DTV beta for Mac is now live. DTV is a new, free and open-source platform for internet television and video. The goal here is to make sure that internet TV is open and independent. Free, open source software and open standards mean anyone can watch and everyone has a voice.
posted by signal
on Aug 9, 2005 -
23 comments
ChessRogue =
Chess +
Rogue. (Open source, versions available for Linux and Windows.)
This console-based game takes the pieces of chess and puts them into a Roguelike environment. You start out with a weakened King who can only move and capture horizontally and vertically, in a randomized board full of multi-directional Pawns. As you capture more pieces, the king slowly gains additional powers, like diagonal capture and movement, Knight jumping, and eventually even Rook movement, among others. The opposition gets tougher too, until eventually the entire selection of pieces is out to get you.
Originally created for a three-day programming challenge on
rec.games.roguelike.development, it's surprisingly cool, and works rather better than you might expect. It's useful as a break between
Nethack fatalities.
posted by JHarris
on Aug 2, 2005 -
19 comments
Free Beer! ...but free as in "Open Source Beer", mind you. Students from Copenhagen's
IT-University have produced and released a powerful beer recipe under a Creative Commons license. Microbrewers, start your machines...
posted by betobeto
on Jul 12, 2005 -
31 comments
NextGen Macromedia Flash Tool "Zorn" to Run on Eclipse • "Macromedia's announcement that their next generation enterprise Flash development tool, code-named Zorn, will be built on top of Eclipse, is a watershed moment both for Macromedia and for the open source movement. Macromedia's choice of Eclipse speaks volumes about the impact of open source on commercial software development -- and about Macromedia's commitment to making Flash into an essential platform for next-generation internet applications." </glavin>
posted by dhoyt
on Jun 16, 2005 -
16 comments
BIOS-Biological Innovation for Open Society is an open source biotechnology initiative based in Australia. Along with its parent organization
CAMBIA, it aims to foster a "protected commons" for scientific information and technology. Tools and techniques are shared, and can be improved and repackaged, just like in open source software.
posted by OmieWise
on Mar 4, 2005 -
2 comments
Pushing the open source agenda to the international stage. Brazilian Pop superstar / Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil, Grateful dead lyricist John Barlow and others participated yesterday in a World Social Forum gathering in Alegre, Brazil to urge a free open source software policy in the developing world. An open source constitutional discussed previously on metafilter
here.
posted by tidecat
on Jan 31, 2005 -
26 comments
Open Source Local Journalism. "A small California newspaper [
The Northwest Voice] has undertaken a first-of-its-kind experiment in participatory journalism in which nearly all the content published in a regularly updated online edition and a weekly print edition is submitted by community members." Is the editor of your local newspaper aware of this?
posted by Blue Stone
on Jul 22, 2004 -
7 comments
The CEO of Ernie Ball talks about how his company left Microsoft for Linux after a licensing fiasco. Sterling Ball: It's just software. You have to figure out what you need to do within your organization and then get the right stuff for that. And we're not a backwards organization. We're progressive; we've won communications and design awards...The fact that I'm not sending my e-mail through Outlook doesn't hinder us. It's just kind of funny. I'm speaking to a standing-room-only audience at a major technology show because I use a different piece of software--that's hysterical.
posted by skallas
on Dec 10, 2003 -
20 comments
Build your own Howard Dean website! The Dean campaign has released web site "kits" under the GNU GPL and based on the
Drupal codebase, which allow web-based communities to quickly and easily build their own sites to support Dean's campaign. Last night, he
held a conference call with over 3,500 "house parties" and individuals to spread the word. If Dean gets the nomination, he'll have technology to thank for it.
(yeah, via slashdot.)
posted by jpoulos
on Sep 30, 2003 -
28 comments
This year, MIT is free. Well, not really -- you won't get the degree, and you won't get to talk to the top minds in science or stay in
a really cool dorm. But
OpenCourseWare provides,
as Wired puts it, "Every lecture [sometimes on video, sometimes only the notes], every handout, every quiz." Curious about
Psycholinguistics?
Urban Transportation, Land Use, and the Environment?
Non-linear Programming?
Cognitive & Behavioral Genetics?
String Theory for Undergraduates?
They are in Kenya.
posted by Tlogmer
on Sep 4, 2003 -
14 comments
Walking Things is an environment that generates small, walking computational organisms. "Each walking thing is built up from totally random conditions. Appearance, behavior, and walking characteristics are all assigned from a range enabling effective, functional mobility. Click on a walking thing to permutate its characteristics".
Just one of the very many wonderful (
open source) creations at
levitated.net (more bugs with bling
here). Kick off your shoes, fill your coffee cup or wine glass, and dip in.
posted by taz
on Jul 2, 2003 -
12 comments
Usability Bazaar sounds like a crazy idea: getting together a group of people that will create usability guidelines for open source projects. Do you think that can work? Do OSS projects actually have usability problems? And can this actually work? Generally, usability people don't seem to get involved in open source. Why? (via webword.com)
posted by Adman
on Jun 17, 2003 -
24 comments
konspire2b allows anyone to be their own broadcast channel, beaming out multimedia across a p2p network to the masses. Could this be the next leap for blogging?
posted by owillis
on Jun 15, 2003 -
13 comments
Looking for a design for your next website?
