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Software Freedom Day Summary

What a great day it turned out to be, weather wise and event wise.

At the Howard County Library the Ubuntu Maryland Local Community Team held an install fest. With a strong turnout by our members and the public we had a real successful day.

We started out the morning getting set up. I was running a little late but with Krispy Kreme doughnuts in hand, I think I was forgiven. Craig, John, Chris, and others were getting our install stations set up. Luis was bringing us monitors to use at each place. We ran our cat5 and wired up the network to the update server that Craig took the time to set up and configure.

We had a few early arrivals for the low-cost, gently used computers that the library was offering at a reasonable prices, to benefit the Friends of Howard County Library organization. While waiting for the PCs to arrive, one of the customers even went home to bring her current PC set up for dual-boot. We had a few people come in during the day to either have their PC ‘upgraded’ to Ubuntu or purchase one of the PCs we were configuring.

As the day progressed we had a lot of good conversation and enlightened a few people as to the benefits of Free software. One of our ‘customers’ kept asking “Is it really free (as in soda)?” She could not get over that all of the software we were offering was free of cost and free as in freedom, though I don’t know how much that aspect affected her. Other people passing by dropped in to find out what was going on and what we were about. Several people took the disks we offered and the knowledge we imparted to them.

Midway through the day we had visitors from the IT staff of the library. All gave us much praise on what we were doing. They even bought lunch for the group of us. I want to thank them all for their hospitality at this event and our regular meetings.

I think the biggest downfall to the day was the weather. Outside it was one of those perfect early fall days. It was warm and sunny with a nice breeze blowing. In all honesty, had I not made the commitment, I would have been elsewhere. I would have spent the day with Peg on the dog search.

Of course, I’ll be doing that tomorrow 🙂