There are some things a free desktop just can't do without: a web browser, music player and, oh yes, clipart! Looking at the selection available by default on a standard Linux install, you might begin to envy your colleagues who use Microsoft Word, and then you notice their snazzy font selection. Well worry no more, for two projects are here to supply all the illegible fonts and amusing stick men your hard drive can keep track of.

With the UK Government considering yet another extension of copyright, demonstrating the value of the public domain is a hot topic for free culture advocates. When the copyright expires on creative works they enter the "public domain", a digital wild west with no legal restrictions on their use. The public domain illustrates a classic free culture dilemna: the absence of restrictions is useful, but the ability to get hold of a copy is equally important, and it's difficult to claim you have much creative freedom without both.

In their zeal to denounce certain license clauses, some free culture advocates have fallen back on definitions to advocate their cause. But such definitions make hasty assumptions about the nature of cultural practice. It's just not a proper movement without semantic squabbles. Where would Linux be without the snappy FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) catchphrase?

According to Greek myth, when Theseus went to defeat the Minotaur in Crete, he was able to find his way out of the labyrinth by laying and then following a thread he was given by Ariadne, a Cretan princess. Whilst laying a GPS breadcrumb trail on bike rides, later to be converted into a map, I like to think of myself as a latter-day Ariadne.

Creative Commons licenses have a totemic status within the free culture movement. Always controversial, yet used for tens of millions of web-based creative works, they have helped bring the ideas of the free software movement to entirely new audiences. But they have also had an uneasy relationship with certain free software communities, in particular the Debian project's legal team. Now, with the drafting of version 3.0 of the generic licenses, issues such as these are being aired.

The second iCommons summit, held at the end of June in Rio de Janeiro, proved many things about the free culture movement. The most exciting development is that we're growing rapidly, both in terms of the numbers of activists and advocates who identify themselves with the movement, and in terms of the quantity of content being distributed under free licenses. But the summit also highlighted some issues that iCommons needs to address if it is to maintain its vitality and legitimacy. This article is is a friendly prod that I hope will strengthen and unite the community.

Software is a tool, a compilation of code that directs computer hardware, a program that empowers people to work more productively. Before Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project, many outside of hacker communities would have reasonably asked: why on earth is the ethics of software distribution philosophically interesting?

From the BBC to the Beastie Boys, big names are signing up to give away their copyrights. Tom Chance offers a beginners' guide to Creative Commons