Another positive and unexpected outcome from the walk was that free software communities, all over Kerala, came together to help organise the event and make it a success.
... Besides that most media had sidelined the social and environmental aspect of their walk and concentrated only on the free software aspect.

Free software had remained a technological and an economic issue in the state of Kerala and it had been very successful in being so. A team of four people decided to take the fundamental principle of the freedom behind free software and take this message of freedom to the masses in Kerala.

Anoop John, CEO of Zyxware technologies and initiator of the Freedom Walk, writes a detailed arcticle about economic model of Free Software. He is looking for comments as it will be published in a engineering college magazine.

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.

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* LibrePlanet Conference 2009!
* FSF files suit against Cisco for GPL violations
* BadVista: We hardly knew ye
* GCC libraries get updated license exception
* An open response to Chris Frey regarding GFDL 1.3
* Updating the Free Software Definition
* More background about the Cisco case
* The bootable membership cards are (finally) here!
* 3D graphics are 100% free software

"The annual free software conference LibrePlanet is the place for the free software community -- from old school hackers to brand new users -- to come together and further the collective goals of the free software movement.

"Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution.

"..RMS’s other mission here is to promote the Free Software Movement. The creator of the GPL...is at pains to correct misunderstandings of what the term free software means and to draw a distinction between it and the open source movement.

Free software is simply software that respects our freedom -- our freedom to learn and understand the software we are using.