Bill's Culture Pages
The cool think to do with computers these days is to share music, video, and software. Everyone debates the moral issues around this, and the proponents usually use these main arguments:
- Pirating sofware and music actually promotes it, benefitting the corporations.
- Copying software does not deprive the company of anything, unlike stealing physical objects.
But here's the way I see it:
- If you dissaprove of a company and their licensing and distribution schemes, why would you want to support them by promoting their software or music?
- There are actually a lot of places you can find good music and software than can legally be copied for free.
- The mainstream music companies don't have a monopoly on talent.
- There is a large and growing field of independent, digital film. A lot of it is short films (which are great), but there are people working on longer stuff, too.
- Oh, yeah, and pirating is illegal, regardless of what intellectual legerdemain you choose to disguise your actions from yourself.
To promote these ideals, I'm encouraging people to throw "Uncultured LAN Parties", where the focus is on legally trading media and software created by those who allow its free redistribution. (And the requisite gaming, of course.) This is a great way to get recommendations from friends on where to find good stuff.
Soon, I hope to have a good start on a list of places to find freely available software and media. Here's a start:
- The Linux operating system is what I use on my desktop computer. Here are a few good places to get the actual OS:
- FreeBSD is another Unix based operating system, very similar to Linux. Great for servers and desktops, though a little weaker than Linux as far as desktop hardware support.
- OpenOffice is probably the best competitor to Microsoft Office right now. It's free and runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and more. It's the open source version of Sun's StarOffice, and Sun has done a great job of making sure it can read Microsoft documents.
- Project Gutenberg is a project to put out electronic copies of freely distributable texts, especially older books that have passed out of copyright. Lots of classics. I like throwing them on my PDA, so I have them with me automatically.
- MP3.comis one of the oldest web sites to allow music downloads. I think they had some trouble with the law, but they've cleaned out the illegal stuff, and they have lots of good music left. Some bands will put up whole albums, hoping to be noticed.
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