I have been throwing myself into web design lately. Like music, it provides a certain amount of creative satisfaction. Unlike music, it provides a steady paycheck.

In November, I bought a new MacBook, which allows me to run Windows (for the necessary website proofing in IE7) and Ubuntu along with OSX. I have been exploring the burgeoning Mac open source software community, and here are some of my current favorites. While I have been enjoying the obvious choices on every Mac open source list (Firefox, VLC, Handbrake, Transmission, Cyberduck), I’ll focus on some you may not have heard of.

Cog: the anti iTunes

Cog doesn’t have an online store, track ratings, CoverFlow, or most of iTunes other slick touches. So why do I keep coming back to Cog? Simple things. First of all, it plays nearly every audio format, including ogg and flac files, which are increasingly a part of my music collection. Second, it doesn’t try to manage my music collection or hijack my optical drive. It just plays the tracks I ask it to play. Third, it Audio Scrobbles, and I’m enjoying tracking my listens on Last.FM.

Bean: the Anti Word Processor

Bean doesn’t merge your mailing labels, sync with your spreadsheets and calendar, or manage your footnotes and bibliography. It just does what I want a word processor to do about 90% of the time when I open one. It just takes dictation from my fingers, and allows me to apply simple formatting, then save it in a tiny, standardized file format. Was that really so hard?

Disk Inventory X: Find that Cruft that’s filling up your hard drive

Apparently there is no such thing as too much hard drive space. While I made do with a couple of floppy disks in high school, now I have terabytes of drives around the house, and they always seem to be full. Disk Inventory X scans your drive, and gives you a visual representation of the acreage each folder and file takes up on your disk drive. Genius.

Apple TV latest info on Engadget

According to Apple’s marketing campaign, if it’s on iTunes, it’s on the Apple TV. That may be true for Apple’s early adopters who plopped down $299 for the privilege of porting their media from their computer to their television. But it wasn’t true for Apple’s Global Sales Training Department, which frantically contacted me about a month ago, seeking to use my music for the launch of their Apple TV Sales Training DVD.

It seems that the training department and the marketing department had gotten their schedules mixed up. The training DVDs were ready to ship, but the demo content had not been cleared for such a use, so Apple staff turned to the internets, searching for unsigned artists with open licenses on their music, who would consent to being included on the training DVD. Apple found my music on Jamendo. I’m assuming I’m not the only Jamendo artist they contacted that day.

My music happens to be available through iTunes. But it was not iTunes which brought me to Apple’s attention. It was Jamendo. A small, French, Bittorrent-based, Creative Commons licensed music community.

I was told that my music was a good fit for the project, and asked to participate. I promptly and politely replied, asking how many DVDs would be distributed and whether I could receive a copy. But they never responded.

Not including poor communication skills, I came up with a couple of theories why I never heard back from Apple:

1. At the final hour, the marketing department got their act together
2. My requests indicated that I was wary of contributing, and too much hassle to deal with.
3. Apple did include my music, without my permission, and without informing me that they would actually do so, beyond an initial inquiry.

So I’d love to know. Who else heard from Apple on February 14th? And does anyone out there have the Apple TV Training DVD? Because I’d love to see it, or at least know what music ended up on the disc.

But whether or not I ever hear anything more about the Training DVD, this amusing episode gave me some additional insight into Apple and their media empire. Exactly one week before, Steve Jobs posted his Thoughts on Music wherein he, disingenuously, I believe, claimed that he was opposed to DRM. Apple, it seems is aware of all the alternative sources for music out there. And we’re not just talking Zune. We’re talking Jamendo, Magnatune and all of the other Creative Commons and public domain artists.

It also suggests that copyright and DRM are serious impediments, not only to consumers and artists, but to the very businesses which are built on proprietary software and strict intellectual property controls. And because of this, those of us who create and support open licenses stand to benefit — not just artistically, but perhaps financially as well.