FOSS and the philosophers

I used to think of myself as something of a rare bird — a philosopher and software developer with a keen interest in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movements. But as I discovered at last month’s North American Computers and Philosophy (NA-CAP) conference in Chicago, there are many with similar interests.

The conference, held at Loyola University Chicago, featured keynotes by Richard Stallman, of GNU fame, and philosopher Peter Suber, an advocate of the Open Access (OA) movement in scholarly journals. Academic philosophers and computer scientists from North America, Europe, and Africa traveled to Chicago to attend the conference and present their research.

Attendees were treated to more than 40 presentations during the three-day stretch. While FOSS and OA were the official themes of the conference, the participants addressed a broad range of topics, from cognitive science and AI, to Web 2.0 and the semantic Web, to online teaching and researching tools.

Read more at Linux.com