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Manchester Free Software: ‘Free Software in Ethics and Practice’ - speaker: Richard Stallman

Thursday 1st May, 2008 - Talk starts at 6:45pm (ends approx. 8:30pm) with refreshments from 6:15pm.

Venue: Room D1, Renold Building, University of Manchester, Sackville Street, Manchester M1 3BB

There is no need to book a place - just turn up on the night.

Abstract

Richard Stallman will speak about the Free Software Movement, which campaigns for freedom so that computer users can cooperate to control their own computing activities. The Free Software Movement developed the GNU operating system, often erroneously referred to as Linux, specifically to establish these freedoms.
About the speaker

Richard Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system (see www.gnu.org) in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates.

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The Open Handset Alliance (OHA), a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies with Google at the forefront, have developed Android to become the first complete, open and free mobile platform.

The system will allow users to access core mobile device functionality through standard API calls and hopes to include such innovative features as combing information from the web with data on the phone, such as contacts or geographic location.

Google’s Android Software Developer (SDK), first released in November, is part of OHA and is based on the Linux 2.6 kernel using an operating system, middleware stack, customizable user interface and applications.

The preview version of the platform was released without real support for the hardware, while instead developers were given a software emulator based on Qemu.

Credited as one of the first developers to use Android in a hardware platform is Ben Leslie from Australia, using the Armadillo-500 from Atmark-Techno based on Freescale’s i.MX31L mobile processor.

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