That's a free software issue!

Talk given by Molly de Blanc & Karen Sandler at Debconf18
https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2018/DebConf18/2018-08-02/that-s-a-free-software-issue.webm

So, thank you everyone to coming to
this talk.

Are you ready to start? Yeah, fabulous.

We've called it "That's a Free Software
Issue!"

Cause it is!

A little bit about us.

My name is Karen Sandler, I'm the executive
director of an organization named

Software Freedom Conservancy.

Raise your hand if you've heard of
Conservancy

so, like 3/4 of the room.

We're a nonprofit charity, we're the home
of lots of free software projects

like garbled,
the list goes on and on.

We're also the home of the Debian Copyright
Aggregation project, and

we're the home of Outreachy, which is a
diversity initiative that

Debian participates in and

the very shortest note about me is that
I have a heart condition and

I'm fine, but my heart is 3 times the size
of a normal person's heart

and I'm at a very high risk of suddenly
dying,

so I have a pacemaker defibrillator,
which is awesome, except

I can't see the source code in my own
body, which is causing me to be

really really passionate about software
freedom.

Karen might be a cyborg, but I'm a cat
owner,

this is a picture of my cat, his name is
Bash.

My name is Molly de Blanc, I'm a free
software activist,

I'm the campaign manager for the Free
Software Foundation.

How many people here know about the FSF?

Wow!

How many of you are members?

Still good!

Can we ask them how many are
Conservancy supporters?

How many of you are Conservancy
supporters?

Nice

How many of you