El Mundo Libre

The Blender Open Movie project's latest baby (in the making) is called Durian. It's going to be an action-packed animation with lots of cool effects and a female lead character. I'm a big fan of the Blender Open Movies because they show what free software can do in a cool way. A lot of their finances come from regular people. To get more funds for their movies, they provide two incentives (apart from the warm, fuzzy feeling of helping free software): a DVD and credits.

The DVD contains the movie in multiple formats, the source files for it, the script, tutorials and more. It is of course not copy-restricted with CSS. One disadvantage of it are the non-free formats: partly unavoidable to have an actual DVD, but apparently the HD version will also not be in a free format, even though it's just a file on the disk.

Anyway, for the second incentive, your name on the end credits, you have to pre-order the DVD early on. I missed the pre-order+credit window for Elephants Dream. Even though it was too late to get a credit, I pre-ordered the DVD anyway, to add to the funds for it or for the next project. I swore then that I wouldn't miss these opportunities again. So when Big Buck Bunny and Yo Frankie! were announced I made sure I was on time. Sadly, I let my attention drop a bit after that. It was only today, when someone mentioned Big Buck Bunny again, that I realized that pre-orders for the next project must have started by now. So I checked the Durian website and found out that the official pre-order period for credits ended a few days ago. I went ahead to the Blender shop anyway to pre-order and I could still choose to get my name in the credits. Maybe this is an oversight and my choice will be ignored. But there's also a chance that you can still get your name in the credits. I think it's a great way to end Software Freedom Day, don't you?

Your shipment of gNewSense has arrived. It was released last Monday and is already being enjoyed by many. Existing users have gotten it through regular updates, but we've also seen new users taking this important step towards freedom. If you would like to follow their example, just click the download button (which I've finally managed to fix) on this website. (Please use the torrent and seed if you can.)

This new release brings you some added freedom fixes in the packages (see also the software blacklist) and a more free Linux kernel. The other noticable major change in the new default install is the removal of Mono. This comes as a result of Richard Stallman's call to discourage C#. The two default applications that depended on Mono were F-Spot and Tomboy. They have been replaced by gThumb and Gnote respectively. A nice side effect of that is that the download has become smaller, so you can start using gNewSense sooner.

I would like to point out that Software Freedom Day is happening this Saturday. And what can be better than a fully Free operating system like gNewSense to tell people what Free software is all about and what it can do. Here's a selection of what you could do:

• Hand out live CDs.
• Show the live CD or an installed system on a demo machine.
• Show it on your Yeeloong mini-laptop. That would be a different version than the one we just released, but it gives a taste of things to come. And promoting the Yeeloong is a good thing.
• Organize an install party.
• Make (and hand out) bootable USB sticks by installing gNewSense on to one with the live CD or via FUSBi.
• Hand out flyers.

It's possible that you like the idea of a Free operating system, but your not entirely happy with gNewSense's implementation of it. Then there's a variety of other Free GNU/Linux distributions you can choose from. Our friends from Trisquel also just released a new version and Kongoni has just been added to the list. It looks like Software Freedom Day can't go wrong this year.