12. Positive and Negative Example of Web Usability

Positive example

 In my personal experience I would say that coub.com is a good example of a website with good usability. The pages' layout is pretty straightforward (with web design I would say that simple is usually the best) and learning how to get what you need from this site doesn't take too long. Searching for content is easy whether it be looking for something specific or just related to some topic. However it's quite addictive and that most of the time is not a good thing.

Negative example

 I don't want to generalize but from my experience almost all of the news portal websites were bad user experience. First thing you get is usually ads thrown at you, while the real content is hidden somewhere between those ads and "related" articles. Learning how to search for necessary information and navigate through those sites can be hard if you've never been to those sites before. In my opinion, there's usually too many distractions from the main content for a news site which greatly subtracts from user experience.

11. Examples of Development and business models

Development Model

 Django is a python based web framework which is free and open-source. It allows you to rapidly develop secure and maintainable websites and it's relatively easy to use. The biggest advantage of Django's open-source model is it's potential of development and makes it thrive with numerous contributors as there are no special development tools needed to improve Django.

Business Model

 Spotify is an example of a Freemium/Software as a Service business model. It lets you listen to all the songs and use almost all of it's features for free if you use it on a computer but it will run ads every so often between the songs (and I noticed that the more you use it the more frequent ads get and it gets quite annoying). The mobile free version however limits you only to "Shuffle Play" so you can't select specific songs you want to listen to and you can only skip 6 songs per hour. Spotify is a streaming service of course, so you need internet connection to use it. The premium monthly subscription removes all those limitations and ads as well as letting you download songs to listen to them offline.

Sources:

1. Django documentation: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/
2. Django Introduction: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Server-side/Django/Introduction
3. Free Spotify vs Spotify Premium: https://www.soundguys.com/free-spotify-vs-spotify-premium-36632/

10. A review of Eric S. Raymond's Hacker-HOWTO

 First of all, I want to say that media ruined the word "hacker" for me. They should learn to call them "crackers", as the real hacker community calls them, to avoid confusing people. As I've rarely heard or seen any mentions about the hacker community and seen many news about crackers, this will take some time to get used to.

 "How To Become A Hacker" written by Eric S. Raymond actually inspired me to try and become a hacker myself even though that would mean to change quite a bit about my mindset and habits. As someone who knew little about the existence of the hacker community, I think that it is great that it exists. This document does a good job at describing what hackers are, their mindset and if you have what it takes to become one. What's actually fascinating is that hacker's mindset is not only applicable to programming but many other things like science, music and art.

 The second believe in the section about hacker's attitude - "No problem should ever have to be solved twice" makes a really good point about what hacker community does. They share their work with each other so they can focus on things that are yet to be solved instead of wasting time on solving something that was already solved. As Eric said "Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource" and they should be used to work on new problems that haven't been tackled yet.

 Raymond also makes some interesting statements regarding non-computer related activities. Reading science fiction, training in martial-arts forms, studying a meditation discipline or developing an appreciation for puns and wordplay (especially this last one) as he says can help you enter the hacker mindset. And I do agree with that but these activities are also quite good at taking your mind straight where you need it even if you are not striving to become a hacker.

 If you want to become a hacker or just want to know more about the real hackers and what they do, I would definitely recommend you to read this document as it contains very valuable information and is on point. You should also don't forget to read the FAQ section.

Source: How To Become A Hacker by Eric Steven Raymond

9. IT Managers

Larry Page

 Larry Page is an example of a "Communicator" and a "Leader" manager in my opinion. As a CEO of Google he always had a clear view of the company's goal and changed management team structure several times to improve the work environment and better guide them to their goal. The first big change was made in 2001 when Page decided to fire all of the project managers because he didn't like that non-engineers were supervising engineers work. This, however, didn't stay like that for too long: soon problems with management began to arise and Google had to hire project managers again.
 After becoming the CEO of Google again in April 2011, Page had plans to take the collaboration and unity among the teams to a higher level. He created a team of senior vice-presidents who worked close to his office, so they could easily report directly to him.

