The Code Crusader

Hello everyone, I'm happy to announce that Software Freedom Day 2007 w/c was held at UP was a success! I met with a friend from a yahoo group and my professor at the University of the Philippines to celebrate Software Freedom Day 2007 at the Advance Science and Technology Institute Bldg. inside UP Diliman. It was great. There are a lot of talks about open source, from advocacy to technical stuff. They also held a burn fest wherein you can get a copy of a linux distro you would like to try. I even got a free Bayanihan Linux4. :)

One of the speakers there is from the governments Office of Representative Teddy Casino who's pushing a bill that would make the use of open source software a must especially on the government. The bill orders every software implemented to be open source and would only allow proprietary software to be installed if and only if there's no equivalent of that software on the Free Software/Open Source software realm. Amb. Manuel Perez Iturbe of Venezuela who's an advocate of "software libre" was also there and was very proud that Venezuela is an Open Source country. I really wish that the Philippines will achieve the same status one day.

They also gave out nice prizes and even free CDs that contains free software that you can install in your Windows desktop and guess what, the free software is a FULL COPY! Not a Demo Version or limited version! You can use it however you want and redistribute by sharing it witout violating any super insane copyright laws with the only restriction that you don't claim that you made the program(you can inlude your name on the developer part if you contributed to it though) and it doesn't expire and has continues patches! Isn't that great?!?! That's why open source is growing so fast... The community is becoming much friendly now adays that choosing to use Open Source Software is much easier now.

Im looking forward for the next Software Freedom Day next year and when that day arrives, I'm ready to be a volunteer... a speaker maybe. :)