Software Freedom Day

Software Freedom Day is a world-wide celebration of Free software and the people behind it. All over the globe, users that appreciate Free software gather and work together to further the use and awareness of Free software. In India, there have been classes set up to educate people on the use of Free software, in Russia, Spain, and Kuwait there will be talks about Free Software. This year, the NJlinux user's group will have a table set up on Church Street in Montclair to give out DVDs with Linux distributions, as well as Free software for Windows, and to talk to people on the street and make more people aware of what

Free software is and how it can benefit them. Free Software ensures that users and developers can control the software that they use, and can see how it is built to ensure that the software does what the users think it does, and allows them to share the software and any changes that they have made to it.

A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish

• (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

The NJ tech community would be well served by supporting Free software, many of the community are already using it in their projects, from Apache, to PHP or Python, to Linux running the servers that make today's rich web experience possible. By letting people know that that software is available to everyone to learn and build upon, as well as software that ordinary users can take advantage of on their desktop computers, such as LibreOffice, Inkspace and the Gnu Image Manipulation Program that allow them to use powerful creative desktop software at no cost. Also, GNU/Linux can be used on any desktop computer to allow the user to control how they use their computers.

We hope to see and speak to many of you this coming Saturday to talk about Free Software.

References: http://fsf.org

Other links: http://SoftwareFreedomDay.org (http://softwarefreedomday.org) http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2014/USA/NJ/Montclair/NJLinux