KRUU's operations, guidelines and underlying philosophies owe a lot to the Free and Open Source Software movements, and the associated spin-offs such as Creative Commons. There are a number of reasons for this, chief amongst which is the whole premise behind Community Radio.

KRUU's founders built the station with a clear mission of Community. The Community Radio license under which KRUU operates is not just a matter of convenience and cost (in general low-power radio licenses have lower fees that full-power, and this in turn means that the overhead is slightly lower). The main purpose is to give voice to a rich and unique community. In KRUU's case this vibrant community happens to be Fairfield, Iowa. But Community Radio worldwide provides a vehicle for every group to broadcast themselves!

KRUU's Community mission deigned that everything the organization did was transparent, simple to replicate and accessible to every person in the immediate community. Given that Fairfield, Iowa is a relatively unique mix of artists, educators, farmers, visionaries, and revolutionaries the question of easy access for this broad listener and contributor base virtually requires that the barrier to entry be virtually zero. This is where Free and Open Source software steps in.

At KRUU we believe that all the software we use to produce and broadcast our shows MUST be available to anyone in the community. This means that they must be able to customize the software, get the latest versions, and not have any restrictions on it's use. There are a number of reasons why these requirements are essential, and these are addressed very well in other places. But in order for our community to be able to participate in our project, they needed to be able to produce content with virtually no barrier to entry, and yet provide the highest quality.

This is exactly what solutions like Audacity, Ardour, and the entire Ubuntu Studio suite provided.

The other side of the coin is the creations that KRUU airs. KRUU encourages the use of Free/Open Source Software for creating and disseminating our broadcast material. But should not this broadcast content be just as accessible as the tools which we used to produce it?

We believe it should, and therefore encourage the use of Creative Commons licenses for all our hosts' content. The license that KRUU adopts is the Creative-Commons-By-Non-Commercial-3.0 license, which basically states that everything that we have the rights to that we provide for public consumption may be redistributed without restriction so long as there is no commercial use of the content. As long as you are not making money off KRUU hosts' content, you're welcome to spread it far and wide. (In fact if you *do* want to make money off it, all you need to do is contact us and we'll make it easy for you to do so!)

So, that's our reason for believing in and promoting the Free Culture and Open Source models. There are a number of resources online which provide details on these philosophies and their outcomes, which we'll leave as research if you're interested.