In these videos, Robin Good interviews Richard Stallman about free software and the open source movement. Stallman created the GPL and the Free Software Foundation to protect the GNU operating system from becoming proprietary.

In the sequence embedded below, filmed, the founding father of open source software answers a series of questions. This interview was originally posted at MasterNewMedia.org in 2006 and features commentary and links from Robin Good.

Q: What is free software?

Q: What are the negative consequences of using proprietary software instead of free software?

Q: What free software do you recommend using?

Q: Can individuals and organizations use GNU/Linux in their daily operations?

Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart founded Project Gutenberg when he was granted an account with $100,000,000 of computer time in 1971 by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois.

The Project Gutenberg Philosophy is “to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search.”

Only books that have entered the public domain are entered into the database of 19,000 titles, of which nearly 2 million are downloaded every month. That means the database is full of the classics of Western literature, with names like Twain, Doyle, Shakespeare, Dickens, Kleiser, Poe, Wells, Austen and Verne dominating the top 10 most downloaded list.

Ok, you probably have already discovered about YouTube yourself. Some have called it the “visual community telegraph of our age.” Others see it simply as the Napster of 2006, with massive copyright lawsuits poised to occur as soon as the site is purchased by an organization with deep pockets. Indeed, the site is rife with copyrighted material, but next to those clips of the Daily Show and SNL are thousands upon thousands of great examples of user-generated content, like the LonelyGirl15 or Ask A Ninja videos we posted about earlier. For the tech set, there’s even these hilarious Mac vs. PC commercial parodies or Weird Al’s outrageous “I’m so white and nerdy” video. Enjoy them while they last!