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The Free Software Foundation’s latest free software campaign is hilarious and awesome!

In case you’re unfamiliar with the FSF, they’re a nonprofit corporation founded by free software activist and GNU hacker Richard Stallman. Their goal is to promote free and open source software. Their tactics often include comical publicity stunts to bash proprietary software.

This is the email I received this morning from the Free Software Supporter mailing list:

Hi everyone,

This Wednesday, August 26 at 11am, the Free Software Foundation will be launching its Windows7sins.org public awareness campaign, drawing attention to the threats posed by the adoption of Microsoft’s proprietary operating system. We have a launch event here in Boston on the Boston Commons from noon until 3pm, and we need everyone in the area to come along and help out and join in the ceremony as we conduct a ceremonial trashing of proprietary software.

**We’ll be launching our Windows 7 campaign with pomp and fanfare, with a giant 12 foot trashcan being filled with boxes of proprietary software.**

The event promises to be lots of fun, and with thousands of people passing through the Boston Commons every day we hope you will help us connect with the public by handing out information and explaining the benefits of free software. There will be camera crews and photographers capturing the event and we will be getting these images up online as soon as possible on the day.

Let us know you’re coming and bring along your friends and work colleagues – mail campaigns@fsf.org if you have time to help us set up, or just turn up at the Boston Commons near the entrance to the Public Gardens from noon.

If you’re not in the Boston area, there will be plenty for you to do to help us launch the campaign and get the message out. Stay tuned for upcoming instructions…

Thanks for your support!

–
Peter T. Brown
Executive Director
Free Software Foundation
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org

I think I’d go to the event — if not to dump my proprietary software, then to witness an event unlike any other I’ve heard of. Too bad I’m not in the Boston area.

I remember checking the search engine rank for my first website FreeTheFlash.com in a whole bunch of now-dead search engines like Altavista, Excite, Gigablast, Hotbot, Lycos, and a whole bunch of others I’ve probably forgotten. Today, of course, I only bother to check my sites’ rankings in Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live Search/Bing (I wonder what Microsoft will call their search engine next?).

Now that Yahoo Search is officially dead, replaced by Bing, I thought it would be nice to post a couple of videos about the good ‘ol days of The Big Three: MSN, Yahoo, and Google.

MSN vs. Yahoo

Google vs. Yahoo

MSN vs. Google

Shaking hands with Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer. Notice, he is wearing THE T-SHIRT I DESIGNED!

More info and a full story coming as soon as I have time to write a full blog post. In the meantime, enjoy this video of Steve’s speech!

Update 11/07/2009: It looks like the video of Steve’s speech has been remove from the ETL website. Next time I’ll download it and host it locally.

El Capitan of Microsoft

Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, is coming to Stanford on Wednesday. He’s going to give a talk about entrepreneurship in Memorial Auditorium at 4pm. If you’re in the Palo Alto area and you want to attend, you can get free tickets online. You can find out more on the ETL website.

Also, rumor has it that the ETL coordinators are going to give Steve an ETL shirt at the end of the seminar (that’s the shirt that I designed!!). If anything like this happens, I’ll be sure to take some pictures and let you’all know about it! Wouldn’t it be awesome if my t-shirt design was on the body of someone worth $11,000,000,000 — that’s 11 billion dollars?!

In the meantime, amuse yourself with some of his past antics. This dude’s an interesting character, without a doubt.

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