Richard Stallman & Software Freedom Day Johannesburg

Free Registration for Software Freedom Day

Eventbrite is not free (as in speech) and we have created an alternative registration site hosted in South Africa. Registration for Software Freedom Day in Johannesburg on Eventbrite was therefore disabled.

Note, if you have already registered on Eventbrite, you do not have to register again.

More tickets available here

Who is Richard Stallman?

Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS) is a software developer and software freedom activist. In 1983 Stallman announced the project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to be entirely free software, and has been the project's leader ever since. With that announcement he also launched the Free Software Movement.

The GNU/Linux system, which is a variant of GNU that also uses the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are used in tens or hundreds of millions of computers, and are now preinstalled in computers available in retail stores. However, the distributors of these systems often disregard the ideas of freedom which make free software important, and even include nonfree software in those systems.

That is why, since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time in political advocacy for free software, and spreading the ethical ideas of the movement, as well as campaigning against both software patents and dangerous extension of copyright laws. Before that, Stallman developed a number of widely used software components of the GNU system, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and is the main author of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license, which implements copyleft.

Other talks by RMS

What will he be talking about?

A Free Digital Society

Activities directed at ``including'' more people in the use of digital technology are predicated on the assumption that such inclusion is invariably a good thing. It appears so, when judged solely by immediate practical convenience. However, if we also judge in terms of human rights, whether digital inclusion is good or bad depends on what kind of digital world we are to be included in. If we wish to work towards digital inclusion as a goal, it behooves us to make sure it is the good kind.

Other talks by RMS

• 3 Sep: SITA (State Information Technology Agency) in Erasmuskloof, Pretoria
• 4 Sep: UCT, Cape Town
• 6 Sep: Durban (either at DUT or UKZN, TBC) - registration

As soon as times and address information becomes available it will be added so "watch this space"

What is software freedom day?

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of Free Software. The goal of SFD is to educate the worldwide public about the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business -- in short, everywhere!

What is software freedom?

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients have the same rights under which it was obtained and that manufacturers of consumer products incorporating free software provide the software as source code. The word free in the term free software refers to freedom (liberty) and is not at all related to monetary cost.

What other talks will there be?

We are planning three tracks:

• Barcamp
• Business Track
• Hands on Labs

In Barcamp, we are trying to balance open hardware and software talks with a focus on local initiatives. We are busy finalising a line-up including:

• How to break out of Prism
• Emacs, orgmode, mu4e - my perfect GTD system
• Morgan - a ZA designed 3d printer
• Internet of Things using the Contiki O/S
• Peer Marker - African School for Excellence's reading and writing system
• OpenJDK - a tale of two companies
• Phun with the Cubie board
• GWT / HTML5 - new generation websites the GWT way
• Lambda Luminaries - functional programming for everyone

If you want to give a talk at barcamp - click here

The business track will feature talks on how to leverage open source software for competitive advantage in your business. More details to follow

The Hands on Labs is free for anyone to attend and bring your own laptop. The session content is being finalised and will include:

• Secrets of the Linux Ninja Dojo
• Etc.

Where on Wits Campus?

Download now