Presentation I did during a University of California Symposium on Open Source for the Arts in UCLA, February 2007. What is Free Software and what does it have to do with Sound and Music.
6. Names and Dates
Richard Stallman
Starts the GNU Project (1983)
Defines Free Software (1985)
Introduces the GPL (1985)
Linus Torvald
Develops the Linux kernel (1991)
Eric Raymond
Founder of the Open Source Initiative (1998)
8. Technical/Practical advantages of
FLOSS
Code is revised by many developers
Security (kerchoff's principle)
Estability
Collaborative effort of large communities
Price
Although interesting, there are even more important
reasons...
12. Social and Ethical aspects
Access to software determines people's ability to:
Communicate
Educate
Work
Software should be considered as cultural heritage
Software will condition more and more the vision of the
world new generations have
Who should control these aspects of society? A single
company? Two companies?
14. The Piece of Art in the Digital Era
Piece of Art = Content + Techniques
In order to fully understand a piece of art we need to
understand the techniques
Digital Piece of Art = Content + Techniques + System
In order to fully undertand a digital piece of art we also need to
understand the system and be able to access it to the lowest
level (code!)
15. Free Expression
There is no Free Expression without control of the
Tools you use (agnula.org)
Would Mozart have composed a line of music for an
instrument he wasn't exactly sure what was doing internally or
producing its sound?
Would Michelangelo have painted the Sixtine Chapel using a
strange device that might have been recording his personal
conversations while painting
An artist needs to be in full control of the tools (be able
to modify, adapt, copy, redistribute...)
This can be done personally or through trusted technical staff
16. Digital Art Heritage
In order to preserve a digital piece of art we need to
preserve the system
Systems that are closed and proprietary in general
cannot be preserved
There are already key compositions in Computer Music
that have already been lost because the original (closed)
system cannot be reproduced
Digital Art Preservation = FLOSS
26. Highlights
Won the 2006 ACM Best Multimedia Open Source
Software award.
Constantly compiled and tested on Linux, OSX and
Windows
> 250 C++ classes, 50K loc
Although it currently specializes in audio and music,
it presents a metamodel that has proven valid for
general multimedia.
31. External Open Source libraries
FFTW (FFT) Libsndfile, OggVorbis,
Xercesc & libxml (XML libmad (mp3), id3lib, for
using DOM API) handling audio files.
FLTK and QT GUI oscpack
toolkits libjack
RtAudio, PortAudio or CppUnit (testing
DirectX (for Windows framework, only used for
audio) development)
pthreads (multithreading
on Windows)