Just one week left of the MediaGoblin campaign! Next Friday, the 18th of April, will be the last day of the campaign.
There's also never been clearer reason for why we need MediaGoblin (and the whole intersections of free culture and free software at that!) to succeed. As you may have seen, Sony did a takedown of the Blender Open Movie project, Sintel, from YouTube. It's not the first time either... there was also a takedown of a Elephants Dream and Sintel remix done by Pitivi contributor Jean-François Fortin Tam. In both of these examples, the materials were 100% free culture, Creative Commons Attribution licensed films. There was no infringement. But the takedowns happened anyway.
This is a symptom of a world where we leave the production and publication of media in the hands of large corporate silos. It doesn't look pretty.
Luckily, a better world is possible, and you can help make it happen! Here are three great ways you can vote with your pocketbook for a better media future in areas of content authorship, editing, and publication:
Donate to the Gooseberry campaign by the wonderful Blender folks! After all, it's thanks to the Blender people that we have Sintel, Elephants Dream and friends. We need more of these projects. Support free culture film production with free software tooling! Not to mention that Gooseberry looks like it's going to produce a really cute and creative feature length film, so that's enough reasons for me to shut up so you can give them your money. They also wrote a nice writeup on Why Gooseberry Matters on the Gooseberry blog.
Next up, there's the Pitivi video editor, which is also running a fundraiser right now. You may have noticed that video editing in free software is, er, not exactly easy right now. Luckily for us, the Pitivi editor provides a great opportunity to bring user-friendly, beautifully written video editor software to the free software desktop. The Pitivi folks are good friends, and familiar allies. Not only do we see eye to eye on the issues at stake, we use pretty similar technology... we both make extensive use of Python and GStreamer!
And last of all, of course we ask that you donate to MediaGoblin! Once you have awesome media, you need a way to get it out to your audience. As we've seen above, we just can't rely on corporate controlled silos to act in our best interests. This is why we're building MediaGoblin so that it is software that acts for you and your needs... software not controlled by any one group, but out there, decentralized on the net, the way things are supposed to be.
While we're on that subject, this is a good time to remind you that if you've been considering donating but you haven't yet, now is such a great time to do so. We've got a active 10k matching grant which means that donations are being doubled! We've passed our first funding milestone, but we're even closer than we look on reaching our second... as soon as we hit 46k, the 10k matching takes effect like magic, and we're at 56k... which puts us right near the edge of our second goal!
So what are you waiting for? There's more clear reasons than ever to join our goblin force and help us build a better internet for everyone!
