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.
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 2010Fred Muller's blog (President of Software Freedom International) 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 2026, this event will be held on the 19th of September.
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.
Past events
Time Teams Countries Source 28 August 2004 12 N/A linux.com 10 September 2005 136 60 linux.com SFD 2005 map 16 September 2006 180 70 SFD 2006 map 15 September 2007 286 80 SFD 2007 map 20 September 2008 563 90 SFD 2008 map 19 September 2009 700 90 SFD 2009 map 18 September 2010 397 90 SFD 2010 map 17 September 2011 442 87 SFD 2011 map 15 September 2012 301 73 SFD 2012 map 21 September 2013 316 81 SFD 2013 map 20 September 2014 197 59 SFD 2014 map 19 September 2015 141 47 SFD 2015 map 17 September 2016 128 51 SFD 2016 map 16 September 2017 88 44 SFD 2017 map 15 September 2018 71 37 SFD 2018 map 21 September 2019 59 36 SFD 2019 map 19 September 20201818SFD 2020 wiki 18 September 20216028SFD 2021 wiki 17 September 20224320SFD 2022 wiki 16 September 20234930SFD 2023 wiki Archived 1 October 2023 at the Wayback Machine21 September 20246628Digital Freedom Foundation Blog event overview
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. 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, Jensen Technology
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.Press coverage
See also
Outline of free software Document Freedom Day Hardware Freedom Day Culture Freedom Day Public Domain Day List of public domain projects International Day Against DRM, promoted by the Free Software Foundation in its Defective by Design campaign
References
External links
Software Freedom Day