Episode: 4166
Title: HPR4166: Everybody organize Software Freedom Day!
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4166/hpr4166.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 20:39:36

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4166 from Monday the 22nd of July 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Everybody Organized Software Freedom Day.
It is hosted by Truller Coaster and is about 24 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, what is software freedom day?
And why is it important to celebrate this event?
During a Libra Planet this year I gave a talk about relaunching software freedom day and
the movement around it.
I edited the recording because I left out some visuals for obvious reasons.
I hope you enjoy it.
Here's the talk.
So software freedom day for me is something I started to organize in Brussels myself
in 2012.
How did software freedom day go?
So first of all, what's the digital freedom foundation?
Basically, it's a nonprofit that existed throughout the years and has been organizing
under different names and in different legal states, enabling events to celebrate digital
freedom at first, only software freedom.
And later on, also a harder freedom, document freedom, there has been a period where there
was also education freedom day and culture freedom day.
But we are limited in our forces.
So what's the story?
In 2004, Matt Oakwists actually discovered software was getting quite good pre-software and
he thought it was a pity that people didn't know enough about this great software that
was out there and nobody knew.
So he reached out to the OpenCD project and together with his luck and the OpenCD project
he started burning CDs in 2004 and started spreading them out to different groups and
organizations and libraries and everyone who he could think of.
So he started handing them out.
Remember, back in those days, the internet was not a very common thing and in some countries
it was limited, it was slow, it was maybe not even available.
So these CDs were a very grateful thing.
And he started the foundation together with some friends and the next year, 2005, they
already had 138 places all over the world where software freedom day was celebrated.
So it started spreading and it spread and grew in 2007, 286, 563 events in 2008, 2009
and these were like the high peaks of, I mean, all over the world, people were celebrating
software freedom day and these basically are even only the events that were on the map
and people who registered, probably they were even more.
So it grew and grew and the foundation also grew and got more active and in 2012 but then
it also started declining a little bit as you see in the numbers but this seems to come
together with the spread of the internet, the availability of the internet.
So by the year 2012, the board at that back then decided they would like to hand over
their responsibilities to some new team and there was a Friedrich Muller who had been
very active with the Beijing look, they were the people back then who actually made all
those packages with all the CDs and the stuff in there and they did all the logistics
and contacted the sponsors, they did a wonderful job to get this running.
And they had a big idea of expanding the event or the concept from not only software
freedom but also digital freedoms in more general.
So back then you had also the rise of Arduino and open hardware, that was getting popular.
There was the document freedom movement that was also starting with the back then it was
the open office making a rise and so the focus shifts a little bit to this more broader
sense and they had a few new focuses because we were getting access to open to free software
much easier than before because of the online availability because it was getting much
more known so software freedom they had actually worked because people knew about software
freedom they knew about all these free applications both free as in beer and free as in freedom
and they had to shift their message a little bit so that they moved slightly to get out
of this concept where the free software is good enough for the poor countries but the
rich countries should use the real software that's not something that we agree with of course
and so there also was this movement where all over the world companies and organizations started
promoting open standards where of course we still believe and promote that just an open
standard isn't good enough and Microsoft with their own implementation of DOC X as an pseudo open
standard was like the best proof of that so an open standard isn't enough we really need
freedom and free software and then there was during the month so it kept declining and declining
and what also impacted the whole free software movement in my opinion is the rise of the free
as in free for no cost offerings from example Google Cloud services and all those open supporters
or all those free at no cost companies who just offered you an email client online an office
suite online whatever application as a service online and as a free software we cannot compete with
somebody who has a pre-made package on a free server running with at no cost at no effort there
was no competition there so what we see today the identification of all these services now
started back then and then most people didn't see it coming I think here inside the FSF the
freedom movements we didn't see it and maybe we didn't shout loud enough or maybe they didn't want
to hear us anyway now we know that people from back then those cloud services weren't always
in the best interest of software freedom but the digital freedom foundation kept working very hard
to get out of the world to make the shift and to keep meeting people physically so not having
online events not just some other website but having two five ten twenty five five hundred people
together in the room and talk about this stuff and this is like the force of the strength of
software freedom day hardware freedom day document freedom day of these freedom days that you have
people come together and talk about this stuff and have a drink over it and then just discuss it
in real life because and this is something I think we know today better than ever with the
rise of artificial intelligence with language models it's so easy to fake persons online you can
fake voices you can fake video you can fake everything almost and it won't take long unless
the only reliable way to meet people is just physically because I will never be able to
slap an AI in the face and I won't slap you in the face but I can give you a hug and I won't
