Foo Communications

FooBar at LibrePlanet 2013

2012-11-14T16:25:19Z

FSF has announced LibrePlanet 2013 is happening, so we’re announcing that we’re going to hold our FooBar event on the Saturday night.

The Liberated Pixel Cup

2012-04-15T21:32:01Z

Liberated Pixel Cup example outdoor artwork / Lanea Zimmerman / CC BY-SA 3.0

Do you like classic game graphics? Do you support free culture and free software? Can you see where this is going? Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, and OpenGameArt have launched a free-as-in-freedom game design competition, the Liberated Pixel Cup:

Announcing the Liberated Pixel Cup: an epic contest for gaming freedom

We'll let FOO300 MediaGoblin founder Chris Webber explain what the competition is about:

Liberated Pixel Cup is a two-part competition: make a bunch of awesome free culture licensed artwork, and program a bunch of free software games that use it. Hopefully many cool projects can come out of this… but that will only happen if people like you get involved! Liberated Pixel Cup is a great opportunity for the commons in many ways! Right now it’s hard to find free culture content to bootstrap games that match a consistent style and hard for artists to collaborate on such. We’re also very interested in areas where free software and free culture directly intersect, which we don’t always see enough of (and which sometimes can even get a bit complex, so it’s good to have opportunities to think about them when we can), and games are a great example of this overlap. We hope you’ll participate!

This is an excellent project, so do get involved if you can!

Free Culture Means More Books Available

2012-03-30T20:32:28Z

This graph from an article in The Atlantic shows how copyright law prevents rather than encourages reprints of books. The dip in new versions of books coincides with U.S copyright:

There's no such problem with freely-licensed or public domain books. It would be interesting to see a study that looks only for such works, but these cannot be identified via Amazon's API. There's an opportunity there...

Announcement: FOO272, the FooBar 3.0

2012-01-13T20:35:03Z

All the information, details and times are on the FOO272 page.

Libre.fm update for September 2011

2011-09-21T21:11:42Z

Exciting times are ahead for Libre.fm. Work has increased on the site and Matt, Rob and the developers (Elleo, jurg, Clint, kabniel, warp and the others) are committed to delivering some truly fantastic features on the site over the coming year.

To kick things off, we have a promotion with Flattr where you’ll be able to get an account and donate some money to your favorite Libre artist (or to the site itself), and Flattr will pick up the payment.

We have plenty more things to share with you, and for this we need to email you. For this, you need to be registered on Libre.fm, so if you didn’t get this message, go register now.

During the coming months, we hope to have some new exclusive Libre artists, news on local Libre.fm events in your area and some new features for the site, as well as a return to the monthly Libre.fm podcast (we just need to collectively harass Mike for that one!) — all together, this could be our best year yet!

We also have good work coming in the design of the site. After the previous round of excellent work by Pablo Lizardo, we’re working with another local (Boston) artist, Brendan Mruk. Brendan is working closely with me to get some concept art together, and we’ll soon be digitizing the work and sharing it with you all.

Until then, you can see an example of Brendan’s work, here.

Remember, you can support our work directly by making a donation: we accept PayPal, bitcoins, Flattr and more!

Collaboration and Freedom - The World of Free and Open Source Art

2011-09-21T20:05:01Z

A collection of artworks, texts and resources about freedom and openness in the arts, in the age of the Internet. Freedom to collaborate - to use, modify and redistribute ideas, artworks, experiences, media and tools. Openness to the ideas and contributions of others, and new ways of organising and making decisions together.

This non exhaustive collection is intended to inspire, inform and enable people to apply peer-to-peer principles for making things and getting organised together. We hope that all art lovers, makers, thinkers, organisers and strategists will find something for them from this set of imaginative, communitarian and dynamic contemporary practices.

Curated by Furtherfield: Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett with additional texts by Charlotte Frost and Rob Myers.

1 What You will Find in this Collection
2 Essays & Interviews
3 Radio Interviews
4 Artist Projects
5 Open Source Resources
- Open source services
- Organisational models and strategies
- Guides and how-tos
- Licensing
- Glossary for Beginners in FOSS Art

Can be found at the the Foundation for P2P Alternatives http://p2pfoundation.net/World_of_Free_and_Open_Source_Art

And at ACE/Thinking Digital http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/about-us/digital-innovation-development/thinking-digital/collaboration-and-freedom/

Commissioned by Arts Council England for Thinking Digital. http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/about-us/digital-innovation-development/thinking-digital/

It will also be presented at the FLOSSIE (Women in FLOSS) conference in November 15th. London. http://www.flossie.org/?page_id=189

----------------------->Extraaaah!<--------------||||

Furtherfield commission 'Balloon Dog' by Rob Myers.

A downloadable freely licensed 3D model of an artwork to print and remix. 2011 Furtherfield commission.

