshop. In the school library, I read Eye Magazine.

Notes from print/pixel

Last week, OSP attended the print/pixel conference in Rotterdam, a two day event gathering publishers, designers, marketeers and document engineers to look at the ever shifting relation between digital and paper publishing.1
For an integral report, see blog-posts by Jouke Kleerebezem and Arie Altena here: http://blog.wdka.nl/communication-in-a-digital-age. Our notes are fragmentary.
The organisers kindly supported our [...]

“Open Source doesn’t mean free access, nor open space or open air; it presumes a seamful approach to design as a response to the increasing reliance on technology and its accessibility”
http://jaromil.dyne.org/journal/research_2009.html…

Chris Lilley writes: “W3C is collecting ideas for work related to downloadable fonts on the Web. This email summarizes the current situation, and asks for feedback on a draft charter for a future W3C Font working group or interest group. Please send feedback on the charter to the publicly archived mailing list www-style@w3.org.”
Read his overview [...]

A conversation with Chris Lilley
Almost a year ago at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008, OSP sat down with Chris Lilley on a small patch of grass in front of the Technical University in Wroclaw, Poland. Warmed up by the early May sun, we talked about the way standards are made, how ’specs’ influence the work [...]

Under the ambitious title ‘Jeffrey Zeldman Discusses the Future of Open Source‘ (filed under: ‘The Internet’), the CSS guru compares the use of Open Source Content Management Systems to what webstandards did for the web. Looking forward to hear more… and will he mention SVG?

Excerpt from a longer interview, soon available here too: http://bigthink.com/ideas/jeff-zeldman-discusses-the-future-of-open-source
sorry, only [...]

… and for the same Cinema du Réel festival, OSP worked with Michael Murtaugh on HIC SUNT LEONES, a collective slideshow of on-line visual contributions gathered during the festival.

Felix Kubin writes:
“As an antidote to globalisation, Ich Bin suggest local megalomania: Mulhouse for capital! ‘Avec le Gewuerz et le Schnaps.’
The record was designed by the talented Monsieur Harrisson, a French refugee now residing in Brussels (…)”

So, OSP makes an exception for Harissons’ *last ever* design in proprietary software: we’re proud to announce that [...]

Designing with TeX: episode III
Thanks to the super active ConTeXt mailinglist, we are finally able to load our own fonts! And of course, once we know how, we are almost disappointed that it is so easy to do.
if you compile this file:
\definetypeface[Libertinage][rm][Xserif][Libertinage]
\setupbodyfont[Libertinage, 24pt]
\starttext
\input knuth
\stoptext
with this command:
texexec –xtx fontsample.tex
you end up with this.

Monday 24 March 2009
Ada Lovelace Day
“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.”
http://www.promessotheque.com/AdaLovelaceDay
Friday 27 March 2009
Thank A Developer Day
“The general idea is to appreciate the creators behind your favorite Free Software application or/and component (preferred [...]

Designing with TeX: episode II
“Users only need to learn a few easy-to-understand commands that specify the logical structure of a document“. If only we had sooner understood that user here is writer, not designer, we might have given up earlier. The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2 goes on to explain: “They almost never need [...]

(Call forwarded from Isabelle Massu)

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

Museums narrate the history of man’s evolution through the display of tools (silex, knife, jar, etc.). In contrast, we are looking for useless tools. This call will result in a vitrine of objects titled ‘Object Inutile’ to be displayed at [...]

The FLOSS+Art book is finally rolling off the print-on-demand press and in the spirit of the kinds of practices described in the book, GOTO10 distributes our ’source files’ as a bittorrent:1
Rather than just providing a “free” PDF, FLOSS+Art.v1.1.eBook-GOTO10 is also available and contains all the Fonts, Images, PDF and Scribus source files that were used [...]

“Only rarely, if indeed ever, are a tool and an altogether original job it is to do, invented together. Tools as symbols, however, invite their imaginative displacements into other than their original contexts. In their new frames of reference, that is, as new symbols in an already established imaginative calculus, they may themselves be transformed, [...]

