Diaspora is a project that aims high: 4 Guys want to establish a super social network! The idea is to let people connect securely and independently through a single interface, making the need for multiple logins at different web services like twitter, facebook or flickr obsolete.

They ask for financial support and promise to release everything under the aGPL - sounds great!

I'm very curious how they plan to face the technical hurdles involved in this undertaking, and especially how much of existing protocols will be implemented (like XMPP or OpenMicroBlogging...)

Very interesting.

Nina Paley reminds those who might have forgotten with a short and funny video: "Copying Is Not Theft!".

There are already lots of remixes with different music and the same text!

Free and downloadable formats are available, too.

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!