Hi all, Software Freedom Day is proud to announce a fantastic competition to get those creative juices going! With Software Freedom Day only a few months away, on September 16th, we have some excellent prizes to help inspire you to create the best Software Freedom Day ever! Get along to http://softwarefreedomday.org to register your team and start planning your event. You can register for free schwag to give away on the day, and we will soon have additional SFD tshirts for sale as well. There is a Start Guide on the website that will help you with ideas and planning. The competition has two categories. One for individuals and one for teams. Individuals have a chance to win a specially signed tshirt and teams can win an awesome IBM System p5 server. The competition will be judged by the LUG Radio team (http://lugradio.org) and the Software Freedom International board. A signed tshirt is awarded to the best individual submissions for the following categories: * best event photo * best localised version of the offical SFD logo. Some inspiration and examples are at http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Artwork/Logo * best global version of the offical SFD logo * best SFD blog coverage * highest ranking Government offical at SFD event (photo required) - Government official submissions determined to be at equal levels (e.g., two country presidents) will be put into a hat and a winner will be drawn. The prize goes to the community individual who organised the official, not the official personally. An IBM System p5 base level POWER5+ server will be awarded to the best team submissions for each of the following categories: * best SFD event publicity * best SFD documentary * best plan for FOSS deployment project on new server for community benefit * second best plan for FOSS deployment project on new server for community benefit * best SFD event The community benefit prizes are for finding great ways to benefit a community with the servers. We would expect you to implement your plan when you get the servers and send photos and a short write-up about it :) Think about ways you can help your community achieve Software Freedom! Please submit all entries to comp@sf-day.org The tshirts are specially signed by some rocking FOSS stars that continue to inspire us all to new heights. As much as we'd love to have every FOSS star we can think of sign the shirts, we have approached a few that cover some major projects and contributions to FOSS. See a full list of the tshirt signers at http://softwarefreedomday.org/sfi/TshirtSigners We welcome IBM as the sponsor of the major competition prizes, the POWER5 servers. It is wonderful to have IBM on board supporting Software Freedom Day 2006. They have generously offered System p5 servers as prizes for a number of categories of competitions. "IBM is proud to be a sponsor of Software Freedom Day and its efforts to raise awareness of Open Technologies to developers and users around the world.", says IBM Linux Community Program Manager, Robert MacFarlan. IBM has long been an advocate, sponsor and contributor to the Linux developer community and Open Technology development. Continuing this tradition of support, IBM has also contributed a number of POWER5 and IBM PPC970 servers to Universities world-wide for the purpose of Linux and Open Source project development by the community. These servers are hosted by the Universities and freely available with a simple registration for use. They include a number of POWER5 Servers and also an Apple Power Mac G5 for those interested in doing Altivec or other PPC970 optimizations. These are shared environments, so users have to abide by each site's acceptable use policies. These systems provide a great chance to become familiar with the technology that you have a chance of winning in this competition. Oregon State University Open Source Labs - SLES on POWER5 and Gentoo on Apple Power Mac G5. http://powerdev.osuosl.org SourceForge.net compile farm - SLES on POWER5 http://sourceforge.net/docs/compile_farm#cf_overview University of Augsburg - Debian on POWER5 http://tuxppc.rz.uni-augsburg.de/ Australian National University - SLES on POWER5 http://clug.anu.edu.au/ Linux on Power @ Peking University - SLES on POWER5 http://ppclinux.pku.edu.cn/ University de Campinas - RedHat, Debian, and Slackware partitions on POWER5 http://power.ic.unicamp.br (Available mid-July) -- Software Freedom Day http://softwarefreedomday.org