Free Republic

We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction. Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model. Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt. Today, Sora is becoming available to red teamers to assess critical areas for harms or risks. We are also granting access to a number of visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to gain feedback on how to advance the model to be most helpful for creative professionals. We’re sharing our...

Today, with great enthusiasm I can let everybody know that the audiobook recording for America's Retreat from Victory; The Story of George Catlett Marshall, by Senator Joseph McCarthy, (as of yesterday) has been completed! It is high quality, great care was put into its creation, and since this is a free and open source item I would encourage all to give this to as many people as you can think of. If you have X/Twitter, Facebook, email, snail mail, whatever you have. Make sure you give it to others. What astounds me is how quickly this was strong-armed to completion....

"If there was a free, public domain audio book written by Joseph McCarthy, would you be interested in listening to it?" Just as the question states. Senator Joseph McCarthy wrote several books, what if one or many of them were recorded as open source public domain audio books and given away for/to everybody? Would you be interested in listening and learning from them? Would you share it with others? I'm just curious what people say to this.

Interview Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the Open Source movement, is ready for what comes next: the Post-Open Source movement. "I've written papers about it, and I've tried to put together a prototype license," Perens explains in an interview with The Register. "Obviously, I need help from a lawyer. And then the next step is to go for grant money."Perens says there are several pressing problems that the open source community needs to address.I feel that IBM has gotten everything it wants from the open source developer community now, and we've received something of a middle finger from...

There are economic good times and economic bad times. When times get tough and money's tight, it's good to have Linux on your PC. 1. The OS and Apps Are Free 2. Your Current PC Will Run for Longer Running Linux means you can expect to use the computer for as long as you want. Rather than running into the artificial limitation of a company declaring your machine end of life and unsupported, you know you will receive free updates until your computer physically falls apart or becomes too underpowered to do what you need it to do. This makes...

The audiobook for the 1916 book The History of the Fabian Society is now complete. Full disclosure - this isn't my voice. Yes! those of you who know, I've been recording free open source public domain audiobooks for years now in order to bring content to a conservative audience who realizes the natural advantage that history brings for us. So why not leverage it? Why let an advantage go to waste? To that end, I had a conversation with a gentleman some time ago, we discussed potential works, and long story short he put in the work and produced this...

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days 'The Evil Empire' hasn't been evil for about eight years now Opinion In the beginning, Microsoft was The Evil Empire.In 2001 then CEO Steve Ballmer declared: "Linux is a cancer." Later, Microsoft sponsored SCO's copyright attack on Linux; claimed that Linux violated unnamed Microsoft patents; and forced Linux-based Android vendors to pay for dubious patent claims. Bill Gates and Ballmer's Microsoft wanted to see Linux and open-source software (OSS) dead and buried.They did it because, as Microsoft's Halloween documents show, they believed "OSS poses a direct, short-term...

If Elon Musk is indeed able to buy Twitter, the platform could look a lot different. In his first public, non-tweeted comments since the saga began, Musk addressed why he wants to buy the company, and changes he would want to bring about. “Twitter has become kind of the de-facto town square,” he said. “It's just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they're able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.” In terms of specific changes, Musk said Twitter should open-source its algorithms and minimize the interventions it takes in policing content....

Last week, the director of the United Nation's World Food Programme said if the world's top billionaires just donated a fraction of their worth, millions of people who are at risk of starving to death can be saved. Elon Musk, the second wealthiest person in the world, said he'd give up some of his wealth – only if he knows exactly where the money is going. Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX who has an estimated net worth of $151 billion, according to Forbes, replied to a tweet questioning the group's figures. "If WFP can describe on this Twitter...

In 1864, Robert Dale Owen (A congressman from Indiana) published the book "The Wrong of Slavery, the Right of Emancipation, and the Future of the African Race in the United States", which traces the beginning of slavery from its roots in the British Empire(with in-depth statistics) up through the colonies and the days just prior to the Civil War. The audio can be downloaded from here.(text here) This audio is free and open source in the public domain. I have a lot to say about this book, and I want to warn everybody that this book is not what it...

As Facebook and Twitter and other big tech firms continue to cement their positions on the side of progressivism, Google, Microsoft, Apple and many other companies, I just wanted to point out to others who may see this that I think that free open source audiobooks now more than ever offer a great way for any conservative to express themselves. In particular, its a way to create something high profile that can't possibly be silenced by big tech. This is in fact censorship proof. I'll tell you right now, The Founding Fathers do speak for me. John Jay, James Madison,...

