Whilst codi­fy­ing the plans for Soft­ware Free­dom Day in Sydney, I decided to put together a mock press release. A little of the con­tent is lif­ted from the SFD Web site. Feel free to modify it for your needs (loc­al­ised to your city, etc.) and redistribute.

SYDNEY CELEBRATES SOFTWARE FREEDOM, THIS SUNDAY

For the second time run­ning, The Uni­ver­sity of New South Wales (UNSW) has been selec­ted to form the centrepiece of Soft­ware Free­dom Day in Sydney.

Soft­ware Free­dom Day (SFD) is a world­wide cel­eb­ra­tion of Free and Open Source Soft­ware (FOSS). Our goal in this annual cel­eb­ra­tion is to edu­cate the world­wide pub­lic about of the bene­fits of using high qual­ity Free and Open Source Soft­ware (FOSS) in edu­ca­tion, in gov­ern­ment, at home, and in busi­ness — in short, everywhere!

Have you ever had your com­puter soft­ware crash, lose data or get a virus? Ima­gine if after only a few years that the thesis that you worked on for ages was no longer read­able, or that your pre­cious home movies were no longer watch­able. If you com­plain to the soft­ware com­pany, they try to talk you into spend­ing yet more money on an ‘upgrade’, which only turns out to be slower and bug­gier than the pre­vi­ous ver­sion. Ever bought a new music player, only to find that it refuses to play the music that worked just fine on your old player?

Unfor­tu­nately, most people are liv­ing in this world today.

Soft­ware Free­dom Day exists to show the gen­eral pub­lic that there is a way out of this vicious cycle. Through the use of free soft­ware, you regain con­trol over your com­puter and your data. Every per­son has the free­dom to par­ti­cip­ate in and use free soft­ware, whether it be on a totally free oper­at­ing sys­tem like Linux or on a non-​​free plat­form like Win­dows or Mac OS.

This Sunday, the Sydney FOSS com­munity will demon­strate how easy it is to install and use free soft­ware to achieve a vari­ety of tasks. Our activ­it­ies shall grav­it­ate around two ven­ues in UNSW:

• At the com­puter fair in the Round­house (10am-​​3pm), we will be demon­strat­ing FOSS tech­no­lo­gies to vendors and visitors.
• In Law Room 203 (8am-​​5pm), we will be host­ing a series of talks and tutorials.

We will also have people roam­ing around cam­pus spread­ing the news. We will be happy to answer any ques­tions that you may have per­tain­ing to FOSS. We will have CDs and other items to hand out, to get you star­ted. If you bring (or buy at the fair) a USB drive, we can trans­fer free soft­ware onto it for you.

If you’re buy­ing hard­ware at the fair, we can help you to get it run­ning with FOSS. If you’re a stu­dent, or just plain curi­ous, we can show you how you can max­im­ise the poten­tial of your com­puter, all at no cost to you.

Unlike with non-​​free soft­ware, FOSS is typ­i­fied by extens­ive com­munity net­works that are able to provide detailed sup­port should you need help. Examples include the Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG), which hosts e-​​mail lists, monthly meet­ings, and other events for people of all skill levels.

With the fin­an­cial sup­port of IT mar­ket lead­ers like IBM, HP, Dell, Intel and Google, as well as count­less gov­ern­mental bod­ies and com­pan­ies in other indus­tries, FOSS is grow­ing from strength to strength at a phe­nom­enal rate.

If you have any fur­ther ques­tions, please see our list of resources below. Oth­er­wise, come and see us on Sunday, and we’ll show you in person!

If you’d like to get involved as a volun­teer, read our plans for the day (linked below).

 

RESOURCES

• To view our plans for the day, see http://​www​.soft​ware​freedom​day​.org/​t​e​a​m​s​/​o​c​e​a​n​i​a​/​a​u​/​S​y​d​ney
• For more inform­a­tion on the mean­ing of Soft­ware Free­dom Day, see http://​www​.soft​ware​freedom​day​.org/​a​b​out
• For more inform­a­tion on FOSS, see http://​www​.linux​.org​.au/​l​i​nux

LotD:  I never got around to writ­ing about the Edu­ca­tion Expo, so I’ll point to Pia’s writeup. 

