Free Culture at Virginia Tech is a chapter of
Students for Free Culture.
We have meetings every Tuesday at 8:00pm in
Johnston Student Center (GBJ) North Lounge.
Students for Free Culture is an international
chapter-based student organization that promotes
the public interest in intellectual property and
information and communications technology policy.
For example, we use free software like GNU/Linux,
follow RIAA lawsuits, and listen to Creative Commons
licensed music. Check out our
wiki,
join our mailing list,
or come by some time to find out more!
May 08, 2010
The FreedomPack, a project of our chapter that provides a disc of free software for Windows and Mac OS X users, has been released to BitTorrent today. The software includes:
- Mozilla Firefox
- Mozilla Thunderbird
- OpenOffice.org
- Pidgin (Windows) or Adium (Mac OS X)
- Sumatra PDF (Windows) or Skim (Mac OS X)
- Audacity
- Celestia
- Code::Blocks
- Neverball
- The Battle for Wesnoth
- Crack Attack!
We have uploaded to both Mininova, where we have a content distribution account, and The Pirate Bay. Download, seed, and enjoy.
April 21, 2010
Free Culture at Virginia Tech will be hosting a LAN party for free games on Sunday. Games being played include Nexuiz, BZFlag, Wormux, and Battle for Wesnoth. If you have a suggestion (it must be multiplayer over a LAN and meet the definition of a Free Cultural Work) please let us know on our wiki.
Bring Ethernet cable and a decent PC. Most machines from the last year or so will be fine, so long as the graphics are discrete (ATI or NVIDIA, not Intel). We will provide copies of all games for all of the major operating systems at the event.
- Date: Sunday, April 25th
- Time: 2:00pm-9:00 pm
- Place: 102 Johnston Student Center
February 03, 2010
The following lists our times and locations for the remainder of the semester.
2/08: Monday, 8:00 PM, North Lounge Johnston Student Center
2/15: Monday, 8:00 PM, 104 Johnston Student Center
2/22: Monday, 8:00 PM, 145 Squires Student Center
3/1 through 5/3, excluding Spring Break: Every Tuesday at 8:00 PM in 104 Johnston Student Center
Sorry for the inconvenience this causes. Next semester’s schedule will hopefully be more consistent.
October 21, 2009
Due to bureaucratic error, we have moved our meeting location from Torgerson 3180 to Squires Cardinal. The meeting time and day have not changed. The room should be more comfortable than our old meeting place, however we do not have a projector anymore.
August 25, 2009
We will have a table at Gobblerfest. If you are in the Blacksburg area, feel free to stop by.
- Date: Friday, August 28th
- Time: 2:00pm-7:00 pm
- Place: Outside Squires Student Center
August 19, 2009
The IRC applet on the IRC page has been changed from Mibbit to qwebirc. This was done for two reasons:
- Mibbit is proprietary, while qwebirc is licensed under the GNU GPLv2.
- Mibbit was not working (it never worked for me anyway).
Like Mibbit, you will need a Web browser that supports JavaScript to use qwebirc. NoScript users should whitelist freenode.net to use the applet.
July 29, 2009
Virginia Tech has made it official: Scholar will be replacing Blackboard completely by Fall of 2010.
Scholar will become Virginia Tech’s online system for learning and collaboration, after three years of development and evaluation, with full implementation by Fall 2010, announced Provost Mark McNamee and Vice President for Information Technology Erv Blythe. Learning Technologies will discontinue Blackboard service at that time.
Scholar is the Virginia Tech label for the community source software Sakai. Sakai is a platform for innovation jointly developed through collaboration among several universities including Virginia Tech, along with Michigan, Indiana, Virginia, Cambridge, Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley, Rutgers, Yale, Georgia Tech, University of Cape Town, and others. By keeping development within the academic community, control of ongoing development and improvements remains within and serves the academic community.
Faculty may start using Scholar at any time.
June 17, 2009
Richard Todd Sexglasses, friend of our chapter, is interviewing various local and underground musicians about various issues relating to the free culture community. The topics include file sharing, sampling, cover songs, “bootleg” copies, and other issues, and how they feel it affects them and their music. The interviews are up on our university’s radio station’s (WUVT) Web site, as part of the WOOVE.
Here are the interviews so far:
Dead Western
Justin Duerr of Northern Liberties
Matt Garfield (no relation to this poster) of Mose Giganticus
Chris Johnson of Ghost Mice
More should surface over the summer.
March 03, 2009
Welcome to Students for Free Culture. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
February 07, 2009
Remix artist Girl Talk is coming to Virginia Tech, sponsored by the Virginia Tech Union.
- Date: Thursday, February 26th
- Time: 7:30pm
- Place Squires Commonwealth