Jeff Bezos

 The CEO and President of Amazon Jeff Bezos can most likely be described as a "Change agent" type of manager. Constantly moving forward and innovating, Jeff's "Day 1" Management Philosophy greatly contributed to the growth of Amazon. According to Jeff, if a company wants to thrive then it needs to stay on Day 1 - "start up". Slipping to Day 2 - "stasis" would be followed by "irrelevance", "excruciating, painful decline" and lastly "death" or bankruptcy of the company. His principles are to focus on the customers and not the competitors, strive for market leadership, adopt external trends and making high quality decisions quickly.

Sources:
1. "The Untold Story Of Larry Page's Incredible Comeback" By Nicholas Carlson (2014)
2. "There's A Pretty Big Tension In How Larry Page Is Running Google" By Owen Thomas (2013)
3. "Google's Page to Replace Schmidt as CEO" By Amir Efrati And Jessica E. Vascellaro
4. "This is the Jeff Bezos playbook for preventing Amazon’s demise" By Jason Del Rey

8. IT Professional

 What make a person an IT professional? Nowadays just being competent in IT field is not enough to be called a professional, there's much more to it. Of course, having a broad knowledge of the field is necessary but what you also need are good communication skills. Working as an IT professional most likely means working in a company/team, especially if it's big project. No matter how good you are at doing your task, completing it with support of few other people is way more efficient, so having teamwork skill is a must for a professional. Being able to clearly communicate with your team, helping or teaching if needed will go a long way. Knowing more languages is a big bonus because it increases your ability to communicate.
 Another thing a professional must have is good adaptability. Be it changes in work environment, team you work with or even in the way you think. Thinking of new creative solutions and quickly adapting to changes is definitely a sign of professionalism.

 Now, talking about being an IT professional in Estonia, I don't think it's much different from most other places. If you want to get employed, in addition to the things written above, you of course need work experience. To get it you should try to take part in as many different projects or startups as you can or if you are confident enough in your abilities, try starting your own. Having a university graduation certificate can also help.

7. Copyleft licenses

 Copyleft allows creators to make their works free to be modified and improved by other people. Anyone who has their hands on that product can freely modify it and publish. However, it does not mean that copylefted work is not copyrighted. It uses the copyright to ensure that all modified works are guaranteed to be as free as the original work. That way no one can make the modified version into a proprietary work and strip the ability to freely modify it by other people. This ensures that all versions of the original work have the same original intellectual property rules.
 The main benefit of using copyleft is for example open-sourced software that can be improved by anyone. This greatly increases the potential of that software to be developed into something great.

Types of Copyleft Licenses

 GNU General Public License (GPL) is a popular example of a copyleft license for software and other kinds of work. It allows the work to be freely changed and published but doesn't allow it to become proprietary. GNU C++ compiler is a work made possible thanks to GPL license allowing people to contribute to developing it.
 GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is similar to GPL but it allows for example a library under this license to be used by a non-GPL licensed program, even if it's a proprietary software.
 GNU Free Documentation License is another license but it covers functional documents and manuals. Because free software needs free documentation as well.

 

Sources:

https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html

6. Copyright Reform (The Case For Copyright Reform 2012)

 Christian Engström and Rick Falkvinge wrote a book that tackles the problem of copyright laws and how they affect the current sharing of copyrighted property. Authors offer reforms that could potentially improve the possibilities of what can be done with copyrighted work which will benefit also the creators of that work.

 There is this good analogy they made with public libraries: not only the people who read books and the society as a whole got benefits from getting free access to the culture but so did the authors themselves. I think it's a good point because instead of driving people away from your work with restrictions, they are being drawn in to check that work with possibility of sharing it with many others and supporting the creators.

Free Non-Commercial Sharing and Free Sampling

I want to say a few things about these changes. I feel like these changes are essential in today's society. Sharing someone else's work that you liked and enjoyed should not be illegal. This just hinders the ability of the work to be shared and if there is no profit being made for the person who shared, there should be no restrictions on this. Of course crediting the creator of the work is something that should be done. Same goes to creating something using someone else's work: remixes, parodies, revisions and so on. The creative process should not be restricted by the copyright laws.
I also want to note that, as the authors said, for the current copyright system to work they need to breach the right to private communication. This is definitely something that will completely ruin internet communication and no one would be happy with that.

Overall, I believe that these reforms will only help society with how the copyrighted works are distributed and used. However, my viewpoint is that of a consumer rather than a creator so I don't know how these changes actually going to affect them.

Source: The Case For Copyright Reform (2012) by Christian Engström & Rick Falkvinge