FreeBSD Multimedia
FreeBSD Multimedia Resources List
Links on this page refer to multimedia resources (podcast, vodcast, audio recordings, video recordings, photos) related to FreeBSD or of interest for FreeBSD users.
This list is available as chronological overview, as a tag cloud and via the sources.
This list is also available as RSS feed 
If you know any resources not listed here, or notice any dead links, please send details to Edwin Groothuis so that it can be included or updated.
Tag: artwork
Artist and Musician Ty Semaka
Interview with Artist and Musician Ty Semaka. You can find his work at http://www.tysemaka.com/, and also on the OpenBSD CDs, posters, and shirts.
Source: bsdtalk
Added: 29 January 2007
Tags: bsdtalk, interview, openbsd, artwork, ty semaka
Ogg version (12 minutes), MP3 version (6 Mb, 12 minutes)
OpenBSD 4.5 Release Songs - Games
[Commentary still being written] For RSS readers: Please note that the download URL is an FTP site.
Source: OpenBSD
Added: 25 May 2008
Tags: openbsd, artwork
Ogg version (4.5 Mb, 3:29 minutes), MP3 version (6.4 Mb, 3:29 minutes)
OpenBSD 4.0 Release Songs - OpenVOX
This is an extra track by the artist Ty Semaka (who really has "had Puffy on his mind") which we included on the audio CD. This song details the process that Ty has to go through to make the art and music for each OpenBSD release. Ty and Theo really do go to a (very specific) bar and discuss what is going on in the project, and then try to find a theme that will work... For RSS readers: Please note that the download URL is an FTP site.
Source: OpenBSD
Added: 10 October 2006
Tags: openbsd, artwork
Ogg version (6.0 Mb, 4 minutes), MP3 version (3.9 Mb, 4 minutes)
OpenBSD 4.4 Release Song - "Source Wars - Episode IV - Trial of the BSD Knights"
Nearly 10 years ago Kirk McKusick wrote a history of the Berkeley Unix distributions for the O'Reilly book "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution". We recommend you read his story, entitled "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable" first, to see how Kirk remembers how we got here. Sadly, since it showed up in book form originally, this text has probably not been read by enough people. The USL(AT&T) vs BSDI/UCB court case settlement documents were not public until recently; their disclosure has made the facts more clear. But the story of how three people decided to free the BSD codebase of corporate pollution -- and release it freely -- is more interesting than the lawsuit which followed. Sure, a stupid lawsuit happened which hindered the acceptance of the BSD code during a critical period. But how did a bunch of guys go through the effort of replacing so much AT&T code in the first place? After all, companies had lots of really evil lawyers back then too -- were they not afraid? After a decade of development, most of the AT&T code had already been replaced by university researchers and their associates. So Keith Bostic, Mike Karels and Kirk McKusick (the main UCB CSRG group) started going through the 4.3BSD codebase to cleanse the rest. Keith, in particular, built a ragtag team (in those days, USENIX conferences were a gold mine for such team building) and led these rebels to rewrite and replace all the Imperial AT&T code, piece by piece, starting with the libraries and userland programs. Anyone who helped only got credit as a Contributor -- people like Chris Torek and a cast of .. hundreds more. Then Mike and Kirk purified the kernel. After a bit more careful checking, this led to the release of a clean tree called Net/2 which was given to the world in June 1991 -- the largest dump of free source code the world had ever received (for those days -- not modern monsters like OpenOffice). Some of these ragtags formed a company (BSDi) to sell a production system based on this free code base, and a year later Unix System Laboratories (basically AT&T) sued BSDi and UCB. Eventually AT&T lost and after a few trifling fixes (described in the lawsuit documents) the codebase was free. A few newer developments (and more free code) were added, and released in June 1994 as 4.4BSD-Lite. Just over 14 years later OpenBSD is releasing its own 4.4 release (and for a lot less than $1000 per copy). The OpenBSD 4.4 release is dedicated to Keith Bostic, Mike Karels, Kirk McKusick, and all of those who contributed to making Net/2 and 4.4BSD-Lite free.
