Formation | 2002 |
---|---|
Type | Non-profit |
Purpose | Educational |
Headquarters | Madrid, Spain |
Region served | Worldwide |
Main organ | Assembly |
Affiliations | Member project of Comunes organization |
Website | OurProject.org |
OurProject.org (OP) is a web-based collaborative free content repository. It acts as a central location for the construction and maintenance of social/cultural/artistic projects, providing web space and tools, and focusing in free knowledge. [1] [2] It claims to extend the ideas and methodology of free software [3] to social areas and free culture in general. [4] [5] Since September 2009, Ourproject is under the Comunes Association umbrella, [6] and gave birth to the Kune collaborative social network for groups.
Ourproject was founded in 2002 with the aims of hosting and boosting the cooperative work done in multiple domains (cultural, artistic, educational [7] ), with one specific condition: the results of the projects should remain freely accessible under a free license. [8] This is understood in a broad way, as not all the available licenses are cataloged as free/libre (such as several Creative Commons licenses). [9] [10]
Its non-profit perspective is partially imposed on its online community of projects, as no advertising is allowed in the hosted webpages. Thus, OurProject projects have mainly been carried out by social movements, university-supported groups, [5] [11] some free software related projects, [12] cooperatives, [13] artist collectives, [14] activist groups, [15] informal groups [16] and non-profits. [17]
As of December 2016, OurProject.org was hosting 1,733 projects and had 5,969 users, with a constant linear growth rate. [18] and had a PageRank of 6 [19] and the 14th position on public Gforge sites, [20] being the first of them not restricted to just free software projects. In fact, the GNU Project highlights it as "Free knowledge & free culture" project. [21] It claims to be the most successful wiki farm with full free version and without ads (comparison). It has presence especially in Spain, Latin America and China. [22]
Relevant projects that are using Ourproject infrastructure include:
During 2011, it has attracted interest by the new wave of protesting social movements in several areas:
OurProject.org uses a multi-language multiple-topic adapted version of FusionForge. Its aim is to widen the spectrum of free software ideals, focusing on free social and cultural projects more than on free software. Thus, its software was originally a kind of social and multiple-topic forge following the free-culture movement. Nowadays, the Ourproject community has been involved in the development of the collaborative environment Kune and eventually this would cover all current Ourproject functionalities.
The main condition for hosting projects at OP is that the content created during the project must be released under one of these licenses:
OP provides several free Internet services to free/libre projects collaborators:
Other secondary services:
Ourproject developed partnership with several organizations:
Free software, libre software, or libreware is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.
The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run, study, modify, and share copies of software. Software which meets these requirements, The Four Essential Freedoms of Free Software, is termed free software.
GNU is an extensive collection of free software, which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popularly known as Linux. Most of GNU is licensed under the GNU Project's own General Public License (GPL).
The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collaboratively developing and publishing software that gives everyone the rights to freely run the software, copy and distribute it, study it, and modify it. GNU software grants these rights in its license.
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that is available under a license that grants the right to use, modify, and distribute the software, modified or not, to everyone free of charge. The public availability of the source code is, therefore, a necessary but not sufficient condition. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term for free software and open-source software. FOSS is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright or licensing and the source code is hidden from the users.
Alternative terms for free software, such as open source, FOSS, and FLOSS, have been a controversial issue among free and open-source software users from the late 1990s onwards. These terms share almost identical licence criteria and development practices.
gNewSense was a Linux distribution, active from 2006 to 2016. It was based on Debian, and developed with sponsorship from the Free Software Foundation. Its goal was user-friendliness, but with all proprietary and non-free software removed. The Free Software Foundation considered gNewSense to be composed entirely of free software.
The GNU General Public License is a series of widely used free software licenses, or copyleft, that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use, and was originally written by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. The licenses in the GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License, and even further distinct from the more widely-used permissive software licenses BSD, MIT, and Apache.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft terms, such as with its own GNU General Public License. The FSF was incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, where it is also based.
FreeCAD is a general-purpose parametric 3D computer-aided design (CAD) modeler and a building information modeling (BIM) software application with finite element method (FEM) support. It is intended for mechanical engineering product design but also expands to a wider range of uses around engineering, such as architecture or electrical engineering. FreeCAD is free and open-source, under the LGPL-2.0-or-later license, and available for Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems. Users can extend the functionality of the software using the Python programming language.
According to the Free Software Foundation Latin America, Linux-libre is a modified version of the Linux kernel that contains no binary blobs, obfuscated code, or code released under proprietary licenses. In the Linux kernel, they are mostly used for proprietary firmware images. While generally redistributable, binary blobs do not give the user the freedom to audit, modify, or, consequently, redistribute their modified versions. The GNU Project keeps Linux-libre in synchronization with the mainline Linux kernel.
Comunes is a nonprofit organization aiming to encourage the commons and facilitating grassroots work through free software web tools. Previously known as Ourproject.org, this collective established itself as a legal entity in 2009, forming Comunes. Nowadays it serves as an umbrella organization for several projects related to the Commons.
Gleducar is a free educational project emerged in Argentina in 2002. It is also an important NGO from Argentina in the field of education and technology.
LibreOffice is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. It consists of programs for word processing; creating and editing spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams, and drawings; working with databases; and composing mathematical formulae. It is available in 115 languages. TDF does not provide support for LibreOffice, but enterprise-focused editions are available from companies in the ecosystem.
GNU Health is a free/libre health and hospital information system with strong focus on public health and social medicine. Its functionality includes management of electronic health records and laboratory information management system.
Kune was a free/open source distributed social network focused on collaboration rather than just on communication. That is, it focused on online real-time collaborative editing, decentralized social networking and web publishing, while focusing on workgroups rather than just on individuals. It aimed to allow for the creation of online spaces for collaborative work where organizations and individuals can build projects online, coordinate common agendas, set up virtual meetings, publish on the web, and join organizations with similar interests. It had a special focus on Free Culture and social movements needs. Kune was a project of the Comunes Collective. The project seems abandoned since 2017, with no new commits, blog entries or site activity.
Parabola GNU/Linux-libre is a free and open-source Linux distribution based on Arch Linux and Arch Linux ARM for the x86-64, i686, and ARMv7 architectures. It is distinguished from other Arch-based distributions by offering only free software. It includes the GNU operating system components common to many Linux distributions and the Linux-libre kernel instead of the generic Linux kernel. Parabola is listed by the Free Software Foundation as a completely free operating system, true to their Free System Distribution Guidelines.
Distributed social network projects generally develop software, protocols, or both.
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery.
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