(a postcard from Vienna)
Wishing you (OpenOffice, Ubuntu, Free Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Debian, Scribus, Creative Commons, One Laptop per Child, Open Clip Art, DejaVu project, Open Font Library or any other F/LOSS or Open Content project) were here, at the European Ministerial e-Inclusion Conference …

Ever considered applying as researcher for the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (NL)?
Extrastatecraft, a project led by Keller Easterling asks interesting questions about the relation between protocol and practice. The JvE offers great facilities (including financial support) for extra-academic research and with the appointment of Florian Schneider as ‘advising researcher’, the design department might [...]

Of course we discuss now and than amongst ourselves, whether it is better to change ‘Open Source Publishing’ to: ‘Free Software Publishing’ (FSP…), or maybe: ‘Free, Libre and Open Source Publishing’ (FLOSP!). Reading Rob Myers text ‘Open Source Art Again‘ makes me bring it up here:
The name Open Source was deliberately chosen for its meaninglessness [...]

Out now: The Mag.net reader 3: Processual Publishing. Actual Gestures, edited by Alessandro Ludovico and Nat Muller.
From the introduction:
“a radical change is to be detected between the lines: publishing on paper is not about rigorously selling and distributing content to a specific target readership. It is more a ‘gesture’ that creates a space of intimacy [...]

An interview with Michael Terry (ingimp)
At the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Wroclaw, just before Michael Terry presents ingimp to an audience of curious Gimp developers and users, we meet up to talk more about ‘instrumenting The Gimp’ and about the way Terry thinks data analysis could be done as a form of discourse.

Michael Terry [...]

For everyone (like me) who keeps re-reading the 1992 edition of Robin Kinross’ Modern Typography: an essay in critical history… his revised edition (published in 2004) ends in an interestingly different way*:
“The phrase ‘democratization of typography’ has become common, referring to the wide availability of the tools of production for type and typographic design. One [...]

Philosopher of science, Bruno Latour, opened the recent Networks of Design conference with a keynote address: A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design. In his lecture, Latour linked the growing importance of design with his idea that “matters of fact” have become “matters of concern“.

With a staggering 1463 points (runners up Typo3 and OpenLieroX ended on respectively 1269 and 572 points), the Open Source prepress project SK1 has well deserved it’s ticket to the upcoming Hackontest event in Zurich, 25-26 September.

We’re very happy to hear that the sK1 team will have a chance to demonstrate their enthusiasm for Libre [...]

As you might have gathered from Thomas Phinney’s latest comment on our post The Status of Utopia, Adobe will not re-release Utopia under an Open Font License. It doesn’t mean though the font cannot be studied, copied, modified and distributed: “Although changing the license would make it easier for folks who find licenses confusing and [...]

Dave Walden from the TeX User Group introduces his excellent TUG Interview Corner as follows:
“technology is created by and evolves with use by people, and the points of view and backgrounds of the people influence the technology”
The ever growing list of interviewees include Barbara Beeton, Donald Knuth, Herman Zapf and numerous other less widely known [...]

On his weblog Infinite Knots, Inkscape’s Bryce Harrington explains that if you want to have a feature implemented in an open source project, offering money will probably not help. He describes how “folks who aren’t developers” challenged Inkscape developers to make the application work on MacOSX, after first having tried doing it themselves.
if you want [...]

Our favourite killer-app Scribus is competing to be included in Hackontest, a “24 hour programming competition between teams of three open source software projects“.
A container designed by E-Toy.corporation will house the competition, which takes place at the Google sponsored OpenExpo (the Swiss conference and trade show for Free and Open Source Software). “This room will [...]

On October 11, 2006 Adobe granted members of the Tex User Group the right to use, modify and distribute the Utopia typeface:
Adobe Systems Incorporated (“Adobe”) hereby grants to the TeX Users Group and its members a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual license to the typeface software for the Utopia Regular, Utopia Italic, Utopia Bold and Utopia bold [...]

