For the winning teams we have very amazing prizes! We are very proud to be able to offer in partnership with our sponsors, Lemote, a manufacturer of MIPS computers using only free software and free drivers. Lemote will provide 3 Yeeloong netbooks for the winners of 2011. Besides, the Free Software Foundation will be providing again Richard Stallman Essays and Richard will sign the book himself for the 2nd year. Big thank you to Lemote and the Free Software Foundation.

For the 2011 competition, three teams will be selected as usual by the Software Freedom International board and reading previous years winning entries should give you some inspiration (this was a free tip!).

Submission deadline is February 16th, 2011 2012 (UTC 0500) and the winning teams will be announced in early April the latest. And of course the submission link itself which I shouldn’t forget to remind you about is at http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/cgi-bin/report.py . Join the competition now and good luck to all!

PS: We are very concerned about SOPA and have joined the strike as many others. SFD website will come back from the dark on 19th January.

SFD 2011 worldwide map: 442 SFD teams from 86 countries registered!

2011 Software Freedom Day is approaching, are you ready yet?

To add to the collection of our Software Freedom Day music library (yeah we can call it a library now, we have two) we have another song named Free, A Song For Software Freedom to complement the excellent SFD song “Celebrate Software Freedom Day”. Both songs are licensed under CC-BY-SA, so you should feel free to share it with your friends especially during the Software Freedom Day! A special thanks to Erwin Galang, Meric Mara, Deng Silorio and Karl Ramirez for the composition of those two very cool SFD songs!

And since we are discussing the day itself please do document your event, use the #softwarefreedomday tag, upload photos, make movies, blog, tweet (on identica of course!) and get ready for the SFD 2011 competition. While we haven’t made any formal announcement yet we have some pretty exciting gifts again this year which we are sure will please all your team. Stay tuned!

2011 Software Freedom Day is approaching, in order to help you with planning, we have set up a few important pages where you can find resources for your SFD event including the brand new SFD song “Celebrate Software Freedom Day”, torrent links to DVDs (OpenDisc SFD version, FreeCulture, FreeDistro), FLOSS application for Mac DVD, logos, slides, videos, templates, all source files of whatever you can find on the wiki and plenty of more stuff. Head to our marketing wiki page to find a list of those. A special thanks to 8LayersTech, Erwin Galang, Meric Mara and Deng Silorio for the composition of the very cool SFD Song!

We will continue working on providing more slides and ideas by the end of the week. Please also feel free to upload your cc licensed slides and other resources to share with other teams.

All the best to your preparation!

On top of the badges we now have a multi-lingual countdown counter supporting all time zones. Currently twelve languages are supported (English, German, Portuguese, French, Khmer, Sinhalese, Persian, Korean, Spanish, Galician, Chinese simplified and traditional). Feel free to place one of the counters in your website or blog. It is very easy to add a new language should you need it and even documented.

Link to countdown usage page:
http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/participate/countdown
Link to translation howto:
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/CountDown/
Link to promotion badges:
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Promote

A big thank you goes to all the translators who have helped us to create the necessary png files for each language!

Happy SFD preparations!

Since its launched a week ago, we already have 188 SFD events registered from over 60 countries.

Team packs are now READY to ship and the deadline to request for this excellent Schway is TOMORROW! If you plan to organize a Software Freedom Day (SFD) event this year, but haven’t registered yet, you should do it now! Schwag availability is subject to first come first served basis (200 packs in total) and each pack will include:

• 3 t-shirts
• a 2-meter long banner
• 20 stickers
• 10 tshirt transfer labels (make your own SFD tshirts)
• 3 DVDs (OpenDisc, FreeCulture and FreeDistro (PC-BSD ISO included) and Free BSD)
• 20 balloons
• a  flyer

Registration is very easy, you just need to :

• Create a wiki page of your event here, and then
• Submit your event information here

If you have any issue regarding registration, please:

• Read the create the team page howto or,
• Contact us via email: sfd-discuss(at)sf-day.org or IRC: #sfd @freenode server.

If you wonder what is SFD or how to organize or participate in a SFD event? Please go to our website and read our startguide.

If you have already registered your SFD event, you should receive your team pack in early September. All the best to your preparation!

Please help us to promote Software Freedom Day by placing a SFD web banner on your website / blog and link back to your SFD event page or softwarefreedomday.org front page.

