SFD-announce

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sfd-announce@mailman3.com

September 2011

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1 message

SFD is today!

by Frederic Muller - SFI

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

Sept. 16, 2011