hug AI either anyway so the events slowly kept declining and declining and in 2019 there was this
variable very terrible accident with Patrick Sins one of the board members back then of
of the digital freedom foundation and this was a very dear friend of the other board members
because they were really close and they wanted to achieve this they really wanted to go for it
and losing their close friends so when Patrick died this was a very big big hit for the whole board
and to add insult to injury in 2020 2021 we obviously had COVID also really heavily impacted
it impacted the movement of software freedom as as you can see on the website also that
there even isn't a map for 2020 yes 2021 2022 COVID lockdown all physical activity went down
and there were like 39 events scattered over the world entered in 2021 then in 2022 still 33
events maybe some post COVID sentiment and there was this so this 2021 2022 and the last
people of the board remaining were also getting quite tired and they also had their life and they
had other stuff in their life going on so when I asked on the mailing list if the website was
going to be updated for and prepared for software free the late 2023 there was a mail sent out
with with the request for a new board I don't know if I'm the best person to be on that board but
I was the person who had the big mouth to ask for the new website so I decided I had to put my
money where my mouth is and here I am now sitting talking about software freedom day and luckily
there were a few other people who I have never met in my life but were great people who also
decided to step up and those are Laura Michaels from the USA, Marcos from Portugal,
Duan from who lives in Germany, Mustafa from Iran, Jan from Czechia and I'm European from Belgium
and I would like to really mention Road Archie who's a graphics artist who who helps a lot in all
the graphic design for the for the new website and for new things he has he made the rocket launch
last year too for example if you remember if you've compared 2022 to 2023 there has been a rise
again so we're coming from 33 events to 49 so the post-COVID effect is going down a little bit but
the great country of the USA they didn't step up yes also I hope next year we'll gonna be seeing a
lot of events in the US in Africa and all over the world again because this is a great event so
that's a pity but these are countries I think where politics have very very strongly already cemented
with the big companies and they have all the best interest in being able to run those services but
we should really get on to making people aware that this is not a solution and all those stories
about free software being difficult and complex and expensive to use and unreliable we should
really demonstrate this that it's not true anyway so why is it important for me to teach about
digital freedoms well just looking into the actuality let's not make the source available kind of
stuff the norm as companies are trying to push on us now because this is really this is toxic
I think this is dangerous because it gives a false sense of ownership and in that context I
love to say often people call the GPL viral I wouldn't call it viral I would call it the vaccine
because it protects us against corporate hijacking and infection by close sourcing again so this is
a very important turnaround it's not it's not viral it's it's a vaccine and let's not make two
I gave it like political names here let's not make the communist error we will say it's a common
good source from everybody but the problem is that everybody does not commit commit code
everybody that does not commit translations everybody doesn't exist it's you and me and
a few people in essence who step up and do it and if these people who step up don't get the right
support the right encouragement the right respect often also then it won't happen and then
then we should then we better put put away some free software because it won't work we need to
respect each other and that's a very important one let's also not make the capitalist error
where we say oh yeah we need something to own it let's give it all out to some company who will
take care of it and just let's all sign out the CLA and have very liberal licensing and everything
is okay let's just go ahead with it that's also dangerous so this is these freedoms the day of
today are very important to keep in mind I think and then of course in the whole story about
artificial intelligence we should and we have to keep our four freedoms in the back of our head
every time we watch we listen we hear we talk about artificial intelligence about language models
because let's not make the same mistake again because it is happening already so maybe
someday we will be celebrating AI freedom day two I don't know sorry I was on my soapbox
but we don't have a lobby we don't have 25 people or thousand people or I don't know how much
people Google and Microsoft have to to push their products into the governments etc we don't have
that those means we are actually very limited as a community we're big but also limited because
nobody is fully committed as it's not it's not a profession the most of us so I think the current
board as a current board we're very limited I mean we are five people we hadn't met each other
before before the first online meeting most of the board members I haven't seen their face even
so we're really a gang of people with a shared idea and we're trying to get this idea over
we also have a limited time because we all have our families our jobs our personal issues health
issues my cat was in surgery last week and so this is this kind of stuff just keeps popping and
everybody's head we are limited in time limited in in resources also at the point where we picked up
the digital freedom foundation there was no legal structure because through some administration
issues they lost and they're not profit status so one of my pet peeves was let's have this website
much more simplified so for this we kind of decided to focus on the core the first event the
biggest event software freedom day and the other events harder freedom day document freedom day
got help us hopefully one day harder freedom day culture freedom day and education freedom day two
and so this let's focus on software freedom day for now set up donation structures so people can donate
so our companies can donate again so we have some money that allow us to to support people and
I'll get back to this money in a few moments it's not to pay me or to pay Marcos or anybody from
