Aim of the course

The aim of this PhD. course it to describe the history of Free Software and Internet (mother and daughter of Free Software) and their most important products. To discuss the opportunities of the future of Free Software and Internet represented by the recent progress of all the information processing and transmission technologies. To analyze the complex question of intellectual property.

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Course program

  1. History of Free software: hackers ideas, Richard Stallman, GNU project, the tower of licences, the General Public Licences, business models of Free Software, Linus Torvalds and the project Linux, the Free Software products of today.
  2. Internet mother and daughter of Free Software: Internet Engineering Task Force and the rules of cooperation, freedom of the Network, models of freedom for Internet.
  3. National and international laws for the promotion of Free Software: Total Cost of Ownership, open interoperability standards, the Italian law 82/05, regional laws, Free Software in the world.
  4. Technological evolution and the new world industry: bits and atoms, the progress of traditional technologies, the progress of the technologies of data processing and transmission and the related industries, the convergence of technologies.
  5. The new applications of Internet: Internet telephony, Internet medicine and surgery, the technological and economical laws of networks, economical implications of tecnological progress.
  6. The future of communications: wide band, computational grid, peer-to-peer, blogosphere, YouTube, Second Life, Wikipedia, social networks, broadcast and peer-to-peer communication, cloud computing, real-time and on-demand video transmission.
  7. Free hardware: free hardware design, open source hardware, the languages for the description of hardware, open cores, embedded systems, examples (free router, free Wi.Fi. gates, etc.).
  8. The question of intellectual property: history of copyright, Creative Common licences, digital divide and disequalities, gift and cooperation as a model of development.

Materials

A collection of several different materials is presented below.

These materials have been prepared by the students of the past years editions of this course

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Software

Free Software related presentations
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Hardware

Hardware components respecting users' freedoms. Read more...

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Ethics

Ethics handouts about freedoms in the IT world.
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Internet

Internet seen as the mother and daughter of "free" culture. Read more...

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Security

Confutation of the STO paradigm.
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Environment

Sharing can help also in the building of a healthier environment. Read more...

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School

Free Software as a didactic tool for students.
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Others

Presentations of FOSS solutions regarding other general fields. Read more...

Events 2016

8
APR
Lesson from 14.30 to 17.30. Presentation of final exam. Slides
15
APR
Lesson from 14.30 to 17.30 Slides
22
APR
Lesson from 14.30 to 17.30 Slides
29
APR
Lesson from 14.30 to 17.30 Slides
6
MAY
Lesson from 14.30 to 17.30. From 15.30 Roboduino and visit at DET labs. TBA
13
MAY
Lesson from 14.30 to 17.30 Slides
20
MAY
Lesson from 14.30 to 17.30 TBA

About

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Prof. Angelo Raffaele Meo (professor emeritus) has been Full Professor of Computer Science at Politecnico di Torino from 1970 to 2010.
He was the head of “Centro per l’Elaborazione Numerale dei Segnali” at CNR, director of the “Progetto Finalizzato Informatica” (1979-1985) and scientific director of “Centro di Supercalcolo Piemonte” (1991-1996). He has published more than one hundred papers dealing with computer science. In particular, he investigated switching theory, hardware design, signal processing, speech analysis and synthesis, and pattern recognition. He has coordinated many academic and industrial national research projects on computer science. He was the president of the Academy of Sciences of Torino. In 2002 he was called by the Italian Ministry of Technology to preside at a Commission entrusted with the task of promoting open source in the Italian Public Administration. Since 2012 he is emeritus professor at Politecnico di Torino.