I recently gave a presentation about the culture and values of open source at the Richmond Church of the Brethren.

I roughly covered the following bullet points, and have presented them here with some links to provide some context about what I might have been talking about.

• The Four Freedoms of Open Source Software
• Accountable and Accessible Leaders
• Open Source Is A Gift Culture: Status Increases Through Giving
• Open Source is Good for the Environment
• Better Support for Local Economies
• A Solution for Accurate, Accountable Voting Machines
• Better Access to Archived Digital Data is a key reason that Massachusetts is switching to open formats.
• Better Security, Less Viruses, Spyware, Adware...
• Weapons, Baby Milk Powder and...Proprietary Software This proposal details numerous values-based reasons that organizations such as Oxfam should use open source. Oxfam apparently listened
• How Can High Quality Software Be Free?
• Open Source Reduces Hardware Costs. Indeed, it often can reduce the Total Cost of Ownership.
• Supporting Global Diversity. While Iceland was left the mercy of Microsoft to have an Icelandic version of windows, (search for Microsoft vs Icelandic), users of open source systems can support a an additional language with minimal effort, as evidenced by this playful project to translate KDE into Klingon.
• Open Source is More Fun.