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In the days of the Apartheid, UWC stood as the intellectual home of the Struggle for Political freedom and justice for all citizens of South Africa.  This university, of which I am proudly the Chancellor, engaged not just in protest, but in protest based on a deep intellectual engagement with the social, economic and political implications of freedom. UWC helped to change our country for the better.

In 1994 South Africans achieved political freedom at last, but somehow, maybe, the UWC  collective institutional conscious forgot that Freedom is an ongoing process, and not an end that can ever be achieved. But at UWC we are not shy to use the word Freedom, and to do so in contexts where its importance is not always recognized.

In a digital world, there are many threats to our hard-won liberty. There are those who would take our ideas, and lock them up for business gain, preventing others from building on them freely subject to such reasonable constraints as society may wish to impose. There are those who would take the fruits of the human mind and lock them up, dishing them out to us in metered amounts for a fee that locks most of our people out. Then there are laws that are usurped for business reasons, and changed to  rob society of its own rights.

There are software patent systems that in other countries have created patent cold wars, and produced companies whose sole business model is to patent the obvious and wait for someone else to have the same idea, and then attack them. This makes it risky for the young people of South Africa to create technology businesses out of their innovations, and stifles innovation that could lead to development, and improvements to the quality of life of our people.

To paraphrase Edmund Burke, who said "The only thing necessary for the triumph of those who would take away our freedom in the digital world is for organizations like UWC to do nothing."

But there are those, people like our keynote speakers, Creative Commons founder Prof Lawrence Lessig and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who are not content to do nothing.

Indeed there is a whole movement that is rapidly gaining momentum worldwide, arising out of the work of people like Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman, creating socially responsible businesses out of the very freedoms that we are talking about.

Free Software (and Open Source), Free and Open Resources for Education, new ways to create and share cultural artifacts such as music, writing and art; all of these are changing the world. For the better.

UWC is in fact at the forefront of this movement, thanks to the work of Professor Derek Keats, the Free Software Innovation Unit within Information and Communications Services, and due in no small part to the support of Rector, Prof Brian O'Conell.

And so, as Chancellor of the University of the Western Cape, I welcome you to the Digital Freedom Exposition at UWC. I am sorry that I cannot be here in person to welcome you, so I hope that you will accept this two-dimensional version as a token of my best wishes for a successful event, and for UWC to again put freedom firmly on its intellectual agenda.

And, just so you know we are serious, this video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.