Balloon Dog forms part of a series of shareable DIY 'readymades' for an era of digital copying and sharing. Iconic objects from the history of appropriation and remixing art are recreated as 3D-digital models. Users can then download and send the digital model to 3D printers via the Internet to receive their own physical artwork through the post at a scale of their choosing.

http://www.furtherfield.org/projects/balloon-dog-rob-myers

Show your support for free music formats

2011-08-23T21:49:53Z

Want a free download of our first EP release? Get it as a high quality Ogg Vorbis download if you sign this petition to get popular US public radio show, This American Life to offer their podcast in Ogg Vorbis as well as MP3.

Sign the petition.
Forward us your confirmation email — to support@foocorp.net
We’ll send you back a place to download a whole EP of music in Ogg Vorbis.

No catch. We won’t put you on our mailing list.

FOO 271 -- The FooBar

2011-02-03T02:50:10Z

The next event has been posted, a sponsor has been found, and a flyer is being produced in Inkscape.

Consider this your invite.

Happy holidays from Foo!

2010-12-29T00:10:07Z

As 2011 comes hurtling towards us with its inevitablity, it’s fun to look back at 2010 and see some of the stuff we’ve done.

In 2010, not only did we finally get ourselves together and finally incorporate, we also got our first bunch of paying customers. We now have seven FooVCs — if you’d like to join this illustrious bunch of the free world’s elite, and get yourself a funky little FooPlug in exchange, now is a great time to do so.

If $300 is a bit much for you at this time of year, we’ve also got some other bundles to tout our wares…

Kicking around the Foo warehouse are some CD-R copies of the furny EP, more mature escapades in hi-fidelity. Get one of these, plus some buttons… and we’ll knock some money off the price:

Foo Projects

2011 sees a change of direction of us: as you hopefully will know, we’re not a software company, but an entertainment company: so, to make this distinction clearer, we’re moving all of our software and other community efforts to their own website: http://foocorp.org/ — we call these things ‘Foo Projects’, and our goal is to take new projects we work on, and eventually move them to being community projects. We will continue to support all community projects, with company resources, but putting them in the direction of the community of developers and artists who work on them.

Foo Projects will also have its own blog. Over there, we’re just publishing the latest news on GNU social and GNU FM…

Try GNU social now at daisycha.in

2010-12-07T06:21:25Z

At your nearest convenience please head to http://daisycha.in on the World Wide Web and after reading and digesting our good mantras and diatribes on the evils of Facebook and the like, consider signing up for your own account.

There most certainly will be bugs, and right now you can’t even sign in after you sign up.

There is a privacy policy and a terms and conditions… if you can’t click to see them when you sign up, please let us know, and we’ll give you a chance to slowly back away after reading them if you don’t like what you read — no hard feelings.
They’re very similar to the Terms and Privacy Policies found here: http://identi.ca/doc/tos and http://identi.ca/doc/privacy but we’re also not logging IP addresses again (same deal applies to Libre.fm, if you’re wondering…)

But: due to an unfortunate link by someone we no longer want to have anything to do with, ever, we’ve been forced to launch now, a few hours ahead of schedule. Minus a support forum, which we’d hoped would be a cool feature, but hey ho… if you have any suggestions for free software sites like Get Satisfaction or Stack Overflow, please send them our way…

As ever, we are here to help and serve you, so please send questions and feedback our way and we’ll do our best to get back to you admit all the screaming hordes of fans this new website will surely not bring us.

Into the future!

Your pals, - Rob and Matt

PS. We took this off our website a while ago. Maybe time to put it back?

It’s my belief that history is a wheel. “Inconsistency is my very essence,” says the wheel. “Rise up on my spokes if you like but don’t complain when you’re cast back down into the depths. Good time pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it’s also our hope. The worst of time, like the best, are always passing away.”

Another GNU social mockup.

2010-09-21T23:26:02Z

Maybe you've seen some of the GNU social mockups on the development site. Well, for our own version of GNU social (hereby called simply 'social') we have our own design in mind...

Matt has become somewhat obsessed with this program called Pencil -- it's free software, naturally, as well as being awesome -- and future designs will no doubt appear in similar form until we actually get around to building it.

Anyone fancy taking a stab at this next stage?

It's official: we're official.

2010-09-21T23:23:13Z

That’s right folks… last Thursday, we finally got around to making the company official.

The company, Foo Communications, LLC is ready to serve you.

Thanks especially to Jason Self for sending us celebratory pub-going money, which for a small company specializing in giving things away, is always welcome.

FooPlug

2010-08-30T09:00:00Z

Set up your own plug computer to run GNU social -- we built one, and called it the FooPlug.

Find out how to build your own!

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Become a Venture Customer!

2010-08-30T01:36:44Z

Help us realise our goal of making free music and free software and get yourself a FooPlug in the mix...

FooCorp's Venture Customer idea is not a new one, it worked famously for TextDrive in the past.

Read the details and sign up

GNU social buttons now available

2010-07-27T21:15:01Z

Our latest product, FOO29 GNU social button is now available to order.