Software Freedom Day


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

Organization

Each event is left to local teams around the world to organize. Pre-registered teams receive free schwag sent by DFF to help with the events themselves. The 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.

Past events

TimeTeamsCountriesSource
28 August 200412N/A
10 September 200513660
16 September 200618070
15 September 200728680
20 September 200856390
19 September 200970090
18 September 201039790
17 September 201144287
15 September 201230173
21 September 201331681
20 September 201419759
19 September 201514147
17 September 201612851
16 September 20178844
15 September 20187137
21 September 20195936
19 September 20201818
18 September 20216028
17 September 20224320
16 September 20234930 1 October 2023 at the Wayback Machine
21 September 20246628

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 who heavily subsidized goodies for their teams. 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.
  • Sponsorship in 2023: Musescore, Digital Peak
  • Sponsorship in 2024: Huion
  • Sponsorship in 2025: LPI,
This event also has the long term support of Earth Cause, Linode, Mailman, FSF, FSFE, Joomla, Creative Commons, Admin Magazine, Linux Journal, Ubuntu User and Woman Tech.
Each local team can seek sponsors independently, especially local FOSS supporting organizations, and often appears in local medias such as newspapers and TV.