For some time now I have been involved with a local charity here in Clackmannanshire called ClacksNet. The main purpose of ClacksNet is to assist local community groups and organisations create a web presence for themselves. Rather than doing all the work for a group the idea is to train them to do it. We run training sessions in web design to show people how to create and maintain their own web sites. In the past we’ve used various programs to teach this but the problem has always been that people couldn’t carry on the work at home if they didn’t have the software. Enter Mozilla, I had the idea to use Mozilla to design and build web sites and as it’s free and open source we could give copies to our students. The next step was to offer not only Mozilla, but a whole range of free software to the students, so I set about creating a list of what we could include. Then I happened upon the Open CD project. A dowloadable CD image of free open source software (FOSS)….just what I was trying to come up with. I contacted the people at the project and told them that I wanted to give their CD away to students at our training events…no problem, in fact they even offered to let me change the splash screen on the CD to incorporate our logo, which I did.
The CD is packed with all sorts of open source programs, including Mozilla and the GIMP which are the two we’ll use during the courses.
The latest version of the CD promotes software freedom day
The idea is to promote the use and dissemination of FOSS (Free Open Source Software). I’m a keen advocate of FOSS and am glad to do my small bit to spread the word about software that is not only of very high quality but FREE.