Photos from the Candle Light Vigil for Document Freedom organised by Free Software Users Group Bangalore. Many carried placards and banners in support of Open Document Format and against OOXML.

The Candle light vigil demands India to appeal ISO approval of ooxml based on its comments and no vote. We also demands the Department of IT to draft a clear national policy for the use of Free standards for data storage.

This programme is planned as a starting point for various events & awareness campaigns on Document freedom.

When: 15 April 2008, 6pm

Members of the Free Software User Group stage a candle light vigil to protest patenting of software in front of Twonhall in Bengaluru on Saturday.

Yesterday I blogged on my greatest contribution to the Say No To Software Patent event to be held at Bangalore - a piece of web banner. Today there is something more. A sticker and t-shirt design!

Twenty-two organizations across 60 countries are taking part in DocumentFreedomDay (DFD) to raise awareness about what happens when formats are no longer supported by proprietary software.

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global grassroots effort to promote and build awareness of the importance of free document formats in particular and open standards in general. If you have ever received a document from a friend that your software could not open, then you know the frustration of proprietary formats.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today launched the next stage of its "Windows 7 Sins" campaign at http://windows7sins.org, making the case against Microsoft and proprietary software by writing to 500 leaders of the most influential nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide, asking them to make the switch to freedom-respecting free software, and to help foster awareness of the ethical impor

Free Software Foundation chairman and all around computer freedom guru Richard Stallman has written an article for the BBC entitled ‘It’s not the Gates, it’s the bars’.

The free software community understands that free software gives the user more freedom than proprietary software. Proprietary software confines its users, prohibits them from making changes that would allow everyone to benefit, etc. Free software advocates (myself included) have a habit of claiming that using free (libre) software means the same thing as having freedom.