Tighten your belts and buckle your shoes, for Soft­ware Free­dom Day is just around the corner! This year, the Sydney team is host­ing their event one day late (on Sunday instead of Sat­urday), to take advant­age of the com­puter fair at The Uni­ver­sity of New South Wales. We’ll have a couple of tables, which we shall be using to show off the won­ders of FOSS to con­sumers, stu­dents and other vendors.

I have chron­icled our plan at the Soft­ware Free­dom Day wiki. If you’d like to get involved, please get in touch with me.

LotD:  Get­ting in Bed With the Cus­tomer (an oldie but a goodie)

Things have cer­tainly been crazy as of late. Being elec­ted onto the SLUG Com­mit­tee (at the March AGM) has given me a greater appre­ci­ation of local com­munity issues and of what it takes to co-​​ordinate a group. At the same time, man­aging the Linux Aus­tralia stand at Open CeBIT has also been a tre­mend­ous learn­ing exper­i­ence. My offi­cial report is here.

I’ve had a few requests to elab­or­ate upon the ‘brush with death’ men­tioned in that mes­sage. Driv­ing home after the second day of CeBIT, I exper­i­enced a car acci­dent. While trav­el­ling at at least 60km/​h, I some­how lost con­scious­ness, and woke up phoughed into the side of another car. For­tu­nately, the car was parked and unoc­cu­pied. Nobody was involved aside from myself. The car was a write-​​off, but the pas­sen­ger cabin was fully intact and I exper­i­enced no injur­ies. The other car was part of a com­pany fleet, and its cus­todian wasn’t bothered much at all. Insur­ance took care of the costs on both sides.

I was quite shaken after the crash, and I very nearly didn’t go to CeBIT the next day. After being cleared by a para­medic and two doc­tors (one on the night of the crash and another the fol­low­ing morn­ing), I decided that I wasn’t going to let this get in my way. It was prob­ably the best decision that I made, since it forced me to get back on my feet doing some­thing that I love, rather than sit­ting at home in misery. I was unable to mod­er­ate the Linux Aus­tralia panel dis­cus­sion that I had helped to organ­ise, but I was there at the stand just like on the pre­vi­ous two days.

Oth­er­wise, CeBIT was a resound­ing suc­cess. It proved to be a fant­astic spring­board for us to launch the inaug­ural SLUG Boot­camp. More on this later.

I can’t fully explain why I blacked out in the first place. When I was younger, I would occa­sion­ally black out under cer­tain cir­cum­stances. Neur­o­lo­gists at the time couldn’t identify what it was, but told me not to worry about it. I was prob­ably just exhausted, from the exhib­it­ing all day, the plan­ning in the lead-​​up to the event, my new job, TAFE, and vari­ous other things. The doc­tors that I spoke with agreed with me that it was prob­ably just a microsleep.

I’m still recov­er­ing from the after-​​effects of the acci­dent. I get stressed more eas­ily when driv­ing, but I can feel that slowly reced­ing with time. Most of all, I feel excep­tion­ally lucky that I didn’t hurt myself or any­one else.

LotD:  IBM PC Real Time Clock should run in UT

I wrote this back in Octo­ber, and for some silly reason I for­got to post it. Bet­ter late than never, I say.

It seems that every couple of weeks I’m at some kind of FLOSS-​​related event. You just can’t keep me away from them! They may require a lot of work, but it cer­tainly feels reward­ing to get the word out. This is espe­cially so in regards to the edu­ca­tional sec­tor. Chil­dren are our future, and they are gen­er­ally more will­ing than your aver­age adult to learn new and dif­fer­ent things. It is an educator’s job to impart know­ledge, and it is the duty of any respect­able edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tion to facil­it­ate a free and open flow of know­ledge. What bet­ter way to achieve this than with free software?

This concept was not lost on the eduact­ors, par­ents and stu­dents at the Sydney Edu­ca­tion Expo in June, and I’m proud to say that we man­aged to rep­lic­ate that suc­cess at the Sydney Moodle Con­fer­ence on Octo­ber 14–15 (Sat­urday and Sunday). Once again, I manned the Linux Australia/​SLUG stand, join­ing Pia Waugh, Lind­say Holm­wood and Andreas Fisc­her. The SLUG Com­mit­tee stopped by for a while, too.