Open Source Web Design is a site that offers tons of free web design templates that you can take and modify for your own needs.
posted by oissubke
on May 30, 2003 -
10 comments
Open Source Content Management Systems Great resource for software (typically free) that allows you to start and maintain websites. The owners have gone so far as to install each one of them and give users admin access to try them out before downloading them.
posted by oissubke
on Feb 20, 2003 -
27 comments
Celestia is the most beautiful toy. It's a free (open source) simulator of the universe, including breathtaking models of known planets. Watch Jupiter rise over Io or follow the course of a solar eclipse. [more inside]
posted by grahamwell
on Feb 4, 2003 -
21 comments
Open Source Copyright. As a follow-up to
this thread, Creative Commons has now
officially launched. I'm quite interested to see the various content creators who take these licenses and run with them - amateur filmmakers, independent musicians, authors, writers, and technologists .....should have groups like the MPAA and RIAA quaking in their boots.
posted by bkdelong
on Dec 16, 2002 -
17 comments
Ghostzilla "is a browser for surfing the Web
when you don't want anyone to physically see what you are doing." Bang goes productivity!
[Also on /.]
posted by dash_slot-
on Nov 10, 2002 -
21 comments
RealNetworks opens up. RealNetworks today launched
the Helix Community which provides the source code to its RealPlayer client (the server and encoding components are coming later). This will present the first end-to-end open source media delivery system- Apple has open sourced its
streaming server, but not its clients or codecs; Microsoft's
Windows Media platform is totally closed. Marketing ploy or real step forward for the software industry?
posted by mkultra
on Oct 29, 2002 -
22 comments
Open Source or Bust? "Named the "Digital Software Security Act," the proposal essentially would make California the "Live Free or Die" state when it comes to software. If enacted as written, state agencies would be able to buy software only from companies that do not place restrictions on use or access to source code. The agencies would also be given the freedom to "make and distribute copies of the software."" If open source wants to be taken seriously, shouldn't it compete on the merits (or with martketing) rather than forcing gov't agencies to use it?
posted by owillis
on Aug 11, 2002 -
44 comments
"A Contrarian View of Open Source" - Bruce Sterling on the open source attitutude:
"Don't like it? Hey, just reconfigure it yourself, don't bother me!" It's the Hippie Squat Model of software architecture. "If I want to paint the doors and floors bright blue and put the toilet right into the kitchen, why not?"
posted by GriffX
on Aug 9, 2002 -
12 comments
Open source music? Give away the songs without copyright, sell the audio source files dirt cheap and waive the copyright. That's the idea behind
Brad Sucks. Are any bands you know of doing something like this?
posted by Leonard
on Jul 30, 2002 -
5 comments
Peru goes GNU. And I quote:
"You may have heard about this if you watch the free software news, but I just want to repeat it for anyone who hasn't. The Peruvian government has introduced legislation requiring government offices to use free software; Microsoft is unhappy; and a member of the Peruvian Congress has written a response which I highly recommend reading, in which he explains in strong terms why it's out of the question for the government of a democratic nation to use proprietary software."
posted by BGM
on May 2, 2002 -
21 comments
Perhaps AOL isn't that bad. I've never liked
AOL, but this recent
article makes me want to give the company a big hug. Finally, people are stepping up to the
Microsoft juggernaut and deciding to use other means to deliever content and run their own machines. AOL is trying to cut costs by migrating from UNIX and Windows to a
Linux environment on the server-side. On the client side, they will apparently be pushing the use of
Mozilla instead of their previous default browser, Internet Explorer. This has the potential to impact the web enormously, as AOL's 30 million subscribers will soon be using Mozilla as their browser. Web designers will have to start sticking to
w3c specs instead of using MSIE-specific coding, which will hopefully force Microsoft to follow the specs more closely. Begun this browser war has. (via
/.)
posted by Hammerikaner
on Mar 11, 2002 -
43 comments
What Linux Really Needs: Non profit, public service announcements by a foundation formed expressly for that purpose. Whether you keep up with the OS fray or not, what a neat idea really.
Trolls: Slashdot is burning! You're needed over there.
posted by crasspastor
on Mar 3, 2002 -
8 comments
Genome liberation. "Life science researchers -- even those who work in academic settings -- are finding that corporations are just as eager to patent the tools as they are the data, and in many cases, universities are bending over backward to let the private sector have its way. As a result, a growing number of bioinformatics researchers are beginning to look to the free-software and open-source software movements for inspiration in their quest for bio freedom."
posted by homunculus
on Feb 26, 2002 -
2 comments
New Scientist release a copyleft article on......wait for it......copyleft. In it, they discuss what's going on in the world of Open Source and how the meme is spreading from software into other areas, like encyclopedias and law. It concludes saying that open source is currently good for things that don't need to be confidential and do need to be consistently upgraded/changed. Does open source have a chance, or is it just a passing fad?
via slashdot
posted by taumeson
on Jan 31, 2002 -
2 comments