A lively discussion about the terminology used in Scribus:
http://lists.scribus.info/pipermail/scribus/2008-May/028994.html
All started with this post from Hans-Josef Heck, linking the language of digital lay-out to that of historical printing techniques:

“Master” is the perfect English term. The master masters a page, a paragraph, etc.
The Webster (edition 1994) says:
3: controlling the operation of other mechanism (e.g. master cylinder)
4: [...]

Scribus is included in this year’s Google Summer of Code and now looking for contributions in the form of proposals and feedback to already formulated ideas: http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/GsoC_2008_Ideas
Scribus is also actively looking for student applications:
http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/GsoC_2008_Example_proposal
From the Gnome Usability list:
“Season of Usability is a series of mentored student projects to encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and [...]

Besides pagenumbers, Scribus masterpages can currently only hold static elements. Ivan Monroy Lopez wrote us a very handy python script which puts as many linked or unlinked text boxes on as many pages you want. You can also run the script multiple times…
measurements.py
template.py

In the summer of 1997, the NLNet Foundation sold its commercialized internet provision activities to UUNET (the internet subsidiary of WorldCom). This created a fund from which the foundation now supports activities that provide network technology to the community and keep outcomes in the “public domain”. NLnet has picked Identity, Privacy & Presence and [...]

This weekend the annual meeting of Free and Open Source Developers (FOSDEM) takes place in Brussels. As usual, the ULB fills up with developers from all over Europe, discussing large scale projects such as Gnome desktop, Mozilla, Xorg and PHP. Unfortunately none of the talks addressed our usual working tools (we’ll see more of that [...]

David Reinfurt’s essay Making do and getting by departs from the work of Muriel Cooper and Anthony Froshaug, and relates their critically engaged practice to contemporary projects such as Juerg Lehni’s Scriptographer. In this way, he convincingly shows how designers can and should reclaim a more intimate relationship with the digital production of their work. [...]

Interview with Dmytri Kleiner
OSP met Venture Communist Dmytri Kleiner late night (thank you Le Coq for the soundtrack!) after his talk InfoEnclosure-2.0, in a bar. We wanted to ask him what his ideas about peer production could mean for the practice of designers and typographers.

With Mute’s Simon Worthington and Laura Oldenburg, OSP participated in a NM-X network evening. Following our presentations, we discussed the problems and potential of installing free software on proprietary platforms, whether it was interesting to develop a free software ‘design suite’, the position of free fonts and much more. [Notes] [Images]
If [...]

(A post for readers with some F/LOSS stamina)

Virginie and Laurence checking the V/J10 program in real size.
Poster is an excellent tool to print .eps or .ps documents in tiles. You can adjust the final size of the file, the amount of overlap, size of the media you print on, work from a percentage (‘enlarge 500%’) etc. Install poster through Synaptic package manager [...]

2 day workshop
Werkplaats Typografie, Arnhem (20 + 21 November, 2007)
What permutations between typeface, typesetting and text can you imagine? How to design through scripting and can you read differently with computer manipulations?
Full brief:

While looking for designers writing about their relation to tools, I discovered the excellent William Morris Archives, part of the Marxist writers’ Internet Archive. To Morris, to own his means of production, was the only way a designer/workman could find back pleasure in work, and this in turn he considered a prerequisite for the [...]

“It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source’s success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work.” (Eric S. Raymond, postscript (2000) to The Cathedral and the Bazaar)

Adobe’s new Creative Suite is currently advertised with the slogan: Creative License – Take as much as you want. Terms and Conditions which apply when you submit a feature request or a bug report:

You agree that by submitting your Idea, you acknowledge and agree that any such Idea is nonconfidential, and that Adobe has no [...]

Looking for ways to fund an European project on Free Fonts… OSP participated in the Info Day on cultural grants, organised by the European Commission in Brussels.

PubliActie @ Boekenbeurs Antwerpen
Inspired by the legacy of Cornelius Kiliaan, inventor of the first Dutch dictionary, Marthe van Dessel and Wendy van Wynsberghe look for neologisms and definitions in search of a word. Using Free Software and Free Licenses, the result will be an open source lexicon taking into account our daily feelings, experiences and [...]

