[GLLUG] GLLUG and Software Freedom Day

[Clay Dowling]

On Saturday, September 15th GLLUG will be holding an Open House on the
campus of Lansing Community College from 1pm to 5pm for Software Freedom
Day.  This event is a good opportunity for business owners, executives,
computer users and students to see how free and open source software can
reduce costs and improve productivity.

We are planning four 10 minutes presentations which will be repeated
during the day:

* What is Open Source? *

A brief overview of what open source is, with a short history and some
prominent examples.

* Why Open Source? *

What are the benefits of using Open Source software, with examples.

* Open Source for the Home User *

A brief look at open source software for the home user, including
current trends and examples of how people are using it.

* Open Source for the Business User *

How open source software is helping business by reducing costs and
making new things possible.


While this is being presented by the Greater Lansing Linux User's Group,
I would like to emphasize that we will be presenting tools and
technology that is available to users of all popular operating systems,
including Windows, Macintosh and Linux.  You do not need to convert your
home or office to Linux to take advantage of the tools we will be showing.

In addition to the presentations we will have the Burn Box available.
For those who are not familiar, the Burn Box is a CD Burning Kiosk that
lets you create CDs of popular software distributions including Linux,
FreeBSD and utility CDs.

There will also be machines on site where visitors can see open source
software in use.  To that end, if people can volunteer to bring in their
machines and talk about the software they're showing, that would be great.

Obvious candidates are Firefox, Thunderbird (possibly with the Calendar
extension, which makes it play nice with Outlook's calendar features)
and Open Office.  The Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus (page layout software) and
various media software are also good things to show off.  Games might be
good to show the home users (my wife loves the variety of Solitaire
games).  I plan to bring in a Windows machine and show PostgreSQL and
the Code::Blocks IDE with the source of a commercial application that I
sell.

We could also use some corporate sponsorship to make this event better.
 If your company or your employer would be willing to provide $50
towards paying for refreshments we will happily give them space to
advertise their products and services.  If they can speak to visitors
about how open source software has helped their business that would be
even better.

Before the list gets flooded with suggestions to do this on the MSU
campus: we considered that first.  MSU has a home game that day, and if
you aren't familiar with MSU on game day, there is no parking to be had
for love nor money, making it somewhat difficult to get visitors to our
event.  Speaking of which, if someone could bring a MythTV setup that is
showing the game, that would be really cool.

Clay