In today's open source roundup: Watch the FSF's new video about free software. Plus: What causes digital piracy? And download Android 5.0 Lollipop wallpapers inspired by Google's Material Design The FSF’s video about free software The Free Software Foundation has created a helpful video that explains what free software is and why users should value it. Libby Reinish at the FSF explains why they created the video: Most people interact with free software every day, but many of those people don’t know what free software is or why they should go out of their way to use it. We want to fix that (and we think you do too), so we commissioned a short video that makes free software easy for everyone to understand. We partnered with Urchin Studios to make this animated introduction to free software. Urchin made the video with all free software. People have been looking to the FSF for thirty years for explanations about the importance of free software. We want to make more videos like this, and other materials, but they cost money. If we meet our annual fundraising goal of $525,000 by January 31st, you can be sure there will be more great projects to come in 2015. Please show your love for this video by making a donation or becoming a member today. More at Free Software Foundation Watch the video via YouTube: As you might imagine, the video caught the attention of Redditors and a discussion ensued about the virtues of the Free Software Foundation’s efforts: Acidw4sh liked the positive focus of the video: “I think that this is a great video because it’s a step in the right direction towards promoting free software to the public. I like that it promotes free software on its own merits without pointing out how specific proprietary software vendors violate free software principles.” FunctionPlastic also liked the video but felt that a TEDx speech by Richard Stallman was a better option: “It’s a nice promotional video, but Stallman’s TEDx speech explains the fundamentals and details of the ideology and its ways much better I think. But it’s probably only worth watching for those actively interested: an animation such as this can capture attention, but you should show them that TEDx vid so they actually know what’s going on.” PsiGuy60 appreciated that the video was made with free software: “For some reason, I love the footnote “Urchin made the video with all free software”. It provides an argument to the standpoint that anything you can do with proprietary software, you can do with free software, which is great. This is the kind of FSF activity that I can get behind.” More at Reddit Of course, Microsoft created its own video about some open source software a few years back. And, as you can imagine, Microsoft’s perspective was…um…different than the Free Software Foundation’s: The folks at Reddit also had some thoughts to share about Microsoft’s video: St3500 didn’t appreciate Microsoft’s efforts at all: “I can’t speak for OpenOffice, but that video’s design was as scatterbrained and confusing as Microsoft Office…It’s like a combination of those lame “lyric videos” and my middle school Powerpoint (sorry RMS) presentations.” Diskilla noticed that Microsoft isn’t allowing comments on its video: “I think it says quite a lot, that the comments on the video are disabled… “ Varikonniemi noted the age of Microsoft’s video: “This video might have had some point when it was made 5 years ago. But today it is almost laughable, especially since most of the problems mentioned are due to microsoft’s inability to use open standards. Also called unfair competition. The specification should be open, the implementation may be closed. Today libre office is on par with microsoft’s office. Some features are worse, some better.” More at Reddit What causes digital piracy? Piracy has long been a concern for media companies and many governments. But what causes people to choose to pirate books, movies and TV shows? Gary Fung, the founder of isoHunt, think it has a lot to do with convenience and access. Torrent freak recently published a column by Fung that focuses on piracy and media distribution: …streaming services are the future of movies and TV. Technically, streaming and superior recommendations are the things that can effectively compete with piracy, which is not as convenient, not as legal and not as high quality. Continue to hamstring collective streaming services with licensing limitations and territorial barriers and expect piracy to endure. The War on Internet cannot be won with lawyers. Imagine when everyone can watch and listen to anything, anytime, anywhere, with mere cents, automatically and continuously deducted from your Bitcoin wallet. No, you won’t own your media, but that was never the case to begin with. Our entertainment will be completely in the cloud, searchable and discoverable with recommendations. Not yours, physically or otherwise, but available and priced low enough that you don’t think much about the charge. More at Torrent Freak I agreed with most of what Fung said, but took issue with his comments about ownership of media by users on my blog: Jim Lynch I have no beef with streaming whatsoever. I have a Netflix and Amazon Prime account, and I use both of them to watch movies and TV shows frequently. However, I disagree with the idea that owning your media isn’t important at times. Streaming simply isn’t enough because some people will always need to own certain kinds of content. Sure, in some cases you just want to watch a TV show or movie or read an ebook without owning it, but in some cases ownership is important to customers. So I think we need to be careful about thinking that streaming will completely replace the desire to own a copy of certain content that we can do whatever we want with on our devices. More at Jim Lynch Android 5.0 Lollipop wallpapers Google’s Material Design in Android 5.0 has inspired some amazing wallpapers. You can check some of these out and download them for your Android device for free. Hernan Rosario reports on Android 5.0 Lollipop wallpapers: Here in IntraPixel we have shared many wallpapers from ones created by ourselves to many Material Design inspired wallpapers. Today, thanks to a Google+ user by the name J. Amourette, we have many wallpapers inspired by the flatness and bright colors that distinguish Android 5.0 Lollipop. In here you will find wallpapers like the one that came with the Nexus 5 with a flat look and other bright and colorful wallpapers. More at Intrapixel Check out the entire collection of wallpapers at J. Amourette’s Google+ collection page. There are many, many different wallpapers available to download so give yourself some time to browse through all of them. Image credit: J.Amourette What’s your take on all this? Tell me in the comments below. Open Source