Latin American libre software installation festival (Festival Latino-americano de Instalação de Software Livre, FLISoL) 2017 in Balneário Camboriú

April 8th, 2017 — Even with the rain in the morning and the dirty road being repaired, the Latin American libre software installation festival (Festival Latino-americano de Instalação de Software Livre, FLISoL) in Balneário Camboriú received 3 (three) visitors and 1 (one) speaker in the morning and 22 (twenty-two) visitors in the evening. From the 16 subscribed visitors, only 3 came to the event — not considering the collaborators and speakers.

The event's goal is to foster the use of libre computer programs (software). However, the edition coordinated in Balneário Camboriú started with a presentation about the importance of the activists from the social, political and philosophical movement of libre software, so as to explain to society that the movement, acting in the social pillar of sustainability, doesn't require advanced knowledge in technology, but instead a society that cares for the movement's goals and that seek collaboration with it and its activities. As an example, the speaker presents the case of an accountant with color blindness and a problem related to the colors of an accounting software.

According to the first speaker, Adonay Felipe Nogueira, it's important to note that there are various challenges to be won by society and by the movement, such as: the problem of gratis copies (which is not a synonym for freedom); the digital handcuffs in the majority of cellphones, tablets, on Blu-ray disks, and on Netflix; the income tax declaration which is still done by the majority of people with proprietary software; the websites and academic systems that force society to use automatically a proprietary software; the inertia caused by society; the bad digital inclusion; and also the blocking of communications, like the one which happens with some instant messaging applications.

Adonay notes, with references that, while computer programs approach more and more to the day-to-day activities — as can be seen in electronic voting machines, vehicles and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators — society must disassociate brand names and organization names from products (goods or services) offered by such organizations or under such brands. This is needed because, according to the speaker and his references, the for-profit organizations has unpredictable behavior and, while they sometime fight for the society's interest, society mustn't depend on such organizations.

On the unpredictability of organizations and the absence of the essential freedoms required by the movement, part of the public questioned the legality of such actions in Brazil. However, the second speaker, Cleber Machado Leão, notes that this is governed by the license applied to the original libre software.

Additionally, Cleber notes that, even if some software, or network service, are gratis, society pays through other ways which most of the time it disagrees with.

Fortunately, one of the challenges pointed out by the speakers appears to be slowly fought by society, thanks to institutions that teach, foster and make competence in libre software. According to Adonay, the teaching institutions must foster only libre software, because these are preparing individuals to act towards society's development, and the dependency on proprietary software goes against such living with society because this type of software is an untrusted material which might not be adequate to the future needs or become obsolete due to not being changeable or distributable by society.

Besides, Adonay suggest the use of GNU Ring for instant communications because, differently from WhatsApp, GNU Ring is libre software and has distributed communication. Thus, each GNU Ring user is his own "availability provider", evading the blocking of communications done by part of the central providers.

In the second talk, Cleber, describes the case of implementation of libre in the work tribunal of the 12th region (Tribunal Regional do Trabalho da 12ª Região, TRT12), in Santa Catarina, and how this implementation served as reference to the other regional tribunals in other federative unities.

In the same talk, Cleber brings an interesting argument: According to him, when someone buys a proprietary software, the buyer solves one problem: the one which the vendor has, related to his loss of money, but this doesn't guarantee that the problem of the buyer is solved or that the acquired product will have the freedoms to be adapted by the buyer in the future according to his needs.

Based on his work in TRT12, Cleber notes that the absence of libre software to manage advanced electronic signatures such as those in the PAdES standard, and which can communicate with the digital signature cards, can be considered as another challenge that must be fought by the movement with the help of society.

On "cloud" computing, Cleber notes that this one doesn't exist, since it's only someone else's computer. And suggests that, instead of trusting other organizations to preserve these "clouds", it would be wise to form a local association of organizations that know each other, so that this association maintain its own private "cloud".

Finally, both speakers agree that there is need to educate society about the importance of the movement, so that, even without technical knowledge, society can help out. All of this without omitting the explanations about the essential freedoms that society ought to have when using computer programs. Because only through these questions there is a way to guarantee a free and just/fair digital society and a social life towards sustainability.

That said, the local event coordination ends this briefing thanking the space made available by the Avantis college (Faculdade Avantis) and the various course coordinators, teachers and students that supported, direct or indirectly, in the publicizing of the event.

Item	Quantity
Visitors	25
External speakers	1
Coordinators which were speakers	1
Talks	2
Workshops	0
Successful installations	27
Failed installations	5

Item	Available	Successes	Failures
Libre system distributions	1	10	5
Libre software	15	9	0
Libre text fonts	1	5	0
Libre color profiles	1	3	0

Libre system distributions made available	Successes	Failures
Trisquel	10	5

The full list of libre system distributions can be found in two parts, at http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html and at http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-non-gnu-distros.html.

Libre software made available	Successes	Failures
7­zip	0	0
Claws Mail	1	0
Declara	0	0
GNU Dia	1	0
GNU GIMP	0	0
GNU GnuCash	1	0
GNU Guix	1	0
GNU Health	0	0
GNU IceCat	1	0
GNU Ring	1	0
IRPF Livre	1	0
LibreOffice	1	0
Pidgin	0	0
rnetclient	0	0
VLC	1	0

Libre text fonts made available	Successes	Failures
GNU FreeFont	5	0

Libre color profiles made available	Successes	Failures
"icc-profiles-free" package (23 profiles)	3	0

all the software packages, color profiles, and text fonts are either registered on the Free Software Directory (https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Main_Page), made available through libre system distributions, through Savannah (https://savannah.gnu.org/), or in the F-Droid application store (https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/).

Failed installations of libre system distributions	Quantity
Visitor gave up due to manufacturer's absence of collaboration	3
Not enough time	2

Computers or pieces	Successes	Failures
HP Elite Slice TPC-1021-DM	1	0
MacBook 2,1	2	0
MSI VR630-073FR	2	0
Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro 20266	3	2
Lenovo IdeaPad S10e 40684JG	2	3

More information on the computers and pieces found, and how well these work with libre system distributions, can be found in the collaborative catalog called h-node at https://h-node.org/.