Open Source

Plastic Microrecycling Goes Viral

December 17, 2025 Paul Spinrad, The Main Street Journal. Create! Open Source, Plastics, Recycling, Upcycling

Most used plastic winds up in landfills, the ocean, or the landscape, where it kills wildlife or degrades and puts toxins and microplastics into the environment. And plastic put in recycling bins often isn’t recycled— sometimes it’s shipped from rich countries to poor countries and surreptitiously burned as fuel, creating and spreading even more toxins. Some researchers characterize the global trade in plastic waste as a new form of colonialism. But a worldwide network of microrecyclers is turning local plastic waste into commercial products, while building community and expertise.

Sharing Seeds In A World Of Proprietary Agriculture

June 1, 2025 David Bollier. Create! Food and Agriculture, Open Source, Seeds, The Commons

Seed sharing has been a venerable tradition since the dawn of agriculture. Sharing has been a way of honoring the renewal of life, developing new seedlines, and maintaining a farmer’s independence while helping other farmers. Modern capitalism, armed with new technologies and legal powers, has savaged this tradition of seed-sharing, with disastrous results. For the past several decades, large biotech corporations have aggressively engineered seeds and the design of seed markets to make them proprietary monopolies. This has had profound consequences for farmers and global agriculture: legal bans on seed-sharing, a loss of biodiversity, less innovation in seed breeding, and higher prices that threaten sustainable agriculture and the economic sovereignty of farm communities, especially in the Global South.

Liberation Economist, Part Two

May 18, 2024 Euclides André Mance and Matt Noyes, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Liberation, Open Source, Software, Solidarity Economy

The theme of software licensing is very interesting. One time Richard Stallman was in Curitiba and stayed at my house for a week. He and I had many conversations about this and in the end wrote a joint statement on the importance of linking free software and solidarity economy, developing solutions for the solidarity economy that are truly free, libre, etc. But I posed to him an ethical problem: free software, precisely because its license allows for its use for any purpose, can lead to its use for ends that are not liberating, purposes tied to exploitation, domination, ecological degradation, or what have you. To what extent does a totally unlimited freedom, with no ethical parameters, contribute to the real expansion of freedom for all and not just some?

Inside Igalia: Scaling A Co-op Beyond 100 Members

January 30, 2024 Valerie Young, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Cooperatives, New Economy, Open Source, Worker Rights

Igalia is an open source tech co-op success story. We have been around for 22 years; we have 140 members. We play an essential role in several open web platform projects such as Chromium/Blink, WebKit (WPE & WebKitGTK), Firefox and Servo. We have contributed to GNOME / GTK+ / Maemo, WebKit / WebKitGtk+ / JSC, Blink / V8, Gecko / SpiderMonkey projects, amongst others. The reason we started as a co-op and the reason the focus of our work is Free and Open Source software are one and the same. Both are implementations of our values, in a word: egalitarianism. In this talk you will hear a bit about our history.

Forget Bellingcat — Meet A Real ‘Open Source’ Watchdog

September 23, 2023 Matt Taibbi, Scheer Post. Educate! Bellingcat, Open Source, Wars and Militarism, Watchdog

On September 11th of this year, on the third floor of the Nauticus museum in Norfolk, Virginia, defense and intelligence representatives gathered for the first and only unclassified meeting of a Naval Special Warfare Command “technology integration exercise,” called Trident Spectre 2024. What is Trident? The three-minute video above was unveiled for attendees. It pitched the program as a matchmaking forum for contractors and “defense leaders” who “tour the experimentation camp during the exercise, leading to technology transition or outright acquisition,” the contract-hungry crowd was told, in tantalizing narration.

Cosmolocalism: The Key To Our Economic Transformation

July 25, 2023 Paddy Le Flufy, Resilience. Create! climate crisis, Cosmolocalism, Creative Commons, Environment, New Economy, Open Source

The idea that we need to transform the economic system in order to avoid environmental catastrophe is growing in popularity. The degrowth movement is currently the most prominent movement for post-capitalist economics, and it is true that getting past the imperative for economic growth is an important element of the needed economic transformation. But rather than simply going against the current hegemony of economic growth, we must create a holistic new system with which to supersede today’s capitalist system. To do this, we must find replacements for each of the major components of the economic system. A core component of capitalism for which we need a replacement is the development dynamic of capital accumulation for profit.

