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Getting your free lunch
2007.11.18 — Culture | Technology | by Derek Jensen
Changing the world with selfless contribution. (Not pictured: lawyer) |
There is a world of free, open-source, community-contributed content out there. At last, you really can get a free lunch. Are you getting yours? Sure, you know all about Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and free, ad-supported news and opinion at thousands of sites, but do you know about these...?
The Wikimedia Foundation
There's so much more than Wikipedia.... Wikimedia is the overarching organization that runs Wikipedia as well as free image repository Wikimedia Commons and Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks. Collect 'em all! And, of course, the wiki software is available for free, if you want to create your own independent wiki site.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg has been around for years and years, producing electronic texts of literature in the public domain. They have thousands of fiction and non-fiction books and collections of poetry. Wikimedia Foundation created Wikisource to do essentially the same thing, just not as well. If you need sheet music in the public domain, try Mutopia. If you want audio books, Gutenberg has some, but most are machine read and completely awful, but you're in luck....
LibriVox
LibriVox is a community of volunteers that creates audio books and releases them to the public domain. The literary works themselves must be public domain material, of course, so Project Gutenberg is the primary source. LibriVox is only a couple of years old, but already volunteers have created 1,000 audio books, some of them quite esoteric, but most of them being solid classical works that you were supposed to read in school.
See Tysto's contributions to Librivox.
One drawback in their offerings is that, in order to produce works quickly (and ensure the longer ones get done at all), books are often read by several different people—with varying results. But most of the recordings are quite good—close to professional quality really, thanks to the new crop of inexpensive USB microphones and the free Audacity audio software, speaking of which....
Audacity, GIMP, Juice, Firefox, and Thunderbird
The Web is full of free software, but the best of it is not hobbled, pay-to-upgrade stuff that may be very useful but is almost an advertisement for itself (AdAware, for example). The open-source applications and utilities like Audacity, GIMP, Juice, Firefox, and Thunderbird benefit from the collective intelligence and diligence of numerous programmers and designers.
Audacity is the above-mentioned free audio software that allows anyone to do sophisticated multi-track recording, mixing, noise cleaning, and more. I sometimes use it to increase the tempo of podcasts and audio books (my brain apparently works 30% faster than most people's). GIMP is a free image editor; I've tried it and decided to stick with Paint Shop Pro, which is inexpensive and more full-featured (or was at the time in 2006). Juice is my podcatcher software of choice, pulling down numerous podcasts on science, home theater, gadgets, and humor, nearly all of which are also free. Firefox is the preferred Web browser of thinking persons. Thunderbird is its e-mail counterpart, a kind of open-source Outlook.
Not enough? How about LilyPond, the free sheet music creation tool? And how about a little give-back?
Podsafe and The Free Sound Project
Maybe you don't have a podcast of your own, but that's no reason not to browse the offerings at Podsafe, the community of song-writing musicians that offer their music for use on podcasts just for a little shout out (some are also for sale for 99 cents). Check out the broken-spirited blues of the Bonevilles. If it's just beats and rhythms you need, check out iBeat.
You may have no use for sound effects—or think you don't—but there are plenty of people who do. The Free Sound Project is a group of volunteers that contributes sound effects for free use under Creative Commons licensing. Even if you don't have a use for them, just browsing the wonderful collection of bells, doors, guns, cars, thunder, streetscapes, music snippets (not whole songs), is a treat. Try playing several of those street sounds at once or if the Bonevilles gave you the blues, cheer yourself up by layering and cycling some laughs.
f e e d b a c k
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