OSP visits Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem (The Netherlands) to discuss a two-day workshop on Free Fonts with Anniek Brattinga and Karel Martens. http://www.werkplaatstypografie.org

On Saturday November 3, OSP will lecture at Integrated2007 “a new vital international design conference taking place in deSingel Antwerp“:
“OSP takes you on a trip into the wonderful universe of Free Software. We will meet alien devices and extraterrestrial tools, previously unknown to the world of graphic design. We like to imagine what would happen [...]

Mute Vol 2 #6 – Living in a Bubble: Credit, debt and crisis is out!
After a few months of testing and trying, the work flow of the entire magazine was converted to Free Software (OpenOffice, Inkscape, Gimp and Scribus on Kubuntu and Ubuntu systems) and… with succes.

Read low-graphic pdf’s online or order your own copy [...]

View from Les Rencontres de Lure (Lurs, France)
Welcome back! OSP is about to start a busy year, but before we begin… here a fresh take on the application of Open Source methodologies in design:
“An open source methodology could aid us in moving in this direction for it provides a contemporary justification
for a publicly owned intellectual [...]

One of our Rotterdam reporters made us notice Inconsolata, a monospaced font designed by Ghostscript maintainer Raph Levien. Levien offers an OTF version, plus ‘raw’ fontforge files on his webpage.
First and foremost, Inconsolata is a humanist sans design. I strove for the clarity and clean lines of Adrian Frutiger’s Avenir (the lowercase “a”, in particular, [...]

The Linux Foundation OpenPrinting work group, organises a get-together 24-27 September in Montreal.
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/SummitMontreal
As stated on their site, the printing activities of the Linux Foundation revolve around a few focal points:

For printer manufacturers, we want to make it easier to produce drivers that work across distributions and to get those drivers in the hands of end [...]

Over the last few months, the OSP and Mute team have established a new design and production workflow for Mute magazine, using Open Source tools. Below are a few of the questions we are encountering during the last stages of this process.

Interview with George Williams, Fontforge developer
(…) I think the ideas behind it are beautiful in my mind — and in some sense I find the user interface beautiful. I’m not sure that anyone else in the world does, because it’s what I want, but I think it’s beautiful. (George Williams, May 2007)
For those who prefer [...]

Wonderful Inkscape unfortunately does not support black overprinting. You can define colors in CMYK but it will not allow values such as 40% C + 40% M + 40% Y + 100% K (Inkscape for some reason automatically converts these back to 0% C + 0% M + 0% Y + 100% K).

Left: [...]

Frog and Prince is a fairytale featuring free software, python scripting and an open font. The story was premièred at LGM 2007 (Montréal, Canada), and formed the centerpiece of the Canadian Printing Breakfast (Brussels, June 2007). Below is everything you need to make the recipe, but you can also browse through sample documents for [...]

Impressions from Canadian Printing Breakfast in Nepomuk Bar, Brussels. More images in Constants Image Repository.
Special thanks: An, Wendy & Pierre (serving), Ivan (Python), Nurse (records), Peter (pictures), Nicolas (printing), Veronique (City Min(e)d).

Samedi 16 Juin
Nepomuk Bar – City Mine(d) – Rue Saint-Jean Nepomucen, 17, Bruxel
Click here for English

Open Source Publishing est fier de vous inviter à son petit-déjeuner canadien, où vous seront servies leurs dernières aventures dans le monde des Logiciels Libres. Au menu: mise en page animée d’un conte de fée, programmeur chercheur de singes à [...]

Today’s challenge brought to you by indexer and typesetter John Culleton.
These four covers were done using three different tools:

Tex (context)
Gimp
Inkscape

Who can match covers 1 through 4 with the correct tool?
http://typebye.com/test2.html

We hope you are as much inspired by these texts as we are.
You should read this!
We think these texts are essential.
These texts need to be seen in context of their time.
Would this be of any use?
Will you read this please?
Please do not take their advice literally!
We hope you find time to have a look at [...]

