Wizards of OS (Wizards of Operating Systems, or "WOS") was a semi-annual

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

-based conference that was held four times between 1999 and 2006. Its topics were the cultural and political potentials of

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

technology, digital networks and media, and more generally information freedom and open cooperation in the creation and proliferation of knowledge. The conference was interdisciplinary, and included among its attendees scientists, engineers, social researchers, scholars from the humanities, artists and activists. The name was a word play on The Wizard of Oz. The acronym "OS" stands for

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

(not open source).

Individual conferences

The first Wizards of OS conference took place in 1999. The third conference took place in 2004, with the subtitle "The Future of the Digital Commons". It featured, among others, the launch of the German translation of the Creative Commons licenses. Wizards of OS 4 took place from September 14 to September 16, 2006, with the subtitle "Information Freedom Rules". Some of the topics were the future of Creative Commons, open music and the compensation of artists and

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

legislation Legislation is the process or result of enrolling, enacting, or promulgating laws by a legislature, parliament, or analogous governing body. Before an item of legislation becomes law it may be known as a bill, and may be broadly referred to ...

Larry Sanger Lawrence Mark Sanger (; born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name and wrote much of Wikipedia's original governin ...

announced an initial proposal of his project

Citizendium Citizendium ( ; "the citizens' compendium of everything") is an English-language wiki-based free online encyclopedia launched by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Nupedia and Wikipedia. It was first announced in September 2006 as a fork of the Engli ...

References

External links

Wizards of OS homepage

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wizards Of Os Computing and society Free-software conferences Recurring events established in 1999 Recurring events disestablished in 2006