Software Freedom Day @ Alexandria University 2011

SFD is an annual worldwide celebration of Free Software. SFD is a public education effort with the aim of increasing awareness of Free Software and its virtues, and encouraging its use.

It is my third year organizing this event and I am still extremely excited to it and full passion to make it the biggest event in Alexandria.

I will inform you very soon isA about the date, schedule and place.

For more information about the event :

SFD Site

OSUM Site

Hope to see you all there ;)

Ubuntu 10.04

Finally, I have downloaded Ubuntu 10.04 and I am writing the post from there :).
The new version of Ubuntu is codenamed Lucid Lynx.It uses GNOME 2.30, For more information, you can check the link : here.
Here is a nice review for the new version : here.

OLPC

OLPC

OLPC (One Laptop Per Children) was founded by Nicholas Negroponte with a core of Media Lab veterans.It is a laptop designed for the poorest children in the world form 6 to 12 years old to empower them to learn and introduce them to the digital world . It’s not a laptop project. It’s an education project .

There mission is to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by giving each child low-cost, low-power connected laptop ,which is joyful and self - learning. The software platform for the OLPC project is an open source software.Those laptops will bring children freedom and as they grow ,they will have new ideas to share it with their laptops, so the software and the tools should be able to grow too and be able to change.

They insist that the software platform for the One Laptop Per Child project:

• Must include source code and allow modification so that our developers, the governments that are our customers and the children who use the laptop can look under the hood to change the software to fit an inconceivable and inconceivably diverse set of needs .Our software must also provide a self-hosting development platform.

• Must allow distribution of modified copies of software under the same license so that the freedoms that our developers depend upon for success remain available to the users and developers who define the next generation of the software. Our users and customers must be able to localize software into their language, fix the software to remove bugs,and re purpose the software to fit their needs.

• Must allow redistribution without permission -- either alone or as part of an aggregate distribution -- because we can not know and should not control how the tools we create will be re-purposed in the future. Our children outgrow our platform, and our software should be able to grow with them.

• Must not require royalty payments or any other fee for redistribution or modification for obvious reasons of economy and pragmatism in the context of our project.

• Must not discriminate against persons, groups or against fields of endeavor. Our software's power will come through its ability to grow and change with the children and in a variety of contexts.

• Must not place restrictions on other software that may be distributed along side it. Software licenses must not bar either proprietary, or "copyleft" software from being distributed on the platform. A world of great software will be used to make this project succeed – both open and closed. We need to be able to choose from all of it.

• Must allow these rights to be passed on along with the software. This means that we must not provide a license specific to the $100 Laptop project or organization or its customers. While we are the developers of this platform today, the users of this platform are the developers of tomorrow and it is through them that the platform will succeed, be transformed, and be passed on.They need the same rights as we do.

• Must not be otherwise encumbered by software patents which restrict modification or use in the ways described above. All patents practiced by software should be sublicenseable and allow our users to make use or sell derivative versions that practice the patent in question.

• Must support and promote open and patent unencumbered data interchange and file formats.

• Must be able to be built using unencumbered tools (e.g., compilers)

One Laptop per Child creates a global center for excellence in laptops and learning. If you can denote or like to read more about the topic you can check their site here.

Stories in FOSS

Richard Stallman

Richard stallman is the President of the Free Software Foundation.He always hate rules that hold programmers from creating good softwares and sharing it with the whole world .That was obvious When MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) in 1977 installed passwords in their system .Stallman didn't like that ,so he broke the passwords,sent messages to all users containing their password systems and suggesting to change it to just ENTER .The amazing part that 20% of the users followed him !

Stallman began to think in freedom software movement when Brian Reid in 1979 placed "time bombs" in Scribe to restrict access to the software.Stallman said "it is a crime against humanity.".He clarified, years later, that it is blocking the user's freedom that he believes is a "crime".

So,in 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto, which showed his desire to create a free operating system called GNU, that would be compatible with Unix. The name GNU is for GNU's Not Unix. Soon after, he started a non-profit corporation called the Free Software Foundation to employ free software programmers and provide a legal infrastructure for the free software movement.That was the beginning of free software principles.

---

Larry Augustin

CEO of SugarCRM and the former chairman of VA Software, now known as SourceForge, Inc

In open source community. You can do incredible things by starting from where others end. That was what Larry Augustin did .His first experience in free software came in 1989 or early 1990 while working as graduate student at Stanford university in computer design tools . In Software Freedom Foundation he found python but it was working with C , so he modified it and create python C++ ,he loved this technique to take one piece of software and adapted it to your needs ,so he put it up again in the internet and was amazed by the people who took it . In his job interview he found out that the company was using python C++ and he told them that he was the author of it!

---

Linus Torvalds

If you didn't like the current software you are working with . Then write your own ,let people around the world work with you.Together you will make the best.That is the story of Linus Torvalds.He studied computer science in 1988 at the University of Helsinki . After buying a PC with an Intel 386 CPU, he began using Minix, an Unix-inspired operating system created by Andrew Tannenbaum. Linus was disappointed of the system which wasn't suitable for his needs. So Linus decided to develop a system independently of Minix. These were the first steps toward creating Linux.

In August, 1991, Linus announced on Usenet that he was working on this operating system .The announcement was extremely simple it was:

From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system Message-ID: <1991aug25.205708.9541@klaava.helsinki.fi>
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things). I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-) Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.

Linus uploaded the first version of Linux, version 0.01 in September of 1991. Then Linux belonged to the world and now Linux kernel reveals that the number of lines of all its source code surpasses 10 million !

---