The third lesson of the
Arte y cultura en circulaci n: crear y compartir en tiempos digitales course was quite easy, at least for me, as it's one of the topics I've been involved with for a long time:
Authors' rights and ways to exercise them.
This lesson starts by talking about the paradoxes created in the reality beneath copyright mostly due to the zero-cost-for-perfect-copy reality we live in today, and then goes on to introduce the most widely spread licensing schemes for cultural works nowadays: The Creative Commons licensing schemes.
What I felt very interesting is that the lesson tackles the most common issues raised by authors choosing CC licensing: The Non-Commercial and Non-Derivatives restrictions. While authors are usually not very hard to convince about the virtues (and their personal benefit) in CC licensing, it's usually hard for authors to accept and relinquish the "locks" on non-derivability and non-commercial-use.
Now, as to the homework: This time, I have to admit it was a no-brainer to me. The homework was to take part of a "Licenciat n":
Publish some work under a open or free license (a work of any kind; it can be text, photo, video, etc.; it can be a new or a pre-existing work) and argue as to why did you choose said license.
Even the act of writing this blog post means I'm releasing some work. The bottom of my blog reads,
All the material found at this site is freely available, and you can use it as you wish, except when the document mentions explicitly different conditions. Yes, this is not a widely known, preexisting licensing scheme, and more or less goes along the lines of CC0 There are some good things I have posted in this blog, some things I am proud about. This post goes more towards the average quality: Not adding anything of
great value to the world, just reiterating/reposting what is already said. But I know this blog is syndicated over several different places, and its content might be copied over to other places. I don't need to know or be notified about it. I just care for people to be able to reach back if they want to do it.
But, of course, if I'm asked to do a homework, I prefer not to have it so self-referential. What else to license?
We are over halfway across the
Wiki Loves Monuments contest for 2013. This year I am clearly not as active on it as I was last year, but yesterday I uploaded
about 60 photos from our recent trips, from historical monuments in some towns/cities within ~150Km of Mexico City: Puebla, Tlaxcala, Cacaxtla, Toluca, Santiago Tianguistenco. I intend to upload more. Those photos are licensed
CC-BY-SA. Why? Mainly, because it is the defaul for the contest. One of the lessons learned working on Debian is that the less the license I choose deviates from what the
upstream authors of a larger project prefer, the more useful my work will be. And being Wikimedia a host of many related projects, I prefer to completely abide by their recommendations unless there is a real, strong reason not to do so.
Also, I know that at least most the photos I am uploading are not of
contest quality (although some are quite nice, but we don't take
that long to take a shot, and our camera is probably too basic to get a quality shot, if not by mere chance). I am using the WLM contest as an excuse to categorize and upload my pictures Of course, I'm not including personal photos, but... If I found a building, place or landscape interesting enough to take a photo of, why not make said photo available for whoever needs it, in a canonical, easy to reach media repository (as
Wikimedia Commons) is)?
And finally, I think it's time to start getting more open and forward-going with a project that I have been giving a lot of work during the past year, a project that has been even eating quite a bit of my Debian time: My upcoming book. While this book is not
yet freely licensed (it is freely distributed online, but does not yet have an explicit license, and I mention it on
my teaching/project page. Why? Because it still has some figures and data which are not mine, and which I have to re-elaborate to be able to legally license it.
But anyway I am writing a book on the subject of
Operating Systems, and am basing my teaching on it. The first semester was basically hell for me, as I was working almost full time on it, and needed to allocate some time as well to the rest of my
formal work. This second semester has been quite smoother. And there is a very important (to me) initiative to which I (or should I now start saying,
we) submitted this work: The
LATIn Project: An initiative to collaboratively create quality, freely redistributable text books for the university level, natively in Spanish, for their use in Latin American countries.
I was not able to propose this book due to some formalities Projects have to be proposed by professors in participant universities, and UNAM is not one of them. However, I offered this work to people in the
Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina, and they managed to push the project forward. Together with people from Universidad Aut noma de Aguascalientes (M xico) and Universidad del Cauca (Colombia),
the project was approved by LATIn.
And this LATIn project can also be seen as a
why do you agree to license your work this way? candidate: I have already written most of what I'd be happy to call a full book. Of course, I do expect my colleagues to chime in with more content, and I expect us to produce a true collaborative project. But as I am not part of the member universities, they will get paid for their contribution And not me. What do I have to gain from this?
More than anything else, the circulation of my work. I'm sure that, were I to publish from UNAM, I would have a good projection. I was (am!) thinking of looking for opportunities to present the book to teachers on the subject, as well as to computing engineering/science students, but the most attractive part (for me) for LATIn is that part of the
prize will be that the book will be used to base work on for teaching at least during 2014 in the three said universities And of course, my/our work will only start then, as we will have to further circulate the work.
Anyway... I expected this post to be small. But as you can see, I am happy with important work perspectives :-)
What happened in the reproducible
builds effort this week:
Toolchain fixes
Like 
Like 
This was just meant to say hello to the Debian Planet readers, but I'll end it with a Jessie related question, so... Intro For those who don't know me, I was born in Betanzos, A Coru a, Galicia, in the North-West of Spain and I currently live on A Coru a. I've been a Debian developer since year 2000 when I was quite more involved than currently (live changes), but I'm always expecting to be able to dedicate more time to the project, I hope this will happen when my two children grow up a little bit. I had been wanting to send my blog's Debian related posts to the planet but always failed to do so, yesterday I found the planet wiki page and I said... it's so easy that I don't have any excuse not to do it, so here I am. Oh, BTW... if I ever comment on Debian's anniversary (16th of August) that at Betanzos we are launching 
This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who 
On the positive side, Marko has gotten some feedback from people who like the new PTS and are using it daily already. And several persons have expressed their interest to work on the new codebase already.
On my side, I created a package so that it s easy to deploy for derivatives. In this process, I revamped the way we manage the Django settings (for development and for production). The package is not finished yet, but it s mostly usable already. But I still want to do some cleanup/refactoring in the models before others start deploying it. We must also enable South to make it possible to upgrade easily afterwards.
DebConf 13 in Vaumarcus
From August 10th to 17th, I was attending DebConf 13. It matched the only week of vacation that my wife had this summer so we went there with the whole family (that is with a 3 years old son, and 6 months old one). Thus I could not immerse myself in Debconf and missed all the nice things that happen outside of the talk rooms. I picked 3-4 interesting talks per day and I spent the rest with my family.
On the positive side, I was pleased that my wife could meet (or at least see) some other Debian people. She knows quite a few (of you) by name because I have been telling her Debian stories for years now
Debian France
Debian France sold quite some merchandise during Debconf but I didn t take care of that. It was supervised by Sylvestre Ledru but fortunately he got the help of multiple persons, both to bring everything there, to sell it, and to bring back the rest.
The good news of the month is that the 