Open source RF hardware has been under development for several years, a boon for ham radio operators and academics. Open Research Institute anticipates that the Commerce Department will find that these technologies are unrestricted under the carve-out for open source in the EAR.

Tell-all with president Brad Smith reveals Obama warned tech giants that a privacy reckoning was coming Microsoft president Brad Smith (pictured) has admitted that the Windows giant was "on the wrong side of history" when it came to open source.While nowadays the born-again company seems unable to resist the embrace (if that's the right word) of the open-source world, it was not always so.Former CEO Steve Ballmer memorably declared that "Linux is a cancer" back in the day. Goodness, how times have changed in Redmond."Microsoft," said Smith during a chat hosted by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL),...

Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, we are woefully short of ventilators that can give the most gravely ill a chance for life. There are many efforts afoot to build more ventilators. Now, instead of building ventilators, a group of open-source developers has a new idea: Create a firmware update, Airbreak, which can transform common Constant Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machines into non-invasive ventilators.  Their first effort -- a proof of concept -- converts the Airsense 10 CPAP machine, which is a common, inexpensive sleep apnea treatment device, into a ventilator. It does so by simply replacing its existing firmware with updated firmware. With this...

Microsoft has been betting big on open source for past few years. Apart from open sourcing a few things here and there, Microsoft is contributing a lot to Linux kernel (for its Azure cloud platform). To further strengthen its position in the open source world, Microsoft acquired the popular open source code hosting platform GitHub for $7.5 billion. Now Microsoft owned GitHub has acquired npm ( short for Node Package Manager). npm is the world’s largest software registry with more than 1.3 million packages that have 75 billion downloads a month. ...snip... Good Hunting... from Varmint Al

The Free Software Foundation really set the bar high there Good news everybody! The Free Software Foundation has blown through its self-imposed target of 7,777 signatories in its efforts to persuade Microsoft to make Windows 7 open source.We noted last week the GNU-gang's attempt to coax the born-again open-sourcerer formerly known as "The Beast Of Redmond" into making a surprise deposit into GitHub.The thinking was that since Windows 7 has now come to the end of the road, as far as free security updates are concerned, then perhaps Microsoft might release it as open software?We put it to the Free...

By Yi Whan-woo, Kim Yoo-chul As nuclear negotiations between North Korea and the United States remain in a stalemate after no "substantial outcome" from their recent encounter in Sweden, the lack of visible progress in the denuclearization dialogue is raising concerns that the North is "buying time" for its military and nuclear advancement. During an Asan Institute for Policy Studies security forum held in Seoul, Tuesday, Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the Washington-based RAND Corporation, claimed that despite North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's promise to end his nuclear program, Pyongyang has not taken any meaningful measures toward this....

From its early days, the availability of source code was one of the defining characteristics of open source software. Indeed, Brian Behlendorf of the Apache web server project, an early open source software success, favored "source code available software." Another important aspect related to user rights. Hence, the "free software" terminology that came out of Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto and GNU Public License (GPL). As the shorthand went, free was about freedom, not price. Christine Peterson would later coin "open source" as an alternative that avoided the confusion that regularly arose between these two meanings of free. And that’s the term...

They cite the increasing costs of commercial software as reason CERN is best known for pushing the boundaries of science and understanding, but the famed research outfit’s next major experiment will be with open-source software. The cost of various commercial software licenses has increased 10x The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, and also known as home of the Large Hadron Collider, has announced plans to migrate away from Microsoft products and on to open-source solutions where possible.Why? Increases in Microsoft license fees. Microsoft recently revoked the organisations status as an academic institution, instead pricing access to...

In the future, Facebook won't be a social-media site. Facebook is under a lot of scrutiny and pressure at the moment. It's accused of helping foreign actors to subvert elections by using ads and fake accounts to spread lies—in the US, for example—and of acting as a conduit for terrorism in New Zealand and elsewhere. There are calls to break up the company or at least to rein it in. In an evident attempt to head off those moves, and to limit the damage that recent events have caused to Facebook's reputation, Mark Zuckerberg has been publishing some long, philosophical...