opensource.com

Using open source components has become the de facto way to develop modern applications. The increased adoption of open source has brought with it a new set of challenges and obstacles, and Tidelift, for the fourth year in a row, has laun

I make it no secret that I love Lego, but I've moved far away from my Lego collection, and shipping a closet full of classic Lego sets all the way around the world is currently a problematic proposal. I've done a lot of virtualization to solve this problem, from building models in Lego CAD to styling models with a Lego texture in Blender. Recently I discovered Goxel.

Digital painting is an art form all its own. It obviously emulates the discipline it's named for, but painting in the physical world and a digital environment is unique. Krita is a digital paint application that's seen use at major film production houses, book publishers, and art studios. It specializes in materials emulation, allowing the artist to adjust and fine-tune their tools through a brush engine so that they can achieve exactly the look and drawing feel they need.

In film post-production, there's a phase called compositing, which puts the actual footage in a camera with footage generated purely by software. What that actually means to the compositing artist depends on the movie. Sometimes there are just a few overlays, other times there's some minor special effect like laser beams or explosions, sometimes it's a green screen, and still other times it's a little bit of everything. Most video editing applications can do basic compositing.

I'm a huge fan of open source.

One of the little ways I've supported the cause is by keeping my personal blog site open from the very beginning. I do this partly to let people see the history of changes behind each page. But I also do it because, when I started using Jekyll, I didn't find many open source Jekyll blogs to learn from. My hope is that keeping my website open and exposing my trials and errors will save someone else a lot of time.

If ever you've been curious about making music, you'll be pleased to know that the open source digital audio workstation Ardour makes it easy and fun, regardless of your level of experience. Ardour is one of those unique applications that manages to span beginner-level hobbyists all the way to production-critical professionals and serves both equally well. Part of what makes it great is its flexibility in how you can accomplish any given task and how most common tasks have multiple levels of possible depth.

It's hard to say how good photographs happen. You have to be in the right place at just the right moment. You have to have a camera at the ready and an eye for composition. And that's just the part that happens in the camera. There's a whole other stage to great photography that many people don't think about. It used to happen with lights and chemicals in a darkroom, but with today's digital tools, post-production happens in darkroom software.

When you start Vim with the --clean option, it shows up in "vanilla" mode. No plugins, no configuration, just back to the roots. I have collected a ton of configuration statements over the years, some of them dating from MS-DOS or Windows 3.1. Here is the deal: I will start from scratch to find a good starting-point configuration with just the plugins available in Fedora 35. Will I survive a week of coding? I'll find out!

Inkscape is an illustration application, and it works in vectors to ensure limitless resolution for your drawings. Vector illustration is different from freehand illustration. If you're used to drawing freehand, vectors may at first feel restrictive, but once you get used to how vectors get created and how you can use them to construct an image, it's a powerful way to build visuals of all sorts. And if you're not much of an illustrator at all, you might just find that the hands-off approach of vectors means you can draw in Inkscape even though you can't draw with pen and paper.

Apache ShardingSphere is an open source distributed database, plus an ecosystem users and developers need for their database to provide a customized and cloud-native experience. In the three years since it joined the Apache Foundation, the ShardingSphere core team has worked hard with the community to create an open source, robust, and distributed database and a supporting ecosystem.

Krita is best known as a digital painting application, but in my experience, it's kind of a digital imaging powerhouse. Recently, a fork of GIMP called GLIMPSE had to pause its development, and because I like alternatives, it occurred to me that Krita could be a reasonable photo editor for at least some use cases. It isn't easy to measure the suitability of an application for a group of tasks because different people require or prefer different things. What's very common and indispensable to one person is an edge case for someone else.

Many open source software projects get used in software builds every day, which is critical for almost every organization. Open source software brings many benefits and helps software developers focus on innovation and efficiency rather than reinventing the wheel.

There's something special about maps. I remember opening the front book cover of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit when I was younger, staring at the hand-drawn map of Middle Earth, and feeling the wealth of possibility contained in the simple drawing. Aside from their obvious purpose of actually describing where things are in relation to other things, I think maps do a great job of expressing potential. You could step outside and take the road this way or that way, and if you do, just think of all the new and exciting things you'll be able to see.

There are many file formats used to store digital audio, and they're good for different purposes. Digital audio is, of course, only a representation of sound, a rendering of soundwaves that get translated into sound by a decoder and a set of speakers. Some audio formats, generically called lossless formats, aim to encode audio close to its original analog form. Still, there's a lot of data in the real world, and as yet, digital can only approximate it in very large files.

Do you have videos you need to cut together but find video editing applications too complex? Flowblade is a minimal video editing application designed to enable you to assemble a cut of your video quickly and easily.

Whether it's due to snow days, a seasonal vacation, or time off for any number of holidays, December is a great time to settle down in front of your computer and get creative. One of my favorite pastimes is cutting video footage together. Sometimes I edit video to tell a story. Other times I edit video to convey a mood or a single idea, and sometimes I do it to provide visuals to music I've either discovered or composed. Maybe it's because I learned to edit film at a school while aiming for a career in the field, or maybe it's just because I like powerful open source tools.

The Audacity sound editor is one of those open source applications that filled a niche that seemingly nobody else realized existed. Initially developed at Carnegie Mellon University at a time when many people still thought computers were just for office and schoolwork, and you required special DSP peripherals for serious multimedia work. Audacity recognized that, occasionally, the average computer user needed to edit audio. The Audacity team has consistently provided an open source application for recording and cleaning up sound in the two decades since.

I edit a lot of text files. Sometimes it's code. Other times it's the written word for role-playing games (RPGs), programming books, or general correspondence. Sometimes it's nice to make a change, but for my collaborator to compare my change with what they originally had written. Many people default to office suites, like LibreOffice, using comments or change tracking features.

There are many ways to install software, but you get an option not available elsewhere with open source: You can compile the code yourself. The classic three-step process to compile source code: