Open Source Creative

It's been a while since I've spoken about software licensing. If you've been in the community for any appreciable amount of time, you'll see that there are two licensing-based brainworms that tend to crop up on a regular basis. The first is the fear that some company might swoop in and buy our friendly little open source program and put it behind a wall. The other is the notion that free software licenses like the GPL are harmful to the program. Although there's a rational background for either of these positions, I think that they're both ill-founded.

Software developers, especially those who write open source software, are not beholden to us. They're not there to do our every bidding. And more importantly, as users, we have to remember that we're not always right. It's a topic that comes up regularly, but it's also one that's important to address just as regularly.

Woohoo! Opensourcecreative.org is up and alive for your listening and browsing pleasure. Bathe your earballs in its magnificence! Also... let me know if anything isn't quite working right. This week's show is all about the site's migration, what I used to make it, and hopefully an option or two on what you should do if you need a website of your own. Use the cool listen-y widget thing to hear all about it (unless you got this through your podcatcher, in which case, use that).

This week's episode is about some critical stuff: making sure that the digital data that we produce doesn't get lost. So we're talking back-ups, passwords, and encryption. It may not sound like as fun and exciting of a topic as other things we've discussed, but it's monumentally important. Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

This week we're talking about social media networks and the kind of love/hate relationship we have with them. We're often at odds with the privacy policies of a lot of social media platforms. Furthermore, the level of discourse that people have on these sites isn't always all that great. But at the same time, as people working in the creative fields, we have a need to get our work in front of an audience. Social media has the largest audiences. Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

A fun little meta show this week. This one's a nuts-and-bolts, step-by-step walk-through of the process I go through each way to deliver podcasty goodness to your earballs. And I do it all with free and open source software. The following is a quick breakdown of each step in the process. Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

This week we have a more positive (I hope) follow-up to last week's rant. We're talking about comparisonitis... that feeling of "I can't do *that*" when you see the incredible work of another artist or find out about another person's level of success in a field similar to yours. Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

Missed last week, but the show is back! And boy, oh, boy... this is a ranty one. Short version: we need to change the way that we discuss the new releases of open source software tools. There's this propensity for wanting to discuss other software or, worse, make gross generalizations about the viability of a tool based on our own limited experiences and uses cases. It's not entirely specific to the open source community, but we do see it a lot... I daresay more than in other circles. Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

This week's show is really a nuts-and-bolts kind of thing. As the title says, it's how a person would go about making his or her living as an open source creative... a person whose primary creative software tools are open source. I still run into people who swear it can't be done. In a way, this is my rebuttal. Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

This week's show is all about open content. I've thought about this topic a lot and I have a lot to say on the matter. I have so much to say, in fact, that I ended up needing to cut myself off a bit before I really wanted to because I'd gotten to the end of my commute. Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

Happy New Year! Short introduction this week, folks. This episode is all about goals for the coming year. What are your creative goals for the year? What do you want to get done? Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

This week's show is all about making the time you need to produce your creative works. Well... it's mostly about that. Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

Hi there! In this episode I talk at length about another little distraction that I've had over the last year... a little feature request site for Blender called [Right-Click Select](https://rightclickselect.com). But, that's just the launch point. What this episode is *really* about is the best way to make feature requests in an open source software community (like the Blender community). I also make a few flubs, but hey... that's pretty much on-brand for me now, right? Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

This week's episode is a barrel of questions and curiosity. I spin myself in a circle when I realize that I might not actually have a single medium that I can call "home". Is that a problem or is that a requirement of being a creative person in the modern era? Or has it always been like this and folks just get known for one of the many kinds of things that they do? Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

Short episode this week! And good thing, too, because this one is all about the stuff I've been up to recently. Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

I told you I'd be making it a point to keep up with this show again. Well, here's another episode. This one is a bit of an archive one. I actually recorded it a year and a half ago before the podcast went dormant. I just never got around to editing it and making it fit for sharing with you. Now I have, so here you go! Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

**Finally!** At long last, after way, *way* too much time off, the podcast is back in action. Huzzah! This one is a little bit different from previous episodes. It's a walking commute rather than a driving one. In this show, I talk about this year's [Blender Conference](https://www.blender.org/conference/2016) and all of the development going on with Blender there. Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

Yay! Another Open Source Creative Podcast episode. In this one, I have a long conversation with myself about the nature of art and open source software as it pertains to selfishness. Is art inherently selfish? Is it not? Is that a bad thing? And likewise for Free Software. Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

At long last, another Open Source Creative Podcast episode is here! Sorry for the long gap between episodes, folks... it's been a crazy month. In any cast, this episode was recorded back in March and in it I talk about doing spec work (that is, speculative work) as a creative producer of things. Episode 15 really helped me nail down where I think my position is on this, so in a way, it's an extension of that. It's a bit of a contrast to the folks at [nospec.com](http://www.nospec.com). Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).

I have a strange feeling that this episode is going to get me into a bit of trouble. Maybe. We'll see. I get into details and backstory in the actual episode, but it all started with a question (or, better, replies to a question) regarding the resale of "used" digital content---specifically ebooks---in an [episode of the Sell More Books Show](http://sellmorebooksshow.com/episode-46-digital-resale-vas-and-shorter-books), a podcast that's pretty prevalent in the indie publishing scene. This episode is a bit of a rant launched from that premise. Originally posted on [monsterjavaguns.com](http://monsterjavaguns.com/podcast).