Software Freedom Day

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of Free Software organized by the Digital Freedom Foundation (DFF). SFD is a public education effort with the aim of increasing awareness of Free Software and its virtues, and encouraging its use.

Software Freedom Day logo

Software Freedom Day 2018 seminar at Budi Luhur University, Jakarta, Indonesia

SFD was established in 2004 and was first observed on 28 August of that year. About 12 teams participated in the first Software Freedom Day. Since that time it has grown in popularity and while organisers anticipated more than 1,000 teams in 2010^[1] the event has stalled at around 400+ locations over the past two years, representing a 30% decrease over 2009.

Since 2006, Software Freedom Day has been held on the third Saturday of September. In 2025, this event will be held on the 20th of September.

Students lined up to register at the Software Freedom Day 2011 event in the University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines

Organization

Each event is left to local teams around the world to organize. Pre-registered teams (2 months before the date or earlier) receive free schwag sent by DFF to help with the events themselves. The SFD wiki contains individual team pages describing their plans as well as helpful information to get them up to speed. Events themselves vary between conferences explaining the virtues of Free and Open Source Software, to workshops, demonstrations, games, planting tree ceremonies, discussions and InstallFests.^[2]

Professor Rodrigo Gastón Manresa conference at the Software Freedom Day 2016 event in the Superior Institute of General Manuel Belgrano 6001, Salta, Argentina

Past events

Time	Teams	Countries	Source
28 August 2004	12	N/A	linux.com Archived 30 July 2013 at the Wayback Machine
10 September 2005	136	60	linux.com Archived 30 July 2013 at the Wayback Machine SFD 2005 map Archived 21 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine
16 September 2006	180	70	SFD 2006 map Archived 21 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine
15 September 2007	286	80	SFD 2007 map Archived 21 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine
20 September 2008	563	90	SFD 2008 map Archived 21 April 2012 at the Wayback Machine
19 September 2009	700	90	SFD 2009 map Archived 21 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine
18 September 2010	397	90	SFD 2010 map Archived 19 May 2012 at the Wayback Machine
17 September 2011	442	87	SFD 2011 map Archived 28 July 2012 at the Wayback Machine
15 September 2012	301	73	SFD 2012 map Archived 16 June 2013 at the Wayback Machine
21 September 2013	316	81	SFD 2013 map Archived 18 August 2013 at the Wayback Machine
20 September 2014	197	59	SFD 2014 map Archived 27 July 2014 at the Wayback Machine
19 September 2015	141	47	SFD 2015 map Archived 21 December 2016 at the Wayback Machine
17 September 2016	128	51	SFD 2016 map
16 September 2017	88	44	SFD 2017 map Archived 26 September 2019 at the Wayback Machine
15 September 2018	71	37	SFD 2018 map Archived 23 November 2022 at the Wayback Machine
21 September 2019	59	36	SFD 2019 map Archived 21 September 2022 at the Wayback Machine
19 September 2020	18[3]	18	SFD 2020 wiki Archived 22 September 2022 at the Wayback Machine
18 September 2021	60[4]	28	SFD 2021 wiki Archived 21 September 2022 at the Wayback Machine
17 September 2022	43[5]	20	SFD 2022 wiki Archived 22 September 2022 at the Wayback Machine
16 September 2023	49[6]	30	SFD 2023 wiki

Note on the figures above: it is difficult to find figures of the early years. The maps on the SFD website are only reliable after 2007, however some years such as 2009 saw extra teams from two different sources which did not "officially" register with DFF. There was about 80 teams from China and a hundred from the Sun community (OSUM) who heavily subsidized goodies for their teams.^[7] In the early year of SFD the map was an optional component not connected with the registration script and therefore some teams did not go through the troubles of adding themselves.

Sponsors

In the past, the event has been sponsored by entities like Canonical Ltd., IBM, Sun Microsystems, DKUUG, Google, Red Hat, Linode, Nokia and MakerBot Industries.

Currently, this event is supported by Earth Cause, Linode, Mailman, Musescore, Digital Peak, FSF, FSFE, Joomla, Creative Commons, Admin Magazine, Linux Journal, Ubuntu User and Woman Tech.^[8]

Each local team can seek sponsors independently, especially local FOSS supporting organizations and often appears in local medias such as newspapers and TV.^[9]

See also

• Free and open-source software portal

• Outline of free software
• Document Freedom Day
• Hardware Freedom Day
• Culture Freedom Day
• Public Domain Day
• International Day Against DRM, promoted by the Free Software Foundation in its Defective by Design campaign