Whereas most people at the Edu­ca­tion Expo were unfa­mil­iar with FLOSS, many of the attendees of the Moodle Con­fer­ence had some idea about it. Moodle itself is avail­able under the terms of the GPL, and many com­pan­ies and schools have become part of its user/​development/​support com­munity. All we had to do was to remind them that we rep­res­ent the under­ly­ing FLOSS con­cepts that have made Moodle so great, and that Moodle func­tions in con­cert with other FLOSS pro­jects such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

The response was over­whelm­ing. We were pre­pared to hand out a truck­load of Ubuntu CDs, only to dis­cover that most attendees had already been sup­plied with one as part of their offi­cial con­fer­ence kit. That didn’t stop us from dis­trib­ut­ing many more, though. We had one fel­low so excited about FLOSS on Sat­urday that he brought along his laptop the next day for an impromptu Ubuntu install­fest. We demon­strated a range of tech­no­lo­gies, includ­ing Compiz and Ink­s­cape. Vis­it­ors were impressed with the ease of the Ubuntu LiveCD installer, and with how Moodle can be installed (com­plete with depend­en­cies) in only a few clicks via Synaptic.

Most inter­est­ing for me was the Live Online Event, which was a panel dis­cus­sion on-​​stage in front of about 150 people. Pia was slated to rep­res­ent the LA/​OSIA point of view, but was forced to bow out due to other com­mit­ments. Much to my sur­prise, she asked me to fill in for her. So there I was, on-​​stage, in front of well over 100 people, field­ing ques­tions while being recor­ded and streamed live over the Inter­net. I had never done any­thing like that before, but I think I went reas­on­ably well. Pub­lic speak­ing and gen­eral spoken com­mu­nic­a­tion are cer­tainly skills that I would like to fur­ther exer­cise in the future. Thanks for your sup­port, Pia!

The topic which dom­in­ated the panel dis­cus­sion, and one which I had been pre­vi­ously unaware of, con­cerned how far soft­ware pat­ents had intruded into the realm of edu­ca­tional soft­ware. Moodle-​​competitor Black­board has been issued an appalling pat­ent “for tech­no­logy used for internet-​​based edu­ca­tion sup­port sys­tems and meth­ods.” I was some­what relieved to see that Mar­tin Dou­gia­mas, Moodle’s founder and pro­ject leader, was not con­cerned at all by this event, at least as far as Moodle was con­cerned. Nev­er­the­less, the spectre of soft­ware pat­ents has been loom­ing over FLOSS for some time now, and it is still very unclear if/​how the situ­ation will ever be resolved.

I must say that the SLUG Videofest on Sat­urday went very well. The imme­di­ate aim is to organ­ise a video recording/​editing/​encoding/​hosting/​streaming team for Soft­ware Free­dom Day (SFD) on Septem­ber 16. I’ll need to squeeze every bit of per­form­ance I can out of my Pen­tium III 700MHz laptop to per­form the requis­ite edit­ing and encod­ing. Encod­ing in single-​​digit frames per second has never been more fun!

The real goal of this ven­ture, how­ever, is to pre­pare for linux​.conf​.au (LCA). We are see­ing SFD as a dry run for this premier annual event, so it is import­ant that we are organ­ised for this one. I am not con­cerned: Silvia has been doing a fine job lead­ing us so far.

Speak­ing of SFD, con­grat­u­la­tions Pia!

Last month’s SLUG meet­ing (Fri­day 28 July) was an inter­est­ing one for me. The SLUG­lets topic was Web browsers, so I decided to volun­teer my ser­vices to give a demon­stra­tion of my favour­ite, Galeon. Its philo­sophy of “The Web, only the Web” felt extremely refresh­ing back in 2000 when the world was dom­in­ated by Web browsers that were either integ­rated into some form of soft­ware suite or even into the oper­at­ing sys­tem itself. Its pos­i­tion as a top-​​dog Web browser has since been usurped by its off­spring, Epi­phany, and its par­ent, Fire­fox, both of which have been clearly inspired by Galeon. Nev­er­the­less, the slick­ness and func­tion­al­ity of Galeon has left it cemen­ted as my Web browser of choice.

