A Freedom Toaster is a public

kiosk Historically, a kiosk () was a small garden pavilion open on some or all sides common in Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and in the Ottoman Empire from the 13th century onward. Today, several examples of this type of kiosk still exist in a ...

that will

burn A burn is an injury to skin, or other tissues, caused by heat, cold, electricity, chemicals, friction, or ultraviolet radiation (like sunburn). Most burns are due to heat from hot liquids (called scalding), solids, or fire. Burns occur ma ...

copies of

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, n ...

onto user-provided CDs and DVDs.

History

The original Freedom Toaster project was sponsored by

Mark Shuttleworth Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born 18 September 1973) is a South African and British entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of Canonical, the company behind the development of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system. In 2002, Shuttleworth became ...

Shuttleworth Foundation The Shuttleworth Foundation was established in January 2001 by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth as an experiment with the purpose of providing funding for people engaged in social change. While there have been various iterations of ...

and built in Perl by Hamish Whittal. It consisted of a number of

CD burning Optical disc authoring, including DVD and Blu-ray Disc authoring, is the process of assembling source material—video, audio or other data—into the proper logical volume format to then be recorded ("burned") onto an optical disc (ty ...

facilities (in kiosk form), where members of the public were able to burn copies of free and

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. ...

onto self-supplied blank CD media. The project was started as one solution to overcome the difficulty of obtaining

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

and other free and open-source software in

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring coun ...

, where the restrictive telecommunications environment makes downloading large software files prohibitively expensive. There are currently Freedom Toasters at the following locations:

Bloemfontein Bloemfontein, ( ; , "fountain of flowers") also known as Bloem, is one of South Africa's three capital cities and the capital of the Free State province. It serves as the country's judicial capital, along with legislative capital Cape To ...

Cape Town Cape Town ( af, Kaapstad; , xh, iKapa) is one of South Africa's three capital cities, serving as the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. It is the legislative capital of the country, the oldest city in the country, and the second largest ...

(2), Diepkloof,

Durban Durban ( ) ( zu, eThekwini, from meaning 'the port' also called zu, eZibubulungwini for the mountain range that terminates in the area), nicknamed ''Durbs'',Ishani ChettyCity nicknames in SA and across the worldArticle on ''news24.com'' from ...

East London East or Orient is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from west and is the direction from which the Sun rises on the Earth. Etymology As in other languages, the word is formed from the ...

Grahamstown Makhanda, also known as Grahamstown, is a town of about 140,000 people in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. It is situated about northeast of Port Elizabeth and southwest of East London. Makhanda is the largest town in the Makana ...

Johannesburg Johannesburg ( , , ; Zulu language, Zulu and xh, eGoli ), colloquially known as Jozi, Joburg, or "The City of Gold", is the largest city in South Africa, classified as a Megacity#List of megacities, megacity, and is List of urban areas by p ...

(5),

Knysna Knysna () is a town with 76,150 inhabitants (2019 mid-year estimates) in the Western Cape province of South Africa. and is one of the destinations on the loosely defined Garden Route tourist route. It lies at 34° 2' 6.3168'' S and 23° 2' 4 ...

Namibia Namibia (, ), officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country in Southern Africa. Its western border is the Atlantic Ocean. It shares land borders with Zambia and Angola to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south and ea ...

Pietermaritzburg Pietermaritzburg (; Zulu: umGungundlovu) is the capital and second-largest city in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It was founded in 1838 and is currently governed by the Msunduzi Local Municipality. Its Zulu name umGungundlovu ...

Port Elizabeth Gqeberha (), formerly Port Elizabeth and colloquially often referred to as P.E., is a major seaport and the most populous city in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. It is the seat of the Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality, So ...

Port Shepstone Port Shepstone is a large town situated on the mouth of the Mzimkhulu River, the largest river on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast of South Africa. It is located halfway between Hibberdene and Margate and is positioned 120 km south of Durban. ...

Potchefstroom Potchefstroom (, colloquially known as Potch) is an academic city in the North West Province of South Africa. It hosts the Potchefstroom Campus of the North-West University. Potchefstroom is on the Mooi Rivier ( Afrikaans for "pretty ri ...

Pretoria Pretoria () is South Africa's administrative capital, serving as the seat of the executive branch of government, and as the host to all foreign embassies to South Africa. Pretoria straddles the Apies River and extends eastward into the foothi ...

(3),

Seneca College Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology is a multiple-campus public college in the Greater Toronto Area, and Peterborough, Ontario, Canada regions. It offers full-time and part-time programs at the baccalaureate, diploma, certificate an ...

Toronto Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the anch ...

, Stellenbosch,

Stockholm Stockholm () is the capital and largest city of Sweden as well as the largest urban area in Scandinavia. Approximately 980,000 people live in the municipality, with 1.6 million in the urban area, and 2.4 million in the metropo ...

Trivandrum Thiruvananthapuram (; ), also known by its List of renamed Indian cities and states, former name Trivandrum (), is the Capital city, capital of the Indian state of Kerala. It is the most populous city in Kerala with a population of 957,730 as ...

. Soon, it will be available a
Michigan City
Indiana.

Functions

A Freedom Toaster kiosk is placed at a

school A school is an educational institution designed to provide learning spaces and learning environments for the teaching of students under the direction of teachers. Most countries have systems of formal education, which is sometimes co ...

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vi ...

shopping center A shopping center (American English) or shopping centre (Commonwealth English), also called a shopping complex, shopping arcade, shopping plaza or galleria, is a group of shops built together, sometimes under one roof. The first known collec ...

or another publicly accessible location.

Users Ancient Egyptian roles * User (ancient Egyptian official), an ancient Egyptian nomarch (governor) of the Eighth Dynasty * Useramen, an ancient Egyptian vizier also called "User" Other uses * User (computing), a person (or software) using an ...

bring blank

optical disc In computing and optical disc recording technologies, an optical disc (OD) is a flat, usually circular disc that encodes binary data ( bits) in the form of pits and lands on a special material, often aluminum, on one of its flat surface ...

s to the kiosk and select the software that they would like. The kiosk will then burn the selected software onto the users' media. The name derives from this function. "Freedom" refers to the

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the sour ...

provided. "Toaster" is a term for an optical disc burner.

Purpose

Freedom Toaster kiosks provide a way for computer users in economically disadvantaged regions and areas with limited or no Internet access to get software. By providing this service, the people behind the Freedom Toaster hope to address the issue of the

Digital Divide The digital divide is the unequal access to digital technology, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and the internet. The digital divide creates a division and inequality around access to information and resources. In the Information Age i ...

Availability

The Freedom Toaster is mostly available in South Africa and is currently supported by the Shuttleworth Foundation. The Foundation is attempting to get others to adopt the idea by providing the tools to help create, support and maintain your own Freedom Toaster. It has also provided seed funding to Brett Simpson of Breadbin Interactive to create a sustainable business model with the idea. The initiative has also been taken up independently by a company in

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...

- Zyxware Technologies - who has partnered with Free Software Users Group, Thiruvananthapuram to promote Freedom Toasters as a viable method to spread

Free Software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, n ...

in India.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Freedom Toaster
– The South African website
Seneca Freedom ToasterWashington-Lee High School Freedom ToasterFreedom Toaster MapFreedom Toaster in India
Free software projects