I hope you noticed that thoroughout my blog I try to use freedom software or freedomware. I wrote this page as an explanation and to avoid misnaming in the community and to strengthen the brand ‘freedom software’.
NB: I don’t hold much love for marketing or the current advertising mechanism, but I had to use the term brand.

That is because I am trying to avoid ambigous related terms such as:

• free software which can be interpreted as ‘no money’ or ‘gratis’ OR software under a free license (of course the Free Software Foundation cannot be avoided)
• FOSS – which makes people say “what is this new acronym? Eah, I don’t care, I’skip it”
• FLOSS – what is this? a string to clean people’s teeth?
• open source – it refers to the ability to write a piece of software collaboratively, but it does not reflect any ethical dimension, it’s not the same as free software.
• linux – many people in the proprietary world or even the general public tend to refer to the freedom software as just ‘linux’
  This is outrageous! Reducing the whole community to just one project or one piece of software is unacceptable for me.
• Anti-microsoft – I heard people (mostly paid microsoft trolls) who claim that freedom software community actually means anti-microsoft. This is just wrong, I won’t bother explain this if you don’t know it already.’

Freedomware is short for freedom software and I like it because it’s just as short as free software, while it tells the whole concept, such as ‘free (as in freedom) software’ or ‘free (as in free speech, not as in free beer) software’. It leaves no doubt that it refers to software that provides the four freedoms of free software. While I think freedomware can be confused for ‘freeware’ when spoken, I still think it’s preferable to free software. I would like to point that when spoken one should prefer to use the longer term ‘freedom software’. Also read the free software page at Wikipedia.

Also I try to use GNU/Linux when I refer to the generic class of operating systems running Linux kernels because most of them include software from the GNU Project, such as gcc… Although many would point out that most of the software coming from the GNU Project is not used by average users nowadays, I am not calling it GNU/Linux for historical reasons or because we should pay homage to Richard Stallman, I do so because the most important contribution from that project was the GNU General Public License, the license under which the Linux kernel and most other freedom software is released.

I call it GNU/Linux because we should always preserve the spirit that brought us together and that is the spirit of the GNU Project, not Linux, nor open source. Likewise the BSD software community keeps its spirit alive by calling thier operating systems FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, PC-BSD and so on…

PS: While I host my views and terms dear, I don’t try to push them down to other people’s throats and I don’t enjoy others doing the same on my own blog.

Ok, I do not know how to cover a conference properly, so I’ll just say that this year I saw more social networking and people were more action focused. I also got the sense that more and more Romanian people want to get involved in the free software movement. Keywords for this conference would be ‘action oriented’ and ’social networking’, which is great.

A little about myself: I am interested in all things free culture, from software, to artwork, to data, but I am particularly interested in free as in freedom network services (FNS for short), from free cloud service to collaboration services between artists.

What I apprieciate most about this conference is that I had more time to socialize with people around: I had the opportunity to talk with Georg + Monty on patents, javascript AGPL, managed services and mostly stuff related to my trial at making a web/network service.

Now, I’d like to say a few words about the presentations:

Richard Stallman – What means Free Software and why matters – I found it interesting how the GNU project started and I did some comparisons with the current state of FNS and I thought we are just at the begining of FNS, where GNU was on 1983. I plan to cover this presentation in a further post on this blog.

Ismael Olea talked about the European Commission Open Source Observatory and Repository Project. Great progress has been done with respect to the process of aquiring software for governmental use and many governmental organisations use free implementable standards. But little was done to give away as much information as possible, that despite the transparency claims made by the public administration, much of the unclassified public data is still offline in a drawer… The US are much more advanced in publishing government data under licenses that allow reuse by their citizens.

Then, John Koetsier from the University of British Columbia made a presentation about the Master of Educational Technologies from his Uni. Well, his presentation lacked an important information: “How much of the technology they teach is actually free software?” – this is a free software conference, how was it related to our topic?

I was eager to find more Mozilla news so the presentation made by Zbigniew Branecki about Firefox and Mozilla Foundation stroke right on spot.

At the Xwiki presentation, made by Jerome Velociter, I got to know a good new wiki app. I liked most the feature-full online rich editor and the integration with Mozilla Bespin editor.

Danese Cooper helped us play a game in which we had to give flash-talks, like the Ignite talks:
each volunteer had to make a 3 minutes discourse on a chosen topic. Presenters had to use their time to the maximum, but had not to go over the time limit.

Presentations that I liked, but I do not remember enough to make a review:
True stories by Danese Cooper
OSI licensing by Monty
Free software 2009 by Georg Greve
Mozilla news & demo

Talks that I missed:
The opening ceremony
The presentation made by the rep. of the Ministry of Education
Free art by Tibi Turbureanu
Concept Aplication Server and GyroGears

Once the presentation materials become available I’ll review them.