"...The main research field of this book is Italy, since it is here that networking practices have determined the construction of a network of projects unparalleled in any other country. A scene with a strong identity and with its own artistic, technological and political feeling has been formed in Italy.

"a new initiative promoted by the italian association for free software for the next italian political elections (provided that they will actually take place…). the initiative consists in asking the candidates to sign a letter where they engage themselves, in case they will be elected, to promote the use of free software through their political activity.

In the beginning was... hacker culture and free Internet software. They existed as outsiders. They were really known by few. But some knew of them and an idea started to grow... it was first only in one person's mind, then two, then it spread to the hacker culture and further into the business world.

Like many multinational corporations, Microsoft has embraced social networking as a means of making customers feel like participants, not just end users, in a Microsoft community.  When it comes to community-building, however, Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle against the open-source world, which was built around social networking before it was called social networking.

"The free software movement is a new social movement which aims to protect the rights of users to access and modify software. Although drawing on traditions and philosophies among members of the 1970s hacker culture, Richard Stallman is widely credited with launching the movement in 1983 by founding the GNU Project..."

More than 100 candidates to Italian regional elections that will take place at the end of this month officially support Free Software and have committed to actively promote it if elected. Many of them are in smaller parties with smaller probability to get a seat, but for Italy it's a good result anyway.

Italian law proposal to defend Net Neutrality and promote Free Software has a hole that would make impossible for Public Administrations and Universities to get rid of proprietary file formats and software, even if they wanted to do it

"Before the word “hacker” was wrongly associated with vandalistic script kiddies and mischievous virus writers, it was used to describe an underground culture. This underground culture was made up of professional engineers and basement tinkerers obsessed with improving computer technology through unconventional, simple, yet brilliant tricks.

"Ever since Richard Stallman started the free software movement, the core ideal of it has been built around the concept of a community. A network of people working and playing together for their common good. In the last couple of years computer science research have found a new hot-tech in the user-interaction space: social networking..."