Software Freedom Day ‘07
September 19th, 2007Last Saturday, 15th of September 2007, the Philippines joined 90 countries around the world in celebrating Software Freedom Day 2007. The celebration was held in two places in the country, Manila and Davao. The Manila event was held in the Advanced Science and Technology Institute, where we were able to have live video feeds of simultaneous SFD events in Davao and Vietnam.
But what is Software Freedom Day? “Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere!” softwarefreedomday.org. So it’s really more of an advocacy event, although there were talks in the afternoon that were more technical, to show the practical applications of FOSS in development.
The event started a bit later than scheduled, which sort of delayed everything else. The morning was full of plenary talks, most of which introduce the concept of Free and Open Source Software and its relevance to different sectors and applications. There were also talks from different organizations such as PREGINET, IOSN (Internation Open Source Network) and Asia Source (a part of IOSN).
One of the plenary talks that is of very special interest is the the one delivered by Rep. Teddy Casiño (Bayan Muna) regarding an update on the Philippine FOSS Bill of 2007. This bill seeks to promote the use and development of FOSS and Open Standards, as well as mandate their use in government. It is this mandating provision of the bill that seems to be raising the most questions and eyebrows. Rep. Casiño’s reason for mandating, rather than merely suggesting or preferring, the use of FOSS is simple: If the FOSS bill simply suggested the use of FOSS, it becomes a mere brochure advocating for FOSS. It requires a mandate to effectively put it into real use. Another reason why “free choice” in this bill isn’t really effective is because in most circumstances, government employees, specially rank and file ones, don’t really have a choice as to what software to use. They merely use what is mandated by their office.
I’m still quite undecided on how I think and feel about this bill. I would personally prefer mandating the use of open standards rather than the software themselves, because this would indirectly cause the use of free software (how many proprietary software out there use open standards?). But I guess this is better than nothing. And the bill has indeed evolved and grown better from the first time I heard of it last year or when Rep. Casiño presented it in another event early this year.
(For another writeup on this talk see The Digital Life)
In between the plenary talks, we were supposed to have a sort of live conversation with the people from Davao and Vietnam, through the network setup by PREGINET (who were also responsible for the live video feeds). Unfortunately, either due to miscommunication, time, or technical difficulties, it didn’t really happen. Maybe next time.
The afternoon was split into two tracks. One track was more technical talking about Ruby on Rails and Glade. The other track dealt with topics on FOSS daily use and migration. The migration talk was given by Mr. Ramon Aguilar, Jr from Q-Linux, a systems integration company and a Red Hat partner in the Philippines. The talk was centered on having a migration plan when trying to get businesses and SME’s to move to FOSS. There was a scheduled talk on Drupal later that afternoon, which was a bit delayed because of the earlier delays in schedule. Unfortunately, by that time I was not feeling well already and decided to go home. They later had a raffle, prizes courtesy of Q-Linux and Red Hat, I think. My name wasn’t picked, so no loss there.
The event was well attended and I counted over 50 people during the plenary talks. The venue did feel a bit crowded, but the facilities were more adequate. There were practically only 3 (or 4) booths there: Q-Linux, Red Hat, Bayanihan Linux (a local Debian-based KDE distribution), and a burning station (c/o of UnPLUG I think). Not to worry, the Ubuntu presence was there, too! The kits that were given away contained Ubuntu CD’s as well as some OpenCD’s. (Thank you zakame!) Too bad there were no Kubuntu CD’s though, but KDE was more or less represented by Bayanihan Linux and the burning station, which used openSUSE. It was mentioned that the attendance this year was more than last year’s, so maybe next year we’ll have more participating groups and booths.
Kudos to CP-Union (Computer Professional’s Union), UnPLUG (University of the Philippines Linux Users’ Group), Asia Source Pilipinas, Stratpoint Technologies, and other partners for organizing the event and thanks for all the sponsors who helped made this happen. Looking forward to next year’s celebration of Software Freedom in the Philippines!
P.S. I tried to take some pictures during the event. But as I discovered only later, zooming with my camera phone is a big no-no. Anyone interested to take a peek at the very low quality pics can view them in my SFD 2007 Gallery
Just some small updates, while I'm trying to get off my ass and migrate the site completely to Textpattern.
September 19th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
PLUG was not part of it heh
September 21st, 2007 at 8:25 pm
Edited. thanks for the correction.