Poster: "How does Free Software work?"
Submitted by mchauvet on 15 February, 2012 - 23:42
April's "Raising Awareness" workgroup published a poster entitled "How does Free Software work?".
The purpose is to provide a document presenting the "making-of" Free Software, by illustrating the various round-trips between users, developers and the community. The guiding theme of this document was to illustrate the different opportunities of making use of the freedom offered by Free software
This project has been mainly led by Antoine Bardelli, within the " Raising Awareness" working group. It consists in the description of a "textbook case" of realization of a piece of software, with a 6-step illustrated progression:
- Discussion of a first draft, during which anyone may study the conception of the software and participate.
- First publication of a functional version which can be used or distributed by everybody
- Users' feedback on the published version, in order to correct mistakes or to suggest adding functionalities.
- Corrections and implantation of new functionalities following these first tests. The access to the source code and the right given to distribute modified version allows each and every one to make use of all these improvements.
- Addition of documentation and translations. In consequence of wider use of the software, its internationalization and its documentation quality increase.
- Continuation of this improvement loop. The users' feedback and developpers' improvement can be included at any time in the software, making this a work in progress.
This document is also an opportunity to address the concept of source code and to explain how some Free Software developpers live of their art without emprisonning their customers in freedomless systems.
The Free Software communities have now this new communication tool to raise the general public's awareness on Free Software. This poster is under a triple license:Art libre license, Creative Commons By Sa and GFDL. Feel free to distribute it and to share it around!
The different versions of the billboard
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| Scribus source
| PDF format (A4)
| PDF format (A3)
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for profesional printers | PNG format
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| Color poster |
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| Grayscale poster |
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The source files require at least version 1.3.8 of the Free Software Scribus, which is a development version at the time of writing this text (June 1st 2010). The versions of this software that are offered in the main distributions are usually older than this and thus cannot open these files.
Version in arabic
Thumbnail
| Inkscape SVG sources
| PDF format (A3)
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Poster in arabic, recto |
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Poster in arabic, verso |
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Printing guidelines
- Folding of the A3 billboard: 2 vertical accordion folds + 1 horizontal fold. Format once folded: L 140 x H 148,5.
- If you double the size to A2, the format once folded becomes: L 198 x H 210.
- If you reduce the size to A4, you should only fold the billboard vertically.
- In all cases, the printing should be done on a paper that is not too thick (110-130 g/m²) to reduce the space taken by the folds.
- An offset paper will be more suitable for solids and for improved quality.
Credits and License of the document
Document produced by April using Free Software. Graphics: Antoine Bardelli. You are encouraged to use, copy, distribute and modify this document following the terms of at least one of the following licenses: : Art libre license, Creative Commons By Sa license et GFDL.
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