Software Freedom Day kicks off on September 15, 2007. The purpose of the celebration is to bring public attention to the benefits of free software compared to their commercial counterparts. On their website they state the following:

We need to look beyond the currently dominant business practices to determine which products we should have and teach in our schools, and we need to educate our children instead of training them. The very first version of MS Office was released in 1989, and now millions of professionals — who were already out of school then — use it every day. There is no reason not to teach using up-and-coming technologies such as Open Office, which may well dominate the professional world of the future. (The state government of Massachusetts, for example, is committed to migrating by January, 2007 to the document format used by Open Office.) Such a shift in focus from MS Office to Open Office, which is free, can save the district thousands of dollars which can then be put toward obtaining more computers and equipment or personnel. Even if the district doesn’t want to incorporate Open Office in the curriculum at this point, at least computers without MS Office should be supplied with Open Office (fast computers) or the Abi office tools (Abiword and others) to increase access to productivity applications.

MS Windows carries with it a requirement for fast, new hardware. Linux, an alternative operating system, does not carry this same overhead and can therefore be used to resurrect very old hardware and provide much greater amounts of high quality, as-good-as-new computing resources to students and teachers. In particular, thousands of organizations around the world are using the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) to accomplish this goal. (Some of these organizations are on the map at http://www.k12ltsp.com/.) In many cases these organizations are able to make use of “old”, donated computers from businesses, and these machines (whose hard disks can be removed) are put directly into use and into the hands of the people who need them. The maintenance overhead of an LTSP network is miniscule per workstation in comparison to a regular network because the clients can easily have no moving parts whatsoever, so hardware failures are rare. In addition, all the software lives on the LTSP server, so software installation and updates are completely centralized. All of this software is free.

More information can be found on the Software Freedom Day website linked below. You can also volunteer your time to spreading the word about free software if you wish.
Software Freedom Day site is here.

Comments welcome.

Tags: software, free, day, celebration