Re: [microsound] OS (openly suspicious)

[Alex Young <alex@xxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 15:24, Phil Thomson wrote:
> If we did have a "100% OS" project, I would likely participate, since,
> despite everything, the idea of OS is (theoretically) worth supporting.
> I just hope we all continue to consider the issues at stake, and don't
> let ourselves get washed up in a tide of uncritical support for
> something which often (but, of course, not always) turns out to be a new
> kind of marketing rhetoric. It all depends on how we mobilize the ideas
> of "purity" and "freedom". 
  
It's certainly possible to read a lot into the political and business
sides of open source software and its usage.  And I'm also suspicious of
a lot of things in the open source community at the moment, but I find
the biggest advantages of using open source software come from less
obvious things.

For example, I found an old Python script someone had written to
transform images using fast fourier transforms that produce audio
files.  Those images could then be viewed by producing a spectrogram of
the audio files (like Aphex Twin famously did).

This was the script I found:
http://www.linuxbandwagon.com/image2wav/

The only reason I was doing this was because my friend challenged me to
make music from images during a particularly boring day.  But by
tweaking that short script, I've learnt a bit about fast fourier
transforms, writing audio files with Python and produced some
interesting sounds to use in compositions.

In addition, if anyone is in interested in the politics of open source,
try:

http://www.fsfeurope.org/

I got into the whole thing when I started to get worried about software
patents in Europe.

-- 
http://alex.bash.sh

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