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Simply stated, open-source software is computer software whose source code is available under a copyright license that permits users to study, change, and improve the software, and to freely distribute it to potential users. If you've never heard of open source software, you're not alone. Commercial, or proprietary, software has dominated the computer industry for many years. Most school personnel have understandably assumed that commercial software was the only option available.

Simply stated, open-source software is computer software whose source code is available under a copyright license that permits users to study, change, and improve the software, and to freely distribute it to potential users. If you've never heard of open source software, you're not alone. Commercial, or proprietary, software has dominated the computer industry for many years. Most school personnel have understandably assumed that commercial software was the only option available.

Curriki is more than your average website; we're a community of educators, learners and committed education experts who are working together to create quality materials that will benefit teachers and students around the world. Curriki is an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them. Our name is a play on the combination of 'curriculum' and 'wiki' which is the technology we're using to make education universally accessible. Curriki is built on the XWiki platform, an open source development platform and "Next Generation Wiki" application developed in Java and released the LGPL open source license. Curriki is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation. Download a summary of Curriki's history and mission: CurrikiBrochureApril2009.pdf.

A few resources for the classroom, free and open source.

"Mibew Messenger (also known as Open Web Messenger) is an open-source live support application written in PHP and MySQL. It enables one-on-one chat assistance in real-time directly from your website."

"In the spirit of the open source movement, new copyright-friendly (and some copyleft) archives are emerging, removing many of the legal and ethical thorns relating to image use in student production. In addition, a number of government image archives provide their archives with limited restrictions. Check out this cool video for an explanation of new, alternate forms of licensing: Creative Commons Video http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/getcreative/clicktoplay.html Most of the images in the collections below include images with a variety of less restrictive licensing. Though students may not need to ask permission to use them when publishing on the Web for educational purposes, they should cite these images unless otherwise notified! Important: Any copyright notices on these pages, should be read carefully and heeded!"

convert your old cds to mp3 with one click. dead easy, open-source software.

"A raccoon with the word "why" Phylo is a project that began as a reaction to the following nugget of information: Kids know more about Pokemon creatures than they do about real creatures*. We think there's something wrong with that. Apparently, so do many others. picture of a bird with the word "what" Phylo is: (1) a card game that makes use of the wonderful, complex, and inspiring things that inform the notion of biodiversity; (2) an exercise in crowd sourcing, open access, and open game development; and (3) FREAKIN' AWESOME! picture of a plant with the word "who" The phylo project is the product of the kind and (frankly) amazing contributions of many many individuals who have given art, science expertise, gaming advice, programming chops, and more. A card usually begins its life by someone submitting art to this Flickr pool, but you can also develop new games, help out with programming, or providing general feedback by leaving comments on the blog or forum. picture of a lady bug and the word "how" You can Start quickly by printing yourself a starter deck and checking out a set of rules. Alternatively, you can just collect and print the cards by going to the card section and "select"ing the ones you like."

Interesting editable open source textbooks

LibreOffice is the power-packed free, libre and open source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and GNU/Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base.

An open source and free alternative to Photoshop ? No, much more than that.

"The app opens to a series of templates, which include basic, contemporary, modern type, classic, editorial, and craft. I'm assuming that you can also use custom created templates that have been downloaded from external sources as well. When a template is chosen, it switches into edit mode, which reminds me a lot of Keynote. There's a bar on the left that organizes all of your pages, and the window on the right displays the page currently being worked on. I chose to experiment with a picture book that also has some text. "

Open source tool enabling folks to create timelines allowing for interaction in over 40 languages.

One of the great things about Twitter is the wealth of useful links that get shared between users. My conservative estimate is that 25% of the resources that I've bookmarked over the last few years have come from Twitter users. The one thing that I wish Twitter had was an option for bookmarking those links without having to open them outside of Twitter. Packrati.us was built to do just that, bookmark links without leaving Twitter. To get started using Packrati.us authorize the service to access your Twitter account and your Delicious account. Once you've authorized Packrati.us it bookmarks in Delicious all of the links you Tweet or reTweet. If you're a frequent user of services like Four Square or Gowalla you can tell Packrati.us to ignore links from those sources. Packrati.us also allows you to specify hashtags to ignore or to add to your links.

A very good alternative to Flicker: use pictures without worrying about licenses and copyrights.

I learned of Twine from Richard Byrne's Free Technology 4 Teachers blog post. It is great to see an opensource option that one can download and run locally or remain on the web to write.