Daffodil International University (DIU) and Foundation for Open Source Solution (FOSS) Bangladesh jointly organized a seminar on “A Free Digital Society” today at DIU Auditorium. World Famous IT Giant Dr. Richard Matthew Stallman, President of Free Software Foundation conducted the seminar as keynote speaker. The seminar was presided over Dr. Touhid Bhuyan, Head, Department of Software Engineering of Daffodil International University. Mr. Sajedur Rahim Joarder, President, Foundation for Open Source Solution (FOSS) Bangladesh and Adjunct Faculty of Software Department addressed the seminar.
Dr. Richard Stallmen addressing the seminar
Dr. Stallman in his address uphold the importance of free technology and free software in every sector of the society and urged the common users of Computer and Information Technology to be careful and aware about the security of personal information and future technological planning. He described the security threats of personal information faced in different institutions of the society with relevant examples and urged to be careful while using the technology.
Dr. Richard Stallman launched the free software movement in 1983 and started developing the GNU operating system (see www.gnu.org) in 1984. GNU is free software, hence everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, with or without changes. The GNU/Linux system, (basically the GNU operating system with added Linux), is used on tens of millions of computers today. Dr. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award, Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several doctorates (honoris causa), and has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.
Now a day’s the most popular server system and the whole Internet system are running on GNU/Linux distributions like Debian, Redhat, Ubuntu etc. In Desktop computing Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Fedora are becoming famous day by day. Among the free softwares, in web browsing we know Firefox and Chromium very well. For Graphics design now we can think of GIMP, Inkscape and Blender for professional and home use. There are LibreOffice and OpenOffice as like any other Office document processing packages. And each of these is built using open compilers named GNU compiler and GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). And these main tools a programmer can run his/her code to make valuable, effective software. The main slogan for this digital and social movement is "FREE Software-FREE Hardware-Digital Freedom". The Founder of this movement is Dr. Richard Matthew Stallman, President of Free Software Foundation.