Do free software developers need lawyers, when reverse engineering formats such as Corel Draw? How to work on the compatibility of file formats, when risking law suits from patent holders? Should we forget about opening up proprietary formats altogether? Jon Philips takes the position that developers should ‘do until done’:
Its good to know generally the [...]

Interview with Andreas Vox, Scribus-developer
While in the background participants to the Libre Graphics Meeting 2007 start saying goodbye to each other, Andreas Vox makes time to sit down with us in the hotel lounge. We want to talk to him about Scribus, the open-source application for professional page layout. Not only as users that [...]

“Neurath’s pictograms owe much to the Modernist belief that reality may be modified by being codified – standardised, easy-to-grasp templates as a revolution in human affairs. But the templates themselves, or the code, may end up in their turn aestheticised, reified, in need of a further round of de-cryption, a paradigm common also to failed [...]

Conversation with Igor Novikov and Valek Philippov (SK1)

Excerpts from a conversation with Igor Novikov (Ukraine) and Valek Philippov (Russia) about how and why they are involved in SK1 pre-press software; the joy of reverse engineering and a handy tip for receiving Russian TV in Ukraine too.
igor_valek.mp3 [25mb]

LGM pictures here

Interview (unedited files) with George Williams, developer of FontForge, the open source font editing tool. Conversation about Shakespeare, Unicode, the pleasure of making beautiful things and pottery. Enjoy!

GW_dl1.mp3 [8.1 mb]
GW_dl2.mp3 [16.6 mb]
…or read the transcription: “I think the ideas behind it are beautiful in my mind“

While on our way to the Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal we’ve done a quick test of Scribus 1.3.4cvs and … good news!
Major New Feature No.1: possibility to add character styles (besides paragraph styles) and a general clean up of the way styles work. More testing needed, but interface and direction taken look promising.
For a [...]

DEbian Font MAnager a.k.a. dfontmgr (available through the Synaptic Package Manager) is helpful when you want to register and unregister fonts on a Debian / Ubuntu system.
After installation you can start the manager, which is a GUI for the Defoma package, from the command line. Type sudo dfontmgr (you need to be root to make [...]

Sneak preview of what New OSP might look like:

The Institute of Network Cultures published an insightful study on the culture of new media work by Sociologist Rosalind Gill. Technobohemians or the new Cybertariat? New media work in Amsterdam a decade after the web, is based on 40 ’semi-structured’ interviews with practitioners (designers, developers, artists, information architects, …). Her study reveals the often [...]

For the Libre Graphics Meeting, taking place May 4-6 in Montreal, Canada, OSP members Harrisson and Femke will speak about FLOSS and design: Relaying Systems – Why designers should be interested in FLOSS. The programme is here!

Nomade, an Argentinian group of artists using Free Software, just finished a printed publication on intellectual property, plus a detailed tour through the process: http://nomade.liminar.com.ar/wakka.php?wakka=MaBI&v=der
Included: design sketches, illustrations, description of the pre-press process, final pdf’s and a html version. Of course everything Open Source. Very nice!

The Open Font Library (OFL.o) needs a logo to help identify their project. They want the community to help create this logo and three judges from the OFL.o will select the winning logo which they will use in all of their branding.
Logos need to be submitted in .svg before March 14, 2007 at 11:59 PM [...]

At the FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers Meeting) conference in Brussels, two openSuse developers presented their research on usability of KDE desktops.

Their testing methods consists of interviews, questionnaires, screen recordings plus precise video documentation of a group of 10 people trying to accomplish 12 tasks using various desktop systems (KDE classic, KDE reloaded [...]

Mute Magazine develops Open Source software, and has recently installed Ubuntu on all office machines. Now they want to move their lay-out away from QuarkXpress too.
Last week, Simon Worthington and Darron Broad from Mute came over to discuss the project. First of all we will need to make sure their original templates can be migrated [...]

