Living Open Source

A while ago I reviewed a number of online sources of royalty-free images. While most of these permit you to use images created by others, being certain of what rights you have to reuse and redistribute is not that clear and you nearly always need to contact the originator before you use the image for [...]

Last week I kicked off this series by introducing you to the concept of Creative Commons for licensing creative works. It is a way of sharing creative works that maintains rights for artists while providing a framework for more freedom in sharing and reuse. In this post we are going to begin exploring this world, [...]

There is something so gospel-like about the open source world and yet Christendom can take no credit for it. The concept of open source software has been around a while, with many high profile success stories like Linux, OpenOffice, WordPress, to name a few. But the Open Source concept is also becoming increasingly popular in [...]

GIMP is a powerful image manipulation tool. Version 2.4 has just been released and having used this for a while, thought it was worth a mention here. GIMP is a free and open source alternative to Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro and is used for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It supports [...]

The Google Pack is a collection of software programs, some of which are Open Source and all of which are completely free. Included in the pack are at least 13 applications. Some of them you may already have, such as Firefox and the Real music player. But it is worth downloading this pack for the [...]

I thought I’d exhausted my list of useful open source (or at least free) software that churches might be interested in. Then I came across Scribus – a desktop publishing application that is a great alternative to Microsoft Publisher.

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor. It aims to become a powerful graphic tool like Adobe Illustrator or Freehand. OK, so it does not have everything that these tools have, but then it doesn’t have a price tag either!