Open Source Films

Last update : July 9, 2013

Open source films (open-content movies, free-content movies or open movies) are films which are produced and distributed by using free and open-source software methodologies. Their sources are freely available and the licenses used meet the demands of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the Free Cultural Works.

A list of free-content films is available at Wikipedia.

Here are the open source films where the sources are available.

1. Films made by Blender Institute, part of the Blender Foundation, a non-profit organization, chaired by Ton Roosendaal, responsible for the development of Blender, an open source program for three-dimensional modeling  :

Open source film Elephants Dream

Elephants Dream

This 10 minutes short movie is about complexities of a machine and how the characters deal with this complexity and ambiguity.

Open source film Big Buck Bunny

Big Buck Bunny

This short-animated movie is about three critters that poke fun at other jungle animals including a big rabbit called Big Buck Bunny. Therefore Big Buck starts to seek vengeance for himself and his beloved butterflies.

Open source film Sintel

Sintel

A girl called Sintel is searching for her dragon friend Scales.

Open source film Tears of Steal

Tears of Steel

This open source film is about a group of warriors and scientists, who gathered at the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam to stage a crucial event from the past, in a desperate attempt to rescue the world from destructive robots.

The Blender Institute created also an open video game, called Yo Frankie!, based on the universe and characters of the film Big Buck Bunny.

2. Open source films made by other creators and teams :

The boy who never slept

Boy who never slept

This film is about a 23 year-old writer who has felt in love with a 16 year old school girl.

.re_potemkin

.re_potemkin

This project is a re-build of the 1925 silent movie Battleship Potemkin which is in public domain now.

Oceania

Oceania

A story of two teenagers who deal with their shattered family-life in a small California coastal town.

Sita Sings the Blues

Sita Sings the Blues

This 80-minutes animated feature film has been created by a single person and is based on the renowned Indian Sanskrit epic The Ramayana.

Jathias Wager

Jathias Wager

A science fiction film about a young man living in an isolated community of humans who must make a life changing decision about his future species.

Valkaama

Valkaama

Three young people are searching for a utopian society in northern Finland called Valkaama; a society that is full of harmony, peace and poetry.

More than ten additional open-content films will be released in the next future.

Different compressed and lossless encoded versions of open-source films are available at Xiph.org. More informations about open source films are provided at the following links :

Open Data

Opte Project

A hall of fame of data visualization projects is presented at the digital-art section of Leslie’s Artgallery.

50 great examples of data visualization are presented by the Mass Media Group.

New Zealander Richard MacManus published the contribution “Where to Find Open Data on the Web” on his blog ReadWriteWeb, one of the most popular technology blogs in the world, known for offering insightful analysis about each day’s Internet industry news.

A list of useful links to open source data sets is given below:

Social Web

OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google, and released November 1, 2007 (version 0.6). Based on HTML and JavaScript, as well as the Google Gadgets framework, OpenSocial includes four APIs for social software applications to access data and core functions on participating social networks :

  • General JavaScript API
  • People and Friends : people and relationship information
  • Activities : publishing and accessing user activity information
  • Persistence (simple key-value pair data for server-free stateful applications

OpenSocial is currently in alpha development, version 0.8 was released on May 28, 2008. Applications implementing the OpenSocial APIs will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them. OpenSocial is rumored to be part of a larger social networking initiative by Google code-named “Maka-Maka”. An Apache incubator open source project, Shindig, was launched in December, 2007, to provide a reference implementation of the OpenSocial standards.

Open Directory Project

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. The web continues to grow at staggering rates. Automated search engines are increasingly unable to turn up useful results to search queries. The Open Directory provides the means for the Internet to organize itself. As the Internet grows, so do the number of net-citizens. These citizens can each organize a small portion of the web and present it back to the rest of the population, culling out the bad and useless and keeping only the best content.

The Open Directory was founded in the spirit of the Open Source movement, and is the only major directory that is 100% free. There is not, nor will there ever be, a cost to submit a site to the directory, and/or to use the directory’s data. The Open Directory data is made available for free to anyone who agrees to comply to the free use license.

Open Science Project : Jmol

JMOL

The OpenScience project is dedicated to writing and releasing free and Open Source scientific software. The OpenScience project is managed by a group of scientists, mathematicians and engineers who want to encourage a collaborative environment in which science can be pursued by anyone who is inspired to discover something new about the natural world.

Among the six interrelated projects pursued is Jmol, an Open Source Java/Swing based molecular dynamics viewer.

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