Emory Free Culture

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Emory University Students Promote Software Freedom

Atlanta, Ga – On September 15 from 10AM to 2PM on the main floor of the Dobbs University Center, the student group Emory Free Culture will host a display as part of Software Freedom Day. Software Freedom Day is a global, grassroots effort to educate the public about the virtues and availability of Free and Open Source Software.

Free and Open source software is software that is developed collaboratively by developers across the globe. The software itself is available at little or no cost. The source code (the human-readable version of the software) is distributed with the executable form, giving users of the software the freedom to modify, adapt and improve the software to meet their needs. Because of this, free and open source is well known for its quality, reliability and security compared with proprietary software.

Software Freedom Day is primarily about Software, but Software Freedom can affect almost every aspect of our lives. Software Freedom enables governmental transparency and openness; for example, voting machines and government records can be examined and available to a degree that is impossible when proprietary secrecy stands in the way of public scrutiny. Software Freedom empowers non-profit organizations (such as libraries, schools, and religious organizations) and businesses (especially in developing countries) to compute with state-of-the-art software without the undue restrictions and costs imposed by proprietary software licensing. Software Freedom can provide a higher degree of security than is possible with proprietary software, because the artificial barrier of proprietary secrecy is not in place to keep security experts from contributing ideas, and it’s in those experts’ best interest to make sure the software is secure. Software Freedom has massive legal and economic benefits, and it ultimately empowers people on a local level to exercise enlightened self-interest concerning any area of life that involves software.