Today is Software Freedom Day!

Today is Software Freedom Day. It is a day to celebrate the Free and Open Source Software movement by not using paid software. 🙂

The movement is sponsored by a non-profit company called Freesoftware Freedom International. It wants to promote free software as an ideal globally and the Software Freedom Day is supposed to galvanize people to conduct camps and events across the world.

The Software Freedom Day is sponsored by Canonical and Ubuntu, Danish Unix User Group, Google, redhat Fedora, linode.com

Difference between Freedom and Free.

• There is a difference in perceptions on what is Free Software. The idea is to bring promote free ideas rather than free products.
• Current laws are slightly unfair to open source software products because when a ‘Paid Software’ applies for a patent it assumes the idea to be original and rights are reserved.
• This means that the idea is unwittingly patented rather than the product and that inhibits any other developer.
• Finally the free software attempts to stop paid softwares as industry standards and hence level the playing field for software developers.

Links: Software Freedom Day | Software Freedom International