[Fsfe-uk] Sep 27th will be GNU's 25th anniversary

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

Sep 27th will be the 25th anniversary of the initial announcement of GNU:
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.html

The 15th and 20th anniversaries were marked by RMS publishing an essay:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/15-years-of-free-software.html
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/use-free-software.html

But there should really be more fuss for the quarter-century anniversary.

Ignoring limits such as time and effort, I've got a few ideas:
* Compile a book on the history of GNU and software freedom (focussing on
  1983 to 1998)
* Compile info for July to start pitching to the tech magazines to make the
  GNU anniversary their cover story for September
* A general free software event (we actually haven't done this before - not
  with multiple speakers at least)
* An awareness campaign, with a booklet, press releases, and letters to
  software companies asking them to sign something (anti-swpat?)

And I'd be interested to hear other ideas.  Sean Daly suggested to me a set
of 10 minute videos explaining individual issues such as DRM, swpat, etc.

I was reminded by this anniversary by Bruce Perens' 10 look back at the Open
Source marketing campaign:
http://perens.com/works/articles/State8Feb2008/

1998, unfortunately, turn into the start of a "let's stop talking about
freedom" era.  So maybe we should use GNU's 25th birthday to start a "Time
to talk about Free Software again" era.

Ideas sought (ignoring limits of time and money - not that I have an unsaid
solution to those limits, but we do have 7 months to work on this).


-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan (+32 477 36 44 19) \ Support Free Software and GNU/Linux
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