A widely used proprietary color-system such as Pantone, obviously raises questions for Open Source graphic tools. Gregory Pittman writes:
* Obviously, no one, including Pantone, can copyright a color, and especially in these days where the RGB/CMYK color systems are freely usable — ie, you can’t put a claim on RGB color “ef9824″.
* They can copyright [...]

Craig Bradney and Peter Linnell discuss the future of Free and Open Source Software for commercial printing:
Right now, I would say the biggest weakness from an FOSS point of view is there are few good high quality fonts. It is one of those areas which requires tremendous amounts of QA to make them reliable in [...]

Contribution by De Geuzen in Open magazine about Travail Mobile, a workshop for Digitales.
After the Crash Test-post a few month ago, finally pictures of the result!
Thanks to Peter Linnell (one of the main Scribus developers), who after I posted about some Postscript troubles to the Scribus mailinglist, came to the rescue on IRC.

Conversation with Ricardo Lafuente
Ricardo Lafuente looks at the way typography, (open source) tools and design economies feed off and into each other. In a few weeks he will publish his text here for you to download. In the mean time, read a few of the ideas we exchanged by e-mail. Comments are of course more [...]

The same illustration that got us to post about image scripting, also brought up an interesting discovery plus a feature/plug-in for Inkscape.

Detail of illustration for Mute Magazine. Click to view .jpg or download complete zipped .svg file + images
Lock layer
It is often helpful to lock an object (in this case the glow in the background), [...]

Well, technically not open-source related… but I think this campaign deserves all designers’ attention. In a nice mock of Apple’s iLife design + writing, Greenpeace reminds us that not all that is wireless comes without footprint. Calling all bloggers, taggers, social bookmarkers and other cool people to the rescue, Greenpeace thinks they might convince Apple [...]

Ellen Lupton’s question: Why would a typeface designer want to give a font away? sparked off a series of comments worth reading. The discussion shows how much typographers struggle with ‘open source’ as an idea. It makes you wonder why Lupton decided to ask ‘to give away a font’ and not ‘to share source’ – [...]

This week the Dutch Design Foundation Premsela organised ‘For the common good’, a conference around Pierre Bernhard (Grapus, Ne Pas Plier), who has been awarded the prestigious Erasmus price.
Design critic Hugues Boekraad introduced the work of Bernard with a plea for reflexive design; in his perspective designers have the responsibility to build bridges between the [...]

Stroom Den Haag started their year long project After Neurath with a public symposium. After Neurath looked/looks at the relevance of 1930’s philosopher and information activist Otto Neurath, and as you can imagine various familiar issues came up.
More information about Otto Neurath: http://www.stroom.nl/webdossiers/webdossier.php?wd_id=3530772
The project is curated by Steve Rushton. Speakers: Frank Hartmann, Robin Kinross, Kristóf [...]

What does it mean, when a typeface is released in the public domain? What are the legal issues surrounding typography? How can a font be generated collaboratively, using open source software? What does it mean, an open standard and how can such a standard fit different contexts?

To get our hands into these and many other [...]

James Love just posted this interesting report on Nettime:

When standards are political — ODF (the Open Document Format)
Yesterday I attended a meeting hosted by TACD at Harvard’s Berkman Center about a very important issue — one that is both highly technical and political at the same time — the battle over the Open Document Format [...]

Lay-out in Scribus
Download low-res PDF
Finished! Sketched and produced a seven page contribution to Open (Dutch bi-monthly on art in public space) + inside cover. Images were prepared in Gimp; pattern assembled in Inkskape and document lay-out in Scribus (v1.3.3.2); all on Ubuntu.

Conditions of production and cultural consumption
After Nicolas gave a brief history of how author rights have developed and how the free software and copyleft movements responded to its increasing restrictive use…

…while trying to be not to grim about the way copyright laws are currently used and abused…

This poster by Act Up (questioning the geneology of [...]

Manifeste GNU, Richard Stallman
Text available on line: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.fr.html
PDF lay-out: retrospective_readingc.pdf
PDF cover: retro_attac_couvert.pdf
License: Copyright © 1985, 1993, 2003, 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA / Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved / La reproduction exacte et [...]