mray's blog

This is a sad story: I was recently asked to give an interview for a student driven magazine. There was a particular interest in free software, since my fellow design students all use macs and adobe software. And I gladly took the chance to speak for free software, of course. But as it seems the university head cannot accept my criticism for letting students learn and work only with a expensive software suite. Part of my arguing was that students are indirectly forced to use the software - not able to rely only on university computers this leads to an obvious behavior of the students. They get their software no matter what.

Ironically my arguing for free software in education was encountered with the surge to be aware of the proprietary software jobs that need to be saved!

The article is not going to be printed, reasoning that I don't comply to the ideas and values of the university.

I'll post it here anyway: the interview (german only).

I need to note that my interviewing partners did their best in trying to defend my position and are not to blame. Unfortunately this didn't have an impact on the official reaction.

Everybody knows famous projects like GIMP and Inkscape, but what about the smaller ones? Synfig Studio deserves more attention for providing all major platforms with a pretty impressive free animation editor (imho the gallery on the website does not really communicate that). I have recently had the chance to work with it on a little status.net intro and am surprised by its features. It still is far from being a professional and full fledged animation package like adobe after effects, but you can do some decent work with it already. There is lots of room for improvement concerning video-import and audio-import - which puts a big focus on animation itself. But all hope is not lost, there are PiTiVi Openshot Audacity and Ardour!

The Synfig Studio team will soon release a fresh version. Watch out for it!

Luca Lucarini has put together a short documentary about software patents (30min). Or to be more precise: the absurdity of it. I bet many people have heard about the complaints concerning software patents and want to understand the issue - or maybe just want to gather a few more arguments for their next debate: if that may be you - that's your documentary. Watch it or download it from the official homepage! Available in the free ogg/theora/vorbis format - what else :)

Thanks to the Free Software Foundation for its support!

The Hedgewars team released yet another fantastic version of their game: 0.9.13! There are TONS and TONS of changes, new levels, new weapons and eyecandy.

What are you waiting for? Go and grab this jewel to show your beloved the true meaning of total anihilation! Or join an internet game to teach some strangers the bitter taste of defeat.

Act now and get some extra KA-BOOM! with your download.

Paratype has released the modern and professional typface "PT Sans" under the OFL! It isn't just a really good looking typeface for daily use, but also covers lots of characters and comes along with the variations regular, condensed and caption. Each of those are available as normal, bold, italic and bolditalic.

This is really awesome - the list of really free and open fonts grows constantly!