the board members because we're not getting paid and so for legal structure we had a very generous
help from young user from Earthcos that's the website earthcos.org they are a small nonprofit
legal nonprofit in the US and they have a very big idea about the there's one only one planet
and it belongs to all of us and we should share it together and this is a very nice idea and they
actually also believe that software freedom is part of this and they offer us to be part of their
their charity until we get our own legal structure if we need to anyway so I already talked about
simplifying that web architecture web architecture we had some discussions and then we decided
to stick with Jumla because it had some advantages first of I have some experience with the platform
everything was already in Jumla the portal sites and there were some plugins that really helped
us out for entering events there's a very big GPL also plugin for Jumla that allows us to enter
events it's called the big calendar look it up they have sponsored us with their
big support package too to get starting with this anyway next steps is we should really get
starting early with media and communications because if we only start communicating for software
freedom day two weeks beforehand it's too late and people can't organize anymore so I think
somewhere in the few next few weeks maybe a month we'll be starting getting out of work on the
mailing list on the chats on on our channels and I hope to find some volunteers maybe here if you're
a volunteer just reach out I'd like to further refine the website because there are like some
ugly bits of HTML CSS in there so if you know some CSS please come reach out to me and help me
even if it's for for 10 days or two days or a day just get started and we can get this thing
rolling then refine the legal structure so we really have our own legal structure that would be
nice and having those funding channels really greased out so people know where to go how they can
support us how they can finance us these are things that are on my wish list for the moment so
no issues I this is the elephant in the room and this is something that people have been asking me
and us every now and then how can we order a swag I mean a bag with a banner and
empty shirts and all this kind of stuff yeah the problem is that we're only five people we don't
live together we don't have we don't even live in the same area we don't have money so we're
looking into how we can give swag do you have a community who thinks maybe a log or a hacker space
or a group who says I cool we live in an area where these kind of goodies may get get made and
we're really enthusiastic and we would like to help get this out all over the world get out to me
and then we will see how we can finance this because at this moment we don't have a budget yet we
have 200 euros as a budget we're looking for sponsors and this is my next one of the next steps
to so finding sponsors but to find a sponsor you need to be able to tell what you want to do with
the money so it's a chicken and next situation and the ideal basically is every event on its own
should have its own core team so you have like for software freedom date a core team for hardware
freedom day a core team for education freedom day document freedom day culture freedom day
if there are 25 people who step up and say we want to celebrate AI freedom day come on make a small
team and if you think you can pull it off we have the infrastructure to to enable this just reach out
so what I didn't tell talk about yes yet was I don't feel comfortable organizing software
freedom day because it's I don't have the experience with to small of a group for my very very
first software freedom day we were three people in the living room and we invited 12 people over
so that was the smallest event possible I think I was kind of disappointed because I had five speakers
so those were part of the audience and that year I really was kind of ashamed about this
but the next year we had 300 people in our in our hackers space so even if you start very small
it can spark a fire I mean reach out to your local library to a school to university
just ask them if you can give an afternoon or an evening or a morning or just put
for computers having tax racer on them and have kids play tax racer do do something very simple it
doesn't have to be big of course the things that that come in it must have on streams that go in
all the big social media those are the ones that that reach a lot of people but I mean
this is maybe the small communist anyway I do believe that a thousand small actions are very
valuable and so be one of those thousand small events please please please and then we can make
the difference so there's our matrix channel digital freedoms if you have any questions maybe you
can reach out to me privately I'm your friend on there what what what what what can you organize
on these events so these events are basically social events where people come over you can have
talks and in our hackers space we we have a lot of talks people talk about technical issues
not less technical issues depending on your audience usually we have on the ground floor like
introductions to inkscape create logo on the first floor we have like more technical stuff like
software defined radio or encryption hacking or that kind of stuff so you can but it really depends
on your own community in other places we had Linux install parties so we ask people to bring
over their computer and if it's if it's an old machine or a new machine just as well if they want
to have the new Linux running on it they can then we we help them with that you can't can have
a LAN party where you organize play play games you can do all kind of stuff have a political awareness
talk have challenges quizzes music have a song I mean there's a lot of stuff you can do
three-day multi-room conferences with dinner party lots of things in between yes so
the hallway track is very important I think since the talk there's one fun little feature that
has been added who on the tablet maker is offered to sponsor a competition so people who attended
or organized software freedom day and create a artwork a piece of art using three software like
create a for example they can win a prize and this prize can be one of their tablets if you want
to know more about this visit our website so it's digital freedoms.org slash sfd and let's say
organize something in your area or if it's already organized make sure to join it by
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