This is with a great pleasure (and small delay) that we are announcing registration opening for SFD 2011! In fact some of the SFD team leaders have already started to create their wiki pages and participated in the soft opening and registration testing that we started 2 days ago. Most bugs should have been cleared out of the way and we remain available for any problem you may encounter through email or on IRC (#SFD on freenode). A special thanks goes to Fred, who wrote us this brand new registration script for 2011 and the many years to come!

We also want to particularly thank our sponsors who are making this possible, namely Canonical, Google, Nokia/Qt in China and Linode. We have also attracted more media sponsors this year (from 2 to 5 in total now) where we are running a A4/Letter size ad in the August/September edition for most (some are quarterly magazines). In no specific order those are Linux Magazine (long time partner), Linux Journal (yeah, welcome!), Ubuntu User, Admin Magazine and Smart Developer. And we are still in discussion with 2 or 3 other organizations.

Like last year there are about 10 days to goodies deadline (limited to the first 200 teams and Canonical is still providing Ubuntu CDs), so just go create a new team page under http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2011 (not continent this year) and fill the registration form! In 2011 goodies will include tshirts, tshirt labels, banners, stickers, balloons and DVDs (OpenDisc, FreeCulture and FreeDistro).

Last but not least we want to thank all the new volunteers who have joined the SFD global marketing team and are helping with global tasks. One of the net outcome has been our new SFD logo for 2011 which we will keep moving forward (thank you David, Jeff and Maxus Singapore) and the multimedia DVD which we have finally managed to make (thank you Diego and Marcos). All artworks are available here and under a CC-BY license.

Please also help us to spread the words and promote Software Freedom Day by placing one of the banners here! And happy SFD preparations!

Do subscribe to the discuss mailing list if you haven’t yet, read SFD Planet (we also have Spanish, Portuguese and German – URLs need to be updated), read our blog to keep posted (or RSS feed to it) as well as check out the SFD 2010 winners for inspiration and thank you to Makerbot and FSF for the prizes.

Software Freedom Day 2010 Best Event Competition result announcements: Africa, Asia and Australia under the spotlights!

Hudson, New Hampshire (July 21, 2011) – Software Freedom International is proud to announce the SFD 2010 best event competition results. Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) with the goal of educating the public about the existence and the benefits of using FOSS in education, in government, at home and in business.

The SFD Best Event Competition is an international recognition of the efforts made by individual organizing teams in regards to spreading the importance of Software Freedom and reaching out to the relevant groups of people in their area. Each year three teams are chosen and the awards given to those teams are meant to help them further in their tasks for the years to come.

This year, two leading organizations from the Free and Open Source Software movements have joined us to reward those exceptional achievers: the Free Software Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the Free Software movement, and Makerbot, a private company pushing the concept of Free Software to physical media and making an fully open source 3D printer.

• SFD team Melbourne, Australia
• SFD team Yaoundé QV, Cameroon team
• SFD team SPCF-CITE, Angeles City, Philippines

Submission deadline is October 31st 1200UTC and winning teams will hopefully be announcement somewhere around mid December the latest. And of course the submission link itself which I shouldn’t forget to remind you about is at http://cgi.softwarefreedomday.org/event_report.html. Good luck to all!

As mentioned in my previous post, the event was organized by the Linux Association from Shantou University (STU). It started in the morning with an outdoor exhibition to demonstrate Free Software and followed with presentations in the evening.  Fred gave an overview on why Software Freedom matters, a quick history review of Free and Open Source Software and talked about how the audience could get involved and contribute to the community. Then I introduced some cool Free Software that I use everyday and demonstrated how FOSS helped me to get things done.  Unlike other events I have been involved with in China, we had the pleasure to talk to very active spectators asking plenty of questions such as:

• How can Free Software sustain without any financial support from companies?
• Which field / area do GNU/Linux systems apply to?
• Knowing that Free Software is so cool, why the market share is so little in China?
• How can we increase the market share of Free Software in China?
• What are the benefits to use GNU/Linux systems and Free Software in terms of software development?
• Do you think Free software will dominate the world market in the future?

The event ended with some great performances given by two other STU associations, namely the Guitar Players Associations and the Magicians Associations. This was totally in line with the purpose of SFD which is to make the day as constructive and fun as possible! We totally enjoyed our Software Freedom Day, how about you?

Outdoor exhibition to demonstrate Free Software

Who says Chinese students are shy? At least not the ones in STU!

Presentations given by Fred, Bean and myself in the evening

I introduced a lot of cool Free Software to STU students!

Performance given by Microphone who is also an Android developer