On the occassion of Software Freedom Day (SFD) 2008, one of the three winners of the SFD 2007 Best Event competition, the FOSS Nepal community has issued "Kathmandu Declaration", that was signed by over 700 professionals, students and other FOSS enthusiasts, amidst the presence of Nepal's Minister of Science and Technology, journalists and government officials.

I finally finished re-installing Gentoo 2008.0 on my desktop. This was the first time in several years I actually got a fully functional Gentoo system.

What is this freedom that we are talking about?

It is the freedom to live our lives to its fullest without harming anybody else and without violating any of our accepted social norms. There are several areas of life where we invoke this freedom. We are primarily concerned with three different areas - Software Freedom, Freedom from Social Evils, Freedom to live our future.

I can't fault Mark Shuttleworth for being ambitious. He wants to make Ubuntu into an operating system of choice -- one not only as good as the Mac, but better, and he wants to do it in 24 months, give or take. Dream big or die, right?

"Electronic Arts (EA) and Amazon have been the targets of a justified online rebellion the last couple weeks. The impetus for the backlash is EA's use of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology in its game Spore. As of right now, the game has received 2,226 1-star reviews on Amazon -- more than we've ever seen before -- and they are primarily focused on EA's DRM system.

Mark Shuttleworth challenged the Python community to look to future trends for Python's next big opportunity. Presenting a keynote at PyCon UK 2008 in Birmingham, Shuttleworth looked at three big trends, cloud computing, transactional memory and future multicore processors and asked the Python community how they were approaching these trends.

"BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 -- Since its release ten days ago, Stephen Fry's film "Happy Birthday to GNU" at www.gnu.org/fry has been viewed over a half-million times, and today the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the availability of twenty-four translations including Chinese, Arabic, Russian and Hebrew, that have been prepared especially for this Saturd

In retrospect, CONSEGI 2008 was a historical event. There were representatives from all over the Americas (including 2 from the US!) -- more Latin American national free software movements were born there as mature ones led. NXS has pulled together a number of links about CONSEGI 2008.