One thing I was not pre­pared for was a fair num­ber of my co-​​workers to be present. That in itself was no sur­prise, given the SLUG-​​friendliness of my work­place. The effect of their heck­ling was another mat­ter. Their light-​​hearted dis­trac­tions may have dimin­ished the qual­ity of my talk, but they also made it much more enjoy­able for every­one, includ­ing myself. This inform­al­ity is a clear defin­ing char­ac­ter­istic of SLUG­lets as opposed to the Spe­cial Interest Talks, which are nor­mally quite ser­i­ous and intellectual.

I had also offered to give a “Privoxy in Under Five Minutes” talk as well, but unfor­tu­nately we ran out of time. Per­haps another time.

All in all, I am mostly happy with how things went. Sure, my talk could have been slicker, but nobody expects a pro­fes­sional present­a­tion in SLUG­lets. The fact that I was try­ing to demon­strate a Web browser without Inter­net access didn’t help either, nor did the time con­straint. This was the first time I have done some­thing like this, so I couldn’t have expec­ted it to be flawless.

Last night (Fri­day) I went to the monthly Sydney Linux Users’ Group (SLUG) meet­ing, after being promp­ted by Pia Waugh at CeBIT. Being my first LUG meet­ing, I didn’t know what to expect. It turned out to be great. The people there are inter­est­ing and friendly, and it felt good to be with people who share sim­ilar ideas about com­put­ing and soft­ware as I do.

The best thing about free soft­ware is the com­munity. As Sean Neak­ums said, “I came for the qual­ity. I stayed for the free­dom.” I have been an act­ive mem­ber of the com­munity for five or six years, but all inter­ac­tion was made via the Inter­net. Meet­ing people face-​​to-​​face felt pos­it­ively wondrous.

Nobody is excluded from LUG meet­ings. After the ini­tial intro­duc­tion and present­a­tion, the LUG splits into a group for new­bies (“SLUG­lets”) and another for more exper­i­enced users. Not being par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in a present­a­tion on stat­ist­ical com­put­ing, I went with the SLUG­lets. Aside from the present­a­tions, the meet­ing was extremely informal. You were free to talk about just about anything.

Fol­low­ing the meet­ing, a bunch of us went to an Indian res­taur­ant near Cent­ral Sta­tion. The food was ordin­ary (as far as Indian food goes), but it was fun get­ting to know people and hav­ing face-​​to-​​face geek-​​talk. When I talk to most people, I have to dumb-​​down what I’m say­ing so that they can fol­low. At SLUG, if any­thing it was the oppos­ite. It felt good to be around people who truly knew what they were talk­ing about and I know I can learn a lot from them.

So what is the moral of this story? If you like Linux and/​or free soft­ware, join a LUG!

The CeBIT show was in the Darling Har­bour Con­ven­tion Centre this week. Com­puter Power were good enough to give us a leave of absence to attend. It only made sense: attend­ing an IT show gives us a feel of the IT industry as a whole. The exhib­it­ors covered just about everything under the sun (at least under the IT sun, which might more accur­ately be described as a dwarf star).

It wasn’t a par­tic­u­larly spec­tac­u­lar show. I still have fond memor­ies of the excesses of the dot-​​com days: loads of givaways, free capucci­nos, etc.. This time the giveaways were mostly restric­ted to pens. There was cof­fee, but to be eli­gible you had to be ‘cus­tomer’ of the group run­ning the booth. The Sydney Morn­ing Her­ald and The Aus­tralian each had booths, and you could pick up free cop­ies of their respect­ive papers. Besides that, there were the oblig­at­ory ‘booth babes’ and plenty of staff who couldn’t speak Eng­lish. w00t.

At the end I decided to return to a booth I had spied earlier: Open Source Vic­toria. There, I got to talk­ing to a nice girl there. It turned out that she was Pia Waugh, wife of well-​​known GNOME hacker Jeff Waugh. Not that she should be known just for that, though. She is doing some truly inter­est­ing work in try­ing to fur­ther the use of open source soft­ware in gov­ern­ment and edu­ca­tion. We spoke for about half an hour, dur­ing which time she invited me to go to the monthly Sydney Linux Users’ Group (SLUG) meet­ing, which con­veni­ently was on that Fri­day (i.e. yes­ter­day). I had been mean­ing to go to one for years, and this was the kick up the back­side that I needed.