Free Software Related
| The Free Software Foundation | The Free Software Foundation (FSF) was formed allready in the middle of the eighties and have always been a cornerstone for the movement. Their site is filled with texts and essays explaining the ideas and moral aspects of free software. Heavy, but very worthwhile eye-opening reading. The site is a combined FSF and GNU site, which might be confusing at first. The GNU-project is FSF's attempt to provide a complete, free UNIX-like operating system and many of todays most important free programs have been developed as part of the GNU project. |
| The Cathedral &The Bazaar | The Cathedral & The Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond is an analysis of the free software movement, trying to (and doing a quite good job at) explaining the culture of the free software movement, how free software projects work and why it works so very well. This is a very good introductory text on the subject! |
| Freshmeat.net | Freshmeat.net is the largest, indexed collection of free software for Linux/UNIX. |
| Linux.com | Linux is today the most popular free Operating System and is a posterchild for the whole movement. Linux.com is a portal that is a good starting point for everything Linux and Free Software related. |
| Sourceforge.com | Sourceforge is a large site that hosts and provides infrastructure for free software projects. Many well known projects (and even more unknown) projects are hosted by Sourceforge. |
| Slashdot.org | A very popular news and discussion site that labels itself as "News for nerds, stuff that matters..." and covers things that interests the average geek like Science, Linux, Free Software, The Internet, Legislation that affects computer users, your rights online etc. The discussions following the news are often very interesting and educating both to read and take part in, although they sometimes gets totally derailed and results in flamewars (you have been warned!). |
| Kuro5hin.org | News and discussion site, reminding a lot about Slashdot, but with a slightly different focus and culture. |
MP3 Related
| MP3.com | The biggest MP3-related site on the net. Tons of free music to download, including a lot of very good and professional music. |
| MP3 Haven | A good starting point for everything MP3 related! |
| MP3' Tech | MP3 Tech focuses on the technical aspects of MP3, testing and comparing encoders and players etc. Has also a programmers corner that has a lot of info on the MP3 format, along with source code for encoders and players. |
| Daily Updated MP3 Software | This page has the most complete list of MP3 software I've ever seen. All the latest MP3 Players, Encoders, CD-Rippers, FrontEnds etc can be downloaded from here. Also have a lot of mp3 related stuff and links like chat room, guides, FAQs, news and charts. |
| UsE! | UsE! is "The User Oriented MP3 Encoding Guide" and includes quality and speed tests of all the popular MP3 encoders. I found the quality tests here to be more true to reality than those found at mp3bench.com. Somewhat out of date though. |
| ID3v2 | The homepage for the ID3v2 standard for tagging MP3 files. A lot of info about both ID3v1 and ID3v2 can be found here as well as ID3Lib, the recommended library for handling ID3v2 frames. |