Brother, can you spare a blank CD?

By Emery Jeffreys

Posted: 6/30/2007 1:20:47 PM

There is a little bit of everything available on the Internet for starving students.

There are starving student cookbooks, guides for survival on a starving student's budget and entertainment guides with low cost entertainment ideas. And now there is free software for starving students.

Software for Starving Students is a collection of free and open source software all on one CD-ROM. There are versions for Windows and Mac. The software on both versions may differ slightly.

Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized for students (but available to anyone). Volunteers from the group gathered a list of best-in-class programs onto one CD (one disc for OS X, one for Windows), including a fully-featured office suite, a cutting-edge Web browser, multi-media packages, academic tools, programming tools, utilities and games.

The CD is created by a group of volunteers led by Dave Turnbull, president and chief executive officer of Softwarefor.org

"We try to release a collection every semester so students going to school will have a fresh disk," said Turnbull, an information technology grade from Brigham Young University. "We still remember what it is like to try to make ends meet."

In addition to assembling a collection of software that can be downloaded, the group wants to become a 501(c)3 tax exempt organization. That status will help the group raise donations that are exempt from taxes. The group must raise $330 of a $500 goal.

Distributing software to starving students and raising money has its challenges.

"Most of the people who volunteered tend to be technically oriented and they know all about the coolest software," Turnbull said. "We have difficulty at times remembering that our core users may not be technically oriented. We need to constantly remember our core users."

The CD is making inroads in higher education. An instructor at the Art Institute of Charlotte wanted to make copies for his students. The group granted permission. The software license allows unlimited copying rights as long as it is not for commercial puproses.

He said the project has gotten publicity through word of mouth and online articles on a few very high profile Web sites aimed at tech savvy users: Download Squad, Lifehacker, Engadget and 43 Folders. The project has gotten no publicity via mainstream publications and newspapers.

Despite the lack of publicity, about 118,000 people have downloaded the CD-ROM.

"The kids today have it easy; when I was young we had to walk five miles just to use Google to find our free software," said Scott Gilbertson, a reporter with Wired News, when he discovered the package.

"You could of course scour the Web yourself like we used to do, but why bother when someone else has already dug it all up and put in one easy-to-download CD?" Gilbertson said. "Just download, burn a copy and pass it down the hall to your friends. It’s all legal."

If you are adventuresome, downloading the software can teach you a few new skills.

Use a BitTorrent client to download the ISO disk image. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution software written by programmer Bram Cohen and debuted at CodeCon 2002. It is written in Python and is released under the BitTorrent Open Source License (a modified version of the Jabber Open Source License), as of version 4.0.

There are two ways to obtain it:

1. BitTorrent can be faster than conventional direct downloads. The starving students have several hundred volunteers supporting BitTorrent.


2. Download it the same way you download any software from the Internet. Downloads may be slower than BitTorrent.

Both the direct download and the BitTorrent version consist of an ISO disk image. A disk image is a computer file containing the complete contents and structure of a data storage device such as a CD-ROM. Many CD burners include features that convert ISO images to a format that can be read by Windows or Mac computers.

BitTorrent uses peer-to-peer sharing. Peer-to-peer is sometimes controversial because it is used to trade illegal copies of copyrighted software. There is no illegal software in Software for Starving Students.

Merely copying the ISO file to a CD will not make it readable.

Once you have the CD, notice the installation program, at right, that explains each program's purpose. You can pick and choose.