Source: OpenBSD
Added: 18 November 2008
Tags: openbsd, artwork
Ogg version (4.4 Mb, 3 minutes 5 seconds), MP3 version (5.6 Mb, 3 minutes 5 seconds)
OpenBSD 4.3 Release Song - "Home to Hypocrisy"
We are just plain tired of being lectured to by a man who is a lot like Naomi Campbell. In 1998 when a United Airlines plane was waiting in the queue at Washington Dulles International Airport for take-off to New Orleans (where a Usenix conference was taking place), one man stood up from his seat, demanded that they stop waiting in the queue and be permitted to deplane. Even after orders from the crew and a pilot from the cockpit he refused to sit down. The plane exited the queue and returned to the airport gangway. Security personnel ran onto the plane and removed this man, Richard Stallman, from the plane. After Richard was removed from the plane, everyone else stayed onboard and continued their journey to New Orleans. A few OpenBSD developers were on that same plane, seated very closeby, so we have an accurate story of the events. This is the man who presumes that he should preach to us about morality, freedom, and what is best for us. He believes it is his God-given role to tell us what is best for us, when he has shown that he takes actions which are not best for everyone. He prefers actions which he thinks are best for him -- and him alone -- and then lies to the public. Richard Stallman is no Spock. We release our software in ways that are maximally free. We remove all restrictions on use and distribution, but leave a requirement to be known as the authors. We follow a pattern of free source code distribution that started in the mid-1980's in Berkeley, from before Richard Stallman had any powerful influence which he could use so falsely. We have a development sub-tree called "ports". Our "ports" tree builds software that is 'found on the net' into packages that OpenBSD users can use more easily. A scaffold of Makefiles and scripts automatically fetch these pieces of software, apply patches as required by OpenBSD, and then build them into nice neat little tarballs. This is provided as a convenience for users. The ports tree is maintained by OpenBSD entirely separately from our main source tree. Some of the software which is fetched and compiled is not as free as we would like, but what can we do. All the other operating system projects make exactly the same decision, and provide these same conveniences to their users. Richard felt that this "ports tree" of ours made OpenBSD non-free. He came to our mailing lists and lectured to us specifically, yet he said nothing to the many other vendors who do the same; many of them donate to the FSF and perhaps that has something to do with it. Meanwhile, Richard has personally made sure that all the official GNU software -- including Emacs -- compiles and runs on Windows. That man is a false leader. He is a hypocrite. There may be some people who listen to him. But we don't listen to people who do not follow their own stupid rules.
Source: OpenBSD
Added: 03 May 2008
Tags: openbsd, artwork
Ogg version (6.5 Mb, 4 minutes 48 seconds), MP3 version (8.2 Mb, 4 minutes 48 seconds)
OpenBSD 4.2 Release Song - "100001 1010101"
Those of us who work on OpenBSD are often asked why we do what we do. This song's lyrics express the core motivations and goals which have remained unchanged over the years - secure, free, reliable software, that can be shared with anyone. Many other projects purport to share these same goals, and love to wrap themselves in a banner of "Open Source" and "Free Software". Given how many projects there are one would think it might be easy to stick to those goals, but it doesn't seem to work out that way. A variety of desires drag many projects away from the ideals very quickly. Much of any operating system's usability depends on device support, and there are some very tempting alternative ways to support devices available to those who will surrender their moral code. A project could compromise by entering into NDA agreements with vendors, or including binary objects in the operating system for which no source code exists, or tying their users down with contract terms hidden inside copyright notices. All of these choices surrender some subset of the ideals, and we simply will not do this. Sure, we care about getting devices working, but not at the expense of our original goals. Of course since "free to share with anyone" is part of our goals, we've been at the forefront of many licensing and NDA issues, resulting in a good number of successes. This success had led to much recognition for the advancement of Free Software causes, but has also led to other issues. We fully admit that some BSD licensed software has been taken and used by many commercial entities, but contributions come back more often than people seem to know, and when they do, they're always still properly attributed to the original authors, and given back in the same spirit that they were given in the first place. That's the best we can expect from companies. After all, we make our stuff so free so that everyone can benefit -- it remains a core goal; we really have not strayed at all in 10 years. But we can expect more from projects who talk about sharing -- such as the various Linux projects. Now rather than seeing us as friends who can cooperatively improve all codebases, we are seen as foes who oppose the GPL. The participants of "the race" are being manipulated by the FSF and their legal arm, the SFLC, for the FSF's aims, rather than the goal of getting good source into Linux (and all other code bases). We don't want this to come off as some conspiracy theory, but we simply urge those developers caution -- they should ensure that the path they are being shown by those who have positioned themselves as leaders is still true. Run for yourself, not for their agenda. The Race is there to be run, for ourselves, not for others. We do what we do to run our own race, and finish it the best we can. We don't rush off at every distraction, or worry how this will affect our image. We are here to have fun doing right.
