You probably know about the ongoing debate of Free Software vs. Open Source. It clearly isn't a black-and-white debate, and some may even say they don't care what the difference is. But let me show you with a black-and-white example what the difference is, and why it matters:

Let's assume you are against slavery for obvious reasons, and there is a movement that clearly states it is "PRO black people".

Then there is a movement that states to be "PRO human rights" - not only including black people, but everybody. While both might fight for a same cause some just support certain behavior in certain cases while others care about the essential underlying reason.

In everyday life there might not be a big difference, but in the end of the day I would like to see Free Software to succeed. It really is something worth caring about.

My new project Quicktorials.org is about to take off. It is a new system for free software video tutorials and currently needs some applications to implement it. Ricardo Lafuente recently worked on a new development version of Shoebot that integrates quicktorials even in a code editor! But that's not enough.

Please contact me if you're a developer and interested in adding this to any free software application! The easiest way is to send a jabber message to mray@jabber.org or contact me on identi.ca.

You can also send mail to "mail at mray.de".

Hype? - no. I certainly don't want to Skhype anything or anybody, but jingle is a nice xmpp (jabber) specification for simple VoIP. I have been testing this for a long time with various clients and finally came to the conclusion: it is really usable. Empathy (standard in Ubuntu), Psi (also free & cross platform) and the Google Talk client (closed Windows only) work together! These are only three big players that offer free VoIP on the major operating systems - and they are easy to use! (Nothing you can say about setting up a SIP client) Now let's see when video is going to follow...

Maybe you have heard about the free film "Sita sings the blues", a film that is completely free available under the creative commons by-sa licence. You may even know it is available in any format and quality on archive.org. But what really matters these days is: what do the persons behind those projects think and say? - Hear the answer of Nina Paley, the author of the film; an interesting insight into a cultural landscape everybody can appreciate.

Seems like we have a release row! The 3D editor Blender has released its new alpha version 2.5.0 with an amazing new set of features. The most obvious new feature is the new UI - but as always there are tons of other new things to explore in this release. Expect improvements in those areas:

• Custom keyboard shortcuts
• Data access
• Tool system
• F-Curves, Actions, NLA
• Animation Editors
• Spline IK
• Smoke Simulation
• Particles
• Volume Rendering
• Ray tracing optimization
• Other rendering features

actually don't bother with that list and have a closer look already on their homepage - it illustrates the changes, but remeber: it's only an alpha version!