Software Freedom Day and the open source way

David M Williams
Monday, 10 September 2007 20:39

Business IT - Open Source

There is one more aspect Software Freedom Day seeks to espouse, and that is the freedom of data. Undoubtedly, we have all experienced problems retrieving old documents. It might be you have old works on 5.25” Commodore 64 floppy disks; even though you can suck the raw data onto a PC thanks to various hardware and emulation solutions, you still have no easy way to read the information stored within the underlying files.

Or, sticking within the last decade, your Microsoft Word 2.0 documents may seem to be lost, with the latest versions of Word itself no longer having support for its own historic files. And that’s even using the same app; woe betide you if you wish to recover your early Microsoft Works documents and your only tool is Word.

Once more, as society tends to greater reliance on technology, the use of obsolete data file formats limits the exchange of thoughts and the preservation of society’s culture. Future generations will suffer a loss of historical detail because the programs used to record events are out of date and the structure of their disk file is no longer known or supported.

In this respect, Software Freedom Day advocates not just open source software but open file formats. So long as there is a description of just how the file is structured, and that it is available with restriction, any data file can be re-opened, re-read, reprinted, reproduced.

That, in a nutshell, is Software Freedom Day. So, come check it out! A regularly updated list of teams is displayed online, ordered by region. Find your area and see if a team is kicking, and what they’re up to. Otherwise, you can also elect to start your own team and the same page is the starting point.

The overseeing Software Freedom Day committee has made available software CDs, T-shirts and other items, but the teams are autonomously funding their own displays and presentations and augmenting the CDs with copies of different Linux distributions as well as OpenCD, a compilation of open source Windows applications.

I’m especially proud to note that the team in my area is working really hard, with events on both Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th. Come one, come all.