Source: OpenBSD
Added: 02 November 2007
Tags: openbsd, artwork
Ogg version (6.4 Mb, 4 minutes 4- seconds), MP3 version (4.0 Mb, 4 minutes 40 seconds)
OpenBSD 4.1 Release Song - Puffy Baba and the 40 Vendors
As developers of a free operating system, one of our prime responsibilities is device support. No matter how nice an operating system is, it remains useless and unusable without solid support for a wide percentage of the hardware that is available on the market. It is therefore rather unsurprising that more than half of our efforts focus on various aspects relating to device support. Most parts of the operating system (from low kernel, through to libraries, all the way up to X, and then even to applications) use fairly obvious interface layers, where the "communication protocols" or "argument passing" mechanisms (ie. APIs) can be understood by any developer who takes the time to read the free code. Device drivers pose an additional and significant challenge though: because many vendors refuse to document the exact behavior of their devices. The devices are black boxes. And often they are surprisingly weird, or even buggy. When vendor documentation does not exist, the development process can become extremely hairy. Groups of developers have found themselves focused for months at a time, figuring out the most simple steps, simply because the hardware is a complete mystery. Access to documentation can ease these difficulties rapidly. However, getting access to the chip documentation from vendors is ... almost always a negotiation. If we had open access to documentation, anyone would be able to see how simple all these devices actually are, and device driver development would flourish (and not just in OpenBSD, either). When we proceed into negotiations with vendors, asking for documentation, our position is often weak. One would assume that the modern market is fair, and that selling chips would be the primary focus of these vendors. But unfortunately a number of behemoth software vendors have spent the last 10 or 20 years building political hurdles against the smaller players. A particularly nasty player in this regard has been the Linux vendors and some Linux developers, who have played along with an American corporate model of requiring NDAs for chip documentation. This has effectively put Linux into the club with Microsoft, but has left all the other operating system communities -- and their developers -- with much less available clout for requesting documentation. In a more fair world, the Linux vendors would work with us, and the device driver support in all free operating systems would be fantastic by now. We only ask that users help us in changing the political landscape.
Source: OpenBSD
Added: 02 May 2007
Tags: openbsd, artwork
Ogg version (8.3 Mb, 4 minutes 19 seconds), MP3 version (4.1 Mb, 4 minutes 19 seconds)
OpenBSD 4.0 Release Song - Humppa negala
The last 10 years, every 6 month period has (without fail) resulted in an official OpenBSD release making it to the FTP servers. But CDs are also manufactured, which the project sells to continue our development goals. While tests of the release binaries are done by developers around the world, Theo and some developers from Calgary or Edmonton (such as Peter Valchev or Bob Beck) test that the discs are full of (only) correct code. Ty Semaka works for approximately two months to design and draw artwork that will fit the designated theme, and coordinates with his music buddies to write and record a song that also matches the theme. Then the discs and all the artwork gets delivered to the plant, so that they can be pressed in time for an official release date. This release, instead of bemoaning vendors or organizations that try to make our task of writing free software more difficult, we instead celebrate the 10 years that we have been given (so far) to write free software, express our themes in art, and the 5 years that we have made music with a group of talented musicians. OpenBSD developers have been torturing each other for years now with Humppa-style music, so this release our users get a taste of this too. Sometimes at hackathons you will hear the same songs being played on multiple laptops, out of sync. It is under such duress that much of our code gets written. We feel like Pufferix and Bobilix delivering The Three Discs of Freedom to those who want them whenever the need arises, then returning to celebrate the (unlocked) source tree with all the other developers. For RSS readers: Please note that the download URL is an FTP site.
Source: OpenBSD
Added: 10 October 2006
Tags: openbsd, artwork
Ogg version (3.6 Mb, 2 minutes 40 seconds), MP3 version (2.3 Mb, 2 minutes 40 seconds)