December 12, 2003
Freshmeat
Surfing around, I came across freshmeat, which “maintains the Web’s largest index of Unix and cross-platform software… Thousands of applications, which are preferably released under an open source license, are meticulously cataloged in the freshmeat database, and links to new applications are added daily… offers a variety of original content on technical, political, and social aspects of software and programming.” Among many other things, the database includes almost 100 pieces of independent, free, open-source “artistic” software ranging from textual to graphical to aural in nature, many added within the last year, such as:
generate letter-like symbols based on a grammar | an ASCII-art animation tool | vee-jay software for live video processing | a program for generating random text with configurable morphology | an application that draws live, interactive, 2D fractal designed trees | software for jazz musicians | a project management and collaboration tool | a webcam for live ASCII video | a tool for live video processing and interactive installations | source code obfuscation for Perl | a highly scalable and portable audio engine and synthesizer | a tool for making large letters out of ordinary text | a very powerful, flexible language for describing music synthesis | a simplified, entertaining drawing program for young children | a graphical Blinkenlights simulator | algorithmically generated images and animations | an intuitive and flexible musical composition environment | the ultimate sprites factory | a tool for generating high quality raster images of proteins and other molecules | a package of routines for editing, processing, and creating soundfiles | a “generative art” image evolver | a Java-based framework for evolutionary programming | a visual dataflow programming environment for interactive multimedia | a graphical simulation of a lava lamp | a really cool tool for sound visualization and manipulation
Not to mention a huge array of independently made games… It’s amazing how much intelligent, free stuff is available out there if you look for it…