[SC.LUG] [Fwd: Software Freedom Day - 10th September]

[Richard Smedley]

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik at canonical.com>
Subject: Ubuntu and Software Freedom Day
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2005 13:54:52 +0100

Hello LoCo Teams and other Ubuntu fans,

September 10th is international Software Freedom Day [1], which is a 
global celebration of free and open source software (FOSS). Ubuntu 
already plays a central role in the event in that the official CD 
distributed by teams around the world (TheOpenCD v3) contains a Live CD 
based on Hoary [2]. Canonical has sponsored the SFD server and 
production of the CDs. Various Ubuntu team members are also directly 
involved in the event. Mako and I are on the governing board of SFD and 
Jeff is involved in organising Australian teams.

Community support is vital in developing a superb OS (testing, 
documentation, MOTUs, etc.), but development is only half the job. To 
encourage people to use free OSes such as Ubuntu and its derivatives, we 
must also engage in promotion. In theory it should be an easy sell: we 
have a great system that we are giving away for free! However, the 
marketing resources spent on promoting proprietary systems are vast and 
will only increase with the pre-hype around Vista.

We have the opportunity of using a distributed marketing model though, 
and directly engaging people. I'm sure all of you are already spreading 
the word amongst friends, but it is also possible to reach larger groups 
of local people through organised events. SFD is a nice opportunity for 
LoCo teams to join with other FOSS advocates and create some real 
momentum on a specific day. It is conceived of as a broad initiative of 
free and open source software advocates, reaching across distributions, 
projects, operating systems and continents! We have teams registered in 
places like Nepal, Burundi, Peru and Bangladesh, in addition to the more 
traditionally high tech regions of Europe and North America.

Many teams already have plans well under way, so if there is one in your 
area, you might want to hook up with them to see how you can help. If 
not, you can easily start a team in your area any time. Check the SFD 
forum and wiki for existing teams [3]. We've had over 200 team 
registrations so far and we are sure that at least 100 of these will 
stage outreach events on the day. I'm sure many of you will have ordered 
and received official Ubuntu CDs already. If you still have some left on 
Sept. 10th you might want to meet up with a local team and hand them 
out  :)

- Henrik

[1] http://softwarefreedomday.org/
[2] 
http://www.theopencd.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=68&Itemid=1
[3] http://maitri.ubuntu.com/softwarefreedomday/wiki/index.php/Team_Pages