Category: Open Source

The Danger of Software Patents

Thanks to Hans for the link:

Speech by Richard Stallman at Cambridge University,
25 March 2002

You might have been familiar with my work on free software. This
speech is not about that. This speech is about a way of misusing laws
to make software development a dangerous activity. This is about what
happens when patent law gets applied to the field of software.

It is not about patenting software. That is a very bad way, a
misleading way, to describe it, because it is not a matter of patenting
individual programs. If it were, it would make no difference, it would
be basically harmless. Instead, it is about patenting ideas. Every
patent covers some idea. Software patents are patents which cover
software ideas, ideas which you would use in developing software. That
is what makes them a dangerous obstacle to all software development.

Cross Platform Open Source Streaming Solution

VideoLAN – Free Software and Open Source video streaming solution for every OS!

Free Software and Open Source video streaming solution for every OS!
The VideoLAN project targets multimedia streaming of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and DivX files, DVDs, digital satellite channels, digital terrestial television channels and live videos on a high-bandwidth IPv4 or IPv6 network in unicast or multicast under many OSes. VideoLAN also features a cross-plaform multimedia player, VLC, which can be used to read the stream from the network or display video read locally on the computer under all GNU/Linux flavours, all BSD flavours, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, Solaris, QNX, Familiar Linux…

DataData, Turn your bits into sweet music

August Black

From the site:
DataDada, version , is an application that will turn the stored data on your hard drive into a movie complete with sound, image, and subtitles. Essentially, it reads all the data on the disk (or, optionally, only specific directories), and writes the data to your computer’s sound card and video display. Additionally, it will display the name of the file being read as a human-understandable subtitle.

Looks like fun.. I will have to give a run.

Thanks to Scott for the link…

Open source audio editing for all

What is Audacity?

Audacity is a free audio editor. You can record sounds, play sounds, import and export WAV, AIFF, and MP3 files, and more. Use it to edit your sounds using Cut, Copy and Paste (with unlimited Undo), mix tracks together, or apply effects to your recordings. It also has a built-in amplitude envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode and a frequency analysis window for audio analysis applications. Built-in effects include Bass Boost, Wahwah, and Noise Removal, and it also supports VST plug-in effects.