Who's organizing Software Freedom Day?

Discussion
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tldr; Who’s organizing software Freedom Day on 2024-09-21 this year? It’s more important than ever! If you did recently… care to share your ideas?

Some history
Software Freedom Day - 3rd Saturday of September - has been celebrated since 2004. The idea is to meet people who aren’t familiar yet with FOSS (both the ideas and the applications). Local teams organize an event, and then they invite people to come over (or they invite passers-by to have a look).

During the COVID-years, this came to a grinding halt for obvious reasons. Big cloud providers jumped in the gap and started offering services. Privacy? Meh… not so much. There are FOSS Solutions, both in the cloud and on your device though. In my opinion it’s more important than ever to question the assumptions of current ecosystems.

Back in the early days, before broadband internet, it was mostly about handing out CDs with FOSS software and demonstrate that the software was up to snuff.

Actuality
Nowadays, it will be more and more important to point out that vendor lock-in is still a thing, that privacy is not the first concern of many companies (and only open source can guarantee you that they are truthful).

An example of “not technically lying”? Everybody promised that they wouldn’t share your intellectual property with third parties. So what did they do? The chopped it up in pieces and fed it to their training data. These large language models aren’t infringing any copyright because they aren’t reproducing your texts or artwork… and us naive populus, weren’t aware what was going on behind the screens. Who knows what backports are hidden in their legal documents nowadays.

Power of FOSS
With the FOSS community, we’ve been through all these kinds of struggles a few times. Unfortunately, the FOSS community doesn’t have a well funded lobby machine and expensive lawyers to help push our agendas. But what we do have, is a gazillion volunteers, people who passionately love their operating system, applications and the FOSS philosophy without getting paid for it. No single well paid marketeer or lawyer can weigh up against that. So that’s what we need to leverage, where we have to put our credibility.

Action!
So as volunteers… step up, join forces and organize an event in your local library, school, university, hackerspace, LUG, … or even in a coffee shop. It’s not that hard! Plenty of ideas.
We’ve gathered a few here, but please put your other suggestions in this discussion. Also, please share your websites for past events to show photos, event outlines, etc…

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That is what it should be about…
Privacy is a side issue.

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Today all people care about is convenience.

Privacy? Don’t care.
Vendor lock-in? Don’t care.
Spying? Don’t care.
Danger to lose everything? “Doesn’t happen to me.”
Price? If it’s what the market is using, then I’m willing to pay through the nose.
Is it new? Scary.

The convenience of free software needs to increase.

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Vendor lock-in is one issue. Reducing the issue to only that, will allow any party to just run an open standard (even if - like MS did - the standard is of low quality).

It has to do with alignment of priorities. Some other examples…

The way certain social media platforms don’t aim to inform, but to addict, is purely based on the algorithms used. If these are open source, they can be critically analyzed.

AI models have implicit biases? Let’s have access to the training data to determine that.

Upgrade paths prioritize new sales and business profits over advancement of the product? Show us the code.

You’re saying that your application is not collecting data? That it’s optimized to use minimal energy? To be stable with multiple fall backs? Let me determine it for myself.

For you, vendor lock-in might be the Nr. 1 priority. For someone else, it might be something completely different. The bottom line is: is code inspection is the way for it to be known.

So… you’re willing to organize Software Freedom Day in your area? Might be possible to raise awareness with a few people…

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Vendor lock in can be rather inconvenient.

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I think you’re a bit cynical, but I recognize the sentiment.
We all suffer this - otherwise we would be riding horse and carriage and not using a phone at all.

Let’s turn this into a positive message - paint a vision of hope against all those walled gardeners. Let’s show alternatives that offer comfort at a fair price.

Furthermore, we also know there are interesting alternatives that don’t require living in a walled garden. Things like Home Automation and NextCloud show how non-cloud/home-cloud solutions can also work.

Would you consider organizing Software Freedom Day in your area?

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FOSS is a rather narrow concept… it is about free access to software source code.
I dont see how you can hold
a Software Freedom Day, and then hijack it with broader issues like privacy.

You need to either broaden the name or narrow the agenda.

I am not against this. It is just that choosing a title is quite important.

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What you mean by ‘convenience’ is access.
Is that not what FOSS achieves.?
In my own work area, I have been able to do things, because FOSS gave me access to a C compiler and an R interpreter and an editor, etc.
Vendor lockin obstructs access

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Thing is, when something (e.g. Windows) is preinstalled on a computer, it becomes mighty hard to beat that convenience; it’s already there, no thinking needed.

FOSS achieves availability, which does not automatically mean convenience.

Most people just want to type a letter, access social media, and do their taxes. We need to convince these people FOSS is a real option for them, not developers. Developers/scientists already know FOSS exists.

Do people care? Lets tell people why they should care.

After reading my message again, I feel my message was a bit too aggressive. This was not my intention.

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FOSS is a rather narrow concept… it is about free access to software source code.
I don’t see how you can hold a Software Freedom Day, and then hijack it with broader issues like privacy.
You need to either broaden the name or narrow the agenda.
I am not against this. It is just that choosing a title is quite important.

Well… there’s actually a difference between “open source” (as the OSI standard defines it, close to “software freedom”) and “source available” (as in: “you can see the source, so now shut up!”

