Tag - societe

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Wednesday, June 19 2019

Preserving freedom in an automated decision making world

In April 2018, during the LLW Workshop in Barcelona, I had the great pleasure to participate in a workshop organised by Andy Wilson, and focused on understanding how the core values and principles of freedom conveyed by the original Free Software movement can be carried over to the 21st century. The lively discussion that ensued led to interesting results, that it is of general interest to share broadly, especially now that awareness is raising about the issues that lie behind the explosive interest in Machine Learning and AI. Here are the notes that I wrote to sum up the results of the discussion.

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Wednesday, April 17 2019

Saving software development from the European copyright reform

On April 15th 2019, the controversial European directive on copyright has been approved by the European Council after being passed in the European Parliament by 348 votes in favor, 274 votes against and 36 abstentions. And it does include the much debated Article 13 (now Article 17).

Even if conceived to be mainly targeted at the "cultural" sector, this directive was written in such a broad way that software development was seriously threatened by it.

Today I have the meager satisfaction to see that one year and half of a hard and exhausting work of explanations and mobilizations, at national and European level, to which I have actively contributed, has led to a clear exclusion formulated in Article 2(6) for

          open source developing and sharing platforms

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Saturday, December 31 2011

Combo-economics at work in Argentina, or how to get a cheap Big Mac thanks to The Economist

Traveling in Argentina, I happened to stop by a MacDonalds. That might seem a silly thing to do in a country where you can have a fantastic piece of prime grilled beef for the price of a typical, lousy Mac combo, but I was just looking for a quick coffee on the route. It turned out that the highly overpriced cup of coffee was lousy too, but the day was not completely lost: I just found out another mind boggling example of the creativity of the people in this country. Bear with me for this short journey from a MacDonalds to finance mangling...

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