Software Freedom Day 2009

Software freedom day is all about celebration of free and open source software(FOSS). My event was sponsored by Sun Microsystems and coordinated by Software Freedom International which is a non profit organisation in USA.

Myself Pradeep along with my friend priyaranjan organised sfd 2009 in our college on 9th october. The event was awesome with number of students turning up for the event crossing 400, unexpected huhhhh!! The whole of the seminar hall was filled with students all around.Unfortunately upto 100 students kept standing and many more went back coz the there was no space,the hall was absolutely packed. Those who were standing through out the sfd celebration showed a great zeal to be apart of SFD celebration,to be a part of OSUM,to be a part of my presentation.The attendees were intelligent,energetic and full of enthusiasm.

I started off with a welcome speech to all the attendees and giving them the necessary details about OSUM club of our college.I told them when our osum club was formed,what it has been doing and what it will do.I told them about objectives of OSUM club and also all the details about the techncal and not technical events we conduct in our club.No doubt they have started calling OSUM as "Awesome" and its awesome indeed!!


Then i began with the presentation on Software freedom day.I told them about SFD agenda and urged them about adoption of FOSS (free and open source software world wide).I informed them about our goal which is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business -- in short, everywhere. Meanwhile i explained them about visions to empower all people to freely connect, create and share in a digital world that is participatory, transparent, and sustainable.And about our objective to foster a general understanding of software freedom, and encourage adoption of free software and open standards and create more equal access to opportunities through the use of participatory technologies

Now came the point to explain them the details of free and open source software i.e about what ,why,how of open source! .Open source brings shared innovation, customer and partner benefits,increased quality and security.I explained them a number of open source products of SUN MICROSYSTEM and gave them small detail about the usuage of these softwares. Detailed description about solaris and netbeans i plan to teach them in upcoming events.In addition to that i gave them examples of a number of open source software which they can use like GIMP editor for photo editing( equivalent to adobe photoshop), okular for editing pdf (equivalent adobe acrobate reader), k3b which is used for writing cd's and dvd's.etc.... i explained them about open source licensing categories which are UNRESTRICTIVE LICENSE,FILE BASED LICENSE and PROJECT BASED LICENSE.I myself made presentation in open office and used it for giving presentation , so the whole presentaion had a open source fervour.It was an eye opener for them coz hitherto many of them were not knowing about open source software.

Going toward end i gave them small explainattion about Solaris which is unix based operating system from SUN Microsystems. I will be having my next presentaion on open solaris in which i will be taking the installation of it and general commands. with this the presentation came to an end.

FUN events:
QUIZ
Then i conducted quiz for all the students based on the presentations i have given.The question were very simple. the winners of the quiz will get prizes .There were upto 400 students to i will be checking their paper and declaring the result afterwards. Questiona were like 1) full form of SUN i.e stanford university network, 2) Solaris is based in which OS?? UNIX!!! etc. At the end i asked them to Write their opinion about Software freedom day and give us a brief feedback. I have received 400 feed backs and they were guiding and praiseworthy.

TECHNICAL DUMCHARADE

I made six Teams of 5 members each and the called one team at a time. One of the member of the team were given the word to act and others have to guess!The teams were so very perfect in expressing themselves just by acting ( no lip movement). Words given for acting were solaris, open office, glass fish, My sql , sun microsystem etc...... they all acted brilliantly in every given question. Finally after very long 4 to 5 rounds of competition we got our teams getting first ,second and third positions. All the winners were gifted with Pens and OSUM century club batches.

This was the time when our heartly awaited event SFD is coming to an end. Cd's od open solaris ,stickers of OSUM and batches of osum club were distributed to everyone before making them leave the seminar.However batches were very few so everyone was not able to get the batch.
Finally i thanked them all for being a wonderful students and taking so much of interest in coming to SFD event. I have promised them to arrange the next event in much more better way.I am even more thankful to my friend priyaranjan who helped me for the event since so many days. He worked equally hard with me for making SFD event a grand one.It requires a great heart and best attitute to be like him.Thanks alot friend.Really the day was AMAZING.......


We are an OSUM community and we are getting Started..........