3rd Fellowship Raffle to attract more Fellows

[Sean DALY]

When I booked my flight to Barcelona last June, I filled out a form served by a Windows server. Each phone call I made was on a proprietary-software GSM device, routed through a Microsoft partner telco. The MiniDV camcorder which I used to film the conference has proprietary, closed firmware and the codec is patent-encumbered. I captured the video on a nonfree system before transcoding it to Ogg Theora with Free Software. The calculations were of course performed by a microprocessor designed with proprietary software tools.

What I want to say is that we have a far way to go yet to further the cause of Free Software in hardware and embedded systems, so we have to start somewhere. Educating/counseling/encouraging manufacturers ready to make the transition and making gadgets available to developers are, to my mind, good ways to start. All this raffle kerfuffle! I mean, will anyone confuse a raffle with formal certification of a device?

Perhaps the marketing needs tuning: "This Device Needs Liberation"