The Commonsverse As A Parallel Polis: Opportunities And Challenges

July 17, 2023 David Bollier. Create! City Planning, Governance, Open Source, The Commons

The dialogue provoked by this workshop is timely and necessary because so many of the certitudes of political economy and culture are slowly crumbling before our eyes. It's fair to say that so many grand narratives of our time -- about citizenship, freedom, property rights, economic growth, and theories of value – have been called into question these days. Existing institutions and categories of thought aren't working so well. On the one hand, few people want to talk about structural change and necessary alternatives lest it open a Pandora's Box of monsters and chaos.

Digital Ecosocialism: Breaking The Power Of Big Tech

April 18, 2022 Michael Kwet, ROAR Magazine. Create! Big Tech, Capitalism, Democracy, Open Source

In the space of a few years, the debate on how to rein in Big Tech has become mainstream, discussed across the political spectrum. Yet, so far the proposals to regulate largely fail to address the capitalist, imperialist and environmental dimensions of digital power, which together are deepening global inequality and pushing the planet closer to collapse. We urgently need to build a ecosocialist digital ecosystem, but what would that look like and how can we get there? This essay aims to highlight some of the core elements of a digital socialist agenda — a Digital Tech Deal (DTD) — centered on principles of anti-imperialism, class abolition, reparations and degrowth that can transition us to a 21st century socialist economy.

US Government Fears China Will Give Away COVID-19 Vaccine For Free

May 7, 2020 Alan Macleod, Mintpress News. Educate! China, COVID-19, Open Source, Vaccine

The number of official global coronavirus mortalities surpassed a quarter of a million people today, including over 69,000 in the U.S. (although this is very likely an undercount). Polls show that the American people are extremely worried about contracting the virus. However, the government has a much bigger concern: that if they find a COVID-19 vaccine, China will copy it and distribute it for free. To many, it will not be immediately clear why it would be a problem for a manufacturing superpower, home to 1.4 billion people, to inoculate itself and others. But to the White House, this would be “stealing” a potential American innovation. “Biomedical research has long been a focus of theft, especially by the Chinese government, and vaccines and treatments for the coronavirus are today’s holy grail,”

Open Access Plan To Make Scientific Work Free To Read

September 9, 2018 Holly Else, Nature.com. Create! Information, Media, Open Source, Science

Research funders from France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and eight other European nations have unveiled a radical open-access initiative that could change the face of science publishing in two years — and which has instantly provoked protest from publishers. The 11 agencies, who together spend €7.6 billion (US$8.8 billion) in research grants annually, say they will mandate that, from 2020, the scientists they fund must make resulting papers free to read immediately on publication (see ‘Plan S players’).

Barcelona Kicks Microsoft Out In Favor Of Open Source

January 19, 2018 By Derick Sullivan M. Lobga, Itsfoss.com Create! Barcelona, New Economy, Open Source, Technology

A Spanish newspaper, El País, has reported that the City of Barcelona is in the process of migrating its computer system to Open Source technologies. According to the news report, the city plans to first replace all its user applications with alternative open source applications. This will go on until the only remaining proprietary software will be Windows where it will finally be replaced with a Linux distribution. The City has plans for 70% of its software budget to be invested in open source software in the coming year. The transition period, according to Francesca Bria (Commissioner of Technology and Digital Innovation at the City Council) will be completed before the mandate of the present administrators come to an end in Spring 2019.

Welcome To The Pirate Bay Of Science

February 14, 2016 Fiona MacDonald, www.sciencealert.com Create! Knowledge, Open Source, Science, Transparency

By Fiona MacDonald for Science Alert. A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles - almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published - freely available online. And she's now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world's biggest publishers. For those of you who aren't already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it's sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn't afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it's since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court - a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.

Ecuador Buen Conocer Summit Declaration

June 6, 2014 FLOK Society, www.buenconocer.org Create! Ecuador, Knowledge, Latin America, Manifesto, New Economy, Open Source

Table 1: Open Educational Resources Education is a common. It has to be open and free access, as a mean to maximize the participation of all people in social knowledge economy. When we talk about open education we talk not only about ICT. Access to educational resources (tangible and intangible) must be released under open licenses. Free access must be ensured distributing repositories via Internet, intranet or other means. Education systems must recognize learning by formal and informal experiences, at any stage of life. All work done with public funds should have open and free license and access. It is necessary to strengthen and create learning communities as a strategy for knowledge production and social economy. Table 2: Open Science Science should be accessible to everyone, being the requirement for open data, processes and results of scientific research and its management through free licenses and open protocols and formats, as well as construction of a collaborative scientific commons platforms, and knowledge banks repositories. Only in that way we can guarantee the development of human capabilities and access to resources, processes, and scientific results and also the transparency in the management of this aspects.

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