We are always thrilled when we see design projects around free culture. Lately the blog Manystuff has enlightened a lot of this kind of projects, either on/with Open Source or around free of charge culture, public domain…

Here is a summary:

• Free Kevin — A Hacker screening series — Can’t find the torrent link anymore…
• General Public Library —  http://www.artingeneral.org/exhibitions/504 and http://www.generalpubliclibrary.info/ : Nguyen invited designers, publishers, curators, artists, galleries, and musicians to contribute publications to the project that reflect the donor’s practice, methodology, inspiration and interest. Visitors are encouraged to donate a favourite book to the library during the exhibition. — Although the project shares the same acronym as GNU’s General Public Licence, licenses are not the subject here. But the project has the merit to gather projects closer to this philosophy: aaaarg, Free Kevin…
• Morf — A magazine for graphic design (in Dutch) — Free of charge for students, paying for non-students. Republication/translation of major articles together with new articles.
• The Dor — The Dor is an ever-growing digital archive of out of print artist books. Eventually, it will culminate in an online database of hard to find artists books, which users may page through and print on demand. Currently, it finds form as a temporary office, where loaned titles are scanned, documented, and sometimes reprinted. Visitors may also contribute to this ever-growing library of titles. The project is made possible by collaborations with book collectors, artists, curators and friends.
• Sexy Machinery — Architectural magazine as a way of exploring issues of copyright and ownership
• Open Source Digest — Compilation of texts from the public domain. But if this digest is open source, where are the sources?
• A Wikipedia Reader — CC-BY-NC-SA — Artists are asked to make a parcours of reading in Wikipedia.
• Free — Exhibition “explor[ing] how the internet has fundamentally changed our landscape of information and our notion of public space.” A lot of material around this exhibition is available online, with long essays. Looks much more interesting than the introductory speech confusing free as in freedom and free as in free beer. Hopefully, during the exhibition, artist Steve Lambert made a speech/city-walk about the history of free culture as in freedom and/or as in free beer (punk rock culture, Free Software history…). No copyright/left mentions though, and without any notice it is “all rights reserved”…
• Re-Applied Art — Workshop by Dexter Sinister asking the participants to re-use a hundred items from Dot Dot Dot magazine archive.
• Agreement to Receive & Exchange this Book — An attempt at an alternative currency during an art book fair.

We can still see some confusion in some of this project about what is free or open source, but we welcome these initiatives. Hope this list will grow faster and faster!