I have the impression that the latter is enough for you. This is indeed one aspect that can combat the whole privacy/unreliable code thing. But the thing is… freedom also implies the freedom to tweak code. Have a look at the four freedoms of free software.

Software Freedom Day is also kind of a “brand” - it sounds familiar. Notice though that there’s also “Hardware Freedom Day” and “Document Freedom Day”. The main website is actually “digitalfreedoms.org”. I don’t think it’s possible to separate out these freedoms completely but consider it like putting a spotlight on a certain aspect of the freedoms.

Comparable with a birthday. You could hardly say that that specific day you grow older more than any other day of the year.

So basically it’s a very broad event. In our hackerspace, we have workshops for example on Software Defined Radio or Cryptanalisys or reverse engineering. The target audience for these events obviously is not the people who just use a computer to fill out their taxes or write a letter. But demonstrations blow the minds of these people. So here, you get the hyper-nerdy demos.
But in the other room, we have a workshop on how to use Inkscape to create a fancy logo. Or how to set up Nextcloud on an old laptop to serve as home backup solution.

But SFD basically is a familiar name, and we’re not really quickly going to give that up. Otherwise we won’t have another event for the next 27 years because we haven’t reached agreement on what to name it and when to date it. :wink:

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Isn’t it what it really boils down to?
What if I am a just a user of a PC? No real knowledge of software or hardware. Don’t know the difference between memory and storage. I buy a PC, plug it it in and it works out of the box.
I can now perform the things I wanted to do with this PC.

You want me to install something that will wipe out Windows. I don’t know how to perform a backup much less a restore. I not even sure what a partition is nor do I care. I am setting myself for failure if I try install Linux.

This I believe is the mind set of a lot of PC users. They really don’t care. They just want to be able to use this PC they just purchased.

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OK. I thought this was a one off… you have some history

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Yeah… basically that’s the first line after the tldr; in my initial post.

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Yep, that’s why I believe it’s important to have companies like System76 and Tuxedo computers and the UbuntuShop.
That’s why I find it equally important that there are Linux Install Parties working together with Repair Cafés… How much computers get trashed because the OS isn’t working anymore and the device won’t support the latest shiny version of the default OS? Explicitly offering this out of the box solution is one thing.

That said… there’s also application software. At work, people tend to ask for Adobe Graphics Suite if all they need to do, is create a simple task like creating a small illustration or tweaking contrast on a photo. We offer them GIMP and Inkscape and say that buying Adobe Suite will take a week to get through all the paperwork (billing department). In 99% of the cases, those people were happy with the proposed solutions. Our company saved money, and we introduced FOSS to another person. Then… once per year, we have like a debate club-style moment. I introduced the topic of “FOSS values” once. There was a lot of interest in that topic, because it name-dropped those applications they already knew and kinda loved too.

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Anyways… is there actually somebody considering organizing Software Freedom Day in their area? Lots of talks, little mention of action…

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I am with jurgen on this. Back at the start of the year I tried to organise

In our village, tried to get the mayor interested and got fobbed off on his deputy who is responsible for the environment, they thought it was a good idea… but in the end the collection and redistribution of old equipment was going to be a pain. Who was going to store them, who was going to erase the data on them, if they were good to repair who would do that…
I had built up a stock of around 20 machines i had prepaired, in the end just took them to the dump, where the guy running it said put them over there, he phoned his mate who took them all without looking.
Not the ideal recycle spirit.
Feel this idea will be similar, yes yes yes… then no action.

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I’d love to, but I’m concerned I’d be the only one there… And my social skills aren’t great, to say the least.

I’m afraid I’d be confronted with tough questions.

If somebody can hook me up with a group in the Netherlands, I’d be happy to help out.

Edit: there appears to be one in Brussels, which is too far away for me.

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Hey Xander, last year the hackerspace tkkrlab organized a small event. They might pick it up again this year.
Not sure what area of the Netherlands you’re in (if you live in Tilburg, Zwolle might not be the best option). I’m in the Brussels team, so yes… we’re organizing again. If you shoot me a private message, I can try and reach out in my network too.
Anyways, have a look. Maybe there’s a hackerspace or LUG in your area.

https://www.nllgg.nl/

But don’t over complicate it. It can be as simple as:

  1. Ask the local library if you can put a small table and show some cool stuff to visitors. Make agreements about what you can and cannot do.
  2. Pick a topic you’re comfortable with (and that’s pretty broadly applicable). Could be drawing in Inkscape, playing music with MuseScore, programming a small game in PyGame, give a demo of LibreOffice or NextCloud, … Offer to give older computers a second life.
  3. Ideally, you gather a few friends (if you’re 3, you’re off to the races)
  4. Try to have some flyers printed. There will be something on the website soon, but if you prefer it to be in Dutch, you can help translate

Come over to the Matrix channel at https://matrix.to/#/#SoftwareFreedomDay:matrix.org to gather ideas.

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Hey Paul,

Digital Cleanup Day sounded like a cool project. Too bad it didn’t get traction.
Don’t get cynical though, sometimes you need to repeat it a few times for it to grow seedlings.

How about you set up another instance on Software Freedom Day (or around that period) and combine it with a small party vibe. Maybe there’s a hackerspace or fablab in your area interested to participate. Here’s a list of the French hackerspaces:
https://interhacker.space/

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I plan to try again next year, but suspect it will fail based on the reaction this time