The Dejunair Project creates "Free and Open Source Music" or "Open Music". This means simply, you can use the music for whatever you want at no cost (free beer!). You can use the tracks for podsafe music in your podcast, backing or overlay music in videos, remix for a total new track, or whatever else you can dream up.

Software that listens to and analyzes music is driving a Sun open source project, which aims to build a music recommendation system that surpasses the systems used today by iTunes and Amazon.

“Open Source” advocate: «...I associate much more with the "Open Source" (also as Richard defines it) camp, and am open to the existence and use of proprietary software...» --

Free and open source software is all about sharing so, prompted by a reader who emailed me last week to ask about books on Linux, I spent some time over the weekend doing research. The result is a short list of books that users - from newbies to gurus - can download and read at their leisure.

We've reported a few times on efforts to apply open source concepts to the world of music, where many people perceive the music industry to be in need of change and improvement.

Want to learn more about open source? Download some books for free. It doesn't matter if you're new to open source or a long-time user, there is always more to learn about. We scoured the Web for the best open source books. All of these are free books that can be downloaded and shared.

"Once software users freedoms are protected the methodology that we know as Open Source becomes possible and its advantages become apparent. But without the guiding principles of Free Software the neccessity and direction of Open Source cannot be accounted for. Open Source has no history or trajectory, it cannot account for itself or suggest which tasks are neccessary or important.

Open source software initially was a head-scratcher: “How can you make money selling something for free?” But once open source advocates clarified the meaning of free – “Free as in speech, not as in beer” – the open source economy took off.

GCstar is a free open source application for managing your collections which works on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Detailed information on each item can be automatically retrieved from the internet and you can store additional data, such as the location or who you've lent it to. You may also search and filter your collection by many criteria.