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Comedian Stephen Fry is the star of a video celebrating the birthday of the free software organisation responsible for developing an operating system aimed at competing with the likes of Windows XP and Vista.

Vnunet.com stated that the GNU movement, which is being heralded by the video, begins a month of events led by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) which plans to highlight the achievements of the GNU operating system, which developed many open source applications and the free software licence.

Peter Brown, the executive director of the FSF, commented that he hoped that the 25th anniversary celebrations for GNU would be more than just a free software movement history lesson.

"Despite all the success brought about by the GNU system and other free software projects, we still need a determined effort to replace or eliminate the proprietary applications, platforms, drivers and firmware that many users still run," he added.

Launched in 1984, GNU developed a Unix-based computer program using the Linux kernel, resulting in the GNU/Linux operating system.

More than half of small businesses (53%) believe that the most important benefit of outsourcing is guaranteed response times for IT support, London based Connect conducted the research in 2007.