Dear Michael Moore,

The International Free Software Forum (IFSF) is a Free Software event in which brazilian and international free software communities meet, discuss on free software development issues, and how can free software help making information technology widespread, from a social and humanitarian perspective.

IFSF, according to Jon Maddog Hall, IFSF is the greatest in the world. IFSF's last edition had the following numbers:

• 4.854 attendees
• attendees from 35 countries
• attendees from all 27 brazilian states, and 380 cities.

We'd like to invite you for attending to the 6th International Free Software Forum as our guest. 6th IFSF will be held in Porto Alegre/Brazil, on June 1st to 4th, 2005.

When we talk about free software, we're not talking about price. We use "free" as in "freedom", and not as in "free lunch". Portuguese has different words for those senses: "livre" from "free" as in freedom, and "grátis" for "free" as in "free lunch".

By free software, we mean software that can be freely distributed, used and modified by users. Deep philosophical texts about free software can be found at Free Software Foundation's website, at http://www.fsf.org .

Free Software world-wide movement is supported by hackers that work for something they believe: that information should be free, and people should have the right to chose what they want to use, and to know exactly what they software does.

Although used by media as a pejorative term, here we must make clear that hackers are specialists who work (on computers, in our case) with passion, support freedom of knowledge and information (software, in our case) sharing. We know people that steal codes, build computer viruses and destroy other people's systems as "crackers".

This community had already developed fully functional software, like operating systems, desktop systems, word processors, electronic spreadsheet, graphics software, sound listening and composing software, games, and several other types of software one can imagine. All this software is freely available, and people now see it as an actual alternative to non-free (sometimes called "proprietary") software.

Nowadays, free software philosophical concepts have gone beyond software: a free information movement raises in the world and we have already people that work on how to make information freely distributable and study how to achieve this in several legal systems. One of the main expoents of this movement is the Creative Commons project: http://creativecommons.org .

IFSF is promoted by Projeto Software Livre Brasil (Brazilian Free Software Project).

Projeto Software Livre Brasil (PSL-Brasil) is a loosely coupled group of people, institutions and multilayered organizations from a broad spectrum of Brazilian civil society, with branches in 18 of its 26 states. PSL's core interests include cooperation with governments, private enterprises and international organizations, in actions aimed at preserving human values across the digital divide and through the digital revolution.

(from the transcript of Professor Pedro Rezende's speech at the 3rd UE-ALC on Information Society Forum: http://www.softwarelivre.org/news/3345)

PSL's news portal can be accessed at http://www.softwarelivre.org (unfortunately, at the moment only in brazilian portuguese).

Brazilian Government have been a pioneer in free software adoption. Brazil's goals with that is giving the first steps towards technological independence, what in our current world is necessary for a country's sovereignty.

This adoption have been caused "unfriendly" reaction from several companies that make a lot of money with non-free software. One of them is Microsoft.

In a interview for a brazilian magazine, Mr. Sérgio Amadeu da Silveira, National Information Technology Institute's president and coordinator of the governments' free software migration workgroup, associated the act of Microsoft giving away software licenses as a drug dealers' strategy. This metaphor was used thousands of times before, but Microsoft sued Sérgio Amadeu on brazilian justice, expecting "explanations". This was a clear threat to brazilian government's support for free software, and brazilian and international community reacted collecting 12305 signatures in [[http]://www.petitiononline.com][petitiononline.com]], in a support petition with 5 versions.

We coordinated the campaign in the following website:

• http://twiki.softwarelivre.org/bin/view/Amadeu/

Pablo Lorenzzoni's blog gives further information in english:

• http://hackers.propus.com.br/%7Epablo/blog/?id=31
• http://hackers.propus.com.br/%7Epablo/blog/?id=32

And Professor Pedro Rezende has followed all the facts of this event in his webpage (in portuguese):

• http://www.cic.unb.br/docentes/pedro/trabs/eucaristia.html

It does not happen only in Brazil. Some companies are always trying to stomp society making their interests prevail over the society's. With free software it's not different.

The international free software community "is tired of seeing corporations interests prevail over our own survival". (do you know this expression? ;-))

Brazil had been watching your movies, reading your books. We follow your battle for a better USA, for a better world. You presence in our event will be of great value for our community.

To manifest our desire of your coming, we've created an online petition, where you'll can see manifestations and support from people in Brazil and in the world, that want to see you at 6th IFSF. You can see it at http://www.petitiononline.com/mm6fisl/ how many people have already signed the petition.

After all that said, we strengthen the invitation to you, a great defender of people's interests over corporations', to attend to the 6th IFSF, support free software and contribute with our debate.

It's quite hard do describe all free software world in so small space, there is much more. That's another reason to you for accepting our invitation.

Sincerily,

The 6th IFSF Organizing Comitee.

see also:

• ConviteMichaelMoore

* e-mail for contact

mailto:contato@softwarelivre.org

-- JoseliceAbreu & AntonioTerceiro - 02 Dec 2004