[SFD-discuss] CDs to be dispatched to SFD teams

[Matthew Davidson]

Robert Schumann wrote:
> What we are proposing instead is to send teams
> 1. One CD or DVD containing open source documentaries, interviews, music 
> and
> any other open resources we can get hold of
> 2. A single copy of The Open CD, which can be replicated by teams if they
> wish to distribute this software
> 3. ...as well as the usual T-shirts and a few other little items!

All sounds good to me. I hastily put together some CDs of music and 
video for SFD2005 along those lines - all terribly dated now of course. 
I vote for including some video of Eben Moglen - he's awesomely inspiring.

I'd have some misgivings about giving away home-made distro CDs to 
newbies. The last thing you want is to have someone's first experience 
of a free OS being a borked install process caused by dodgy media. It's 
not so essential for something like the OpenCD to be bit-perfect.

Be careful where you source your music from. There are a distressing 
number of businesses (like Magnatune - 
http://business.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/11/16/1458249) who slap 
a Creative Commons button on their site for the karma it brings, while 
doing their best to ensure that users can't exercise the rights granted 
by the licenses that they are notionally using. Some sites even only 
distribute their "free" music streamed via Flash plugins, to prevent 
people copying and reproducing ostensibly freely redistributable works. 
I don't think we should be supporting people who believe in "free as in 
shareware".

I can wholeheartedly recommend Jamendo (http://www.jamendo.com/, try 
these albums for starters: 
http://www.jamendo.com/en/user/mjdsawtell/albums/), who not only offer 
CC-licensed music (mostly by-nc-sa), but also embrace Ogg Vorbis and 
BitTorrent. Wish they would smoke less AJAX crack, though.

Here's what was in the CD I put together in 2005 (I also had some music 
from Magnatune, which I wouldn't include now):

Books

     * Three Novels by Cory Doctorow
     * Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software 
by Sam Williams
     * We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People 
by Dan Gillmor
     * Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock 
Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig
     * Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing
     * Free Software Magazine - Issues 0-6

Audio

     * Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock 
Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig (and friends)
     * LugRadio - 2 episodes
     * The Dangers of Software Patents by Richard Stallman
     * Copyright vs Community in the age of computer Networks by Richard 
Stallman

Video
 From the Creative Commons Project

     * Creative Commons - Get Creative
     * Creative Commons - Remix Culture
     * Building on the Past
     * CC Brazil

 From archive.org

     * Richard Stallman - Rome - Interview (4-1-2003)


Matthew.

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