Dear all!
Forgetting we have up to 26 hours difference between 2 end points on the
same planet and that a few teams have already celebrated SFD or will
until almost end of October, SFD is here!
While we are sure everyone is super busy with the last minute
preparations we would like to draw your attention on the excellent
community participation this year in making SFD a success. We have
received many contributions of all kinds and we would like to thank and
highlight those as they can be used to enhance your event.
First for those still looking for a topic to present we have finally
managed to upload our slides on "Why software freedom matters". Lots of
notes have been added to the slides in order to let almost anyone make
the presentation. It's however good to think about the topic before hand
and be prepared for questions.
Slides available at
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Resources#Software_Freedom
I suppose you are also aware that we've had 2 great songs contributed
from 2 different teams from the Philippines, both licensed under
CC-BY-SA. One of the 2 even has a KTV version should you think of making
singing games. Either way those will be great to add color to your event
and definitely some great atmosphere!
Songs and details, credits, lyrics available from
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Resources#Songs
And since we're covering atmosphere, music and giveaways we would like
to remind teams distributing non-free GNU/Linux distributions that we
are providing a notice to be included with those CDs to let people know
about the hidden non-free software they will be getting on the spot or
later. Users need to understand what is included in the software you may
be distributing. While we totally understand that some people already
have bought their hardware and may just be discovering software freedom
(thus needing proprietary drivers for example) it is our duty to let
them know they can chose to buy hardware that is fully supported by free
software on their next purchase, or be careful about the type of
software they chose to install in the future.
The notice has been pre-formatted to be easily printed and is available
is English, Spanish and Portuguese thanks to our translators.
Link to the English notice page is
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Resources/CdNotice . You can easily
navigate to the other versions from there.
Another excellent suggestion from our sfd-discuss mailing list has been
to hang out on the #sfd irc channel on freenode to show the global
nature of SFD. We have a web interface from the website or you can point
your audience to specific free IRC clients that will run on their
platform. Should the English channel be over populated with non-English
discussions feel free to create language specific channels such as
#sfd-es, #sfd-ru or #sfd-jp.
Last but not least do not forget to document your events, take photos,
blog or share the news on social networks. The official tag for SFD is
#softwarefreedomday. The great news is that this year SFD Competition
has attracted great sponsors again: first we are happy and proud to have
the Free Software Foundation provide Richard Stallman books signed by
himself. And then Lemote, the Chinese computer manufacturer of fully
free hardware (BIOS including) will be supplying 1 Yeeloong per winning
team so you can fiddle with MIPS CPU and fully free software machines!
So thank you to all, it has really been a fun ride until now and we
truly believe that this year celebration is going to be exceptional!
Happy SFD to all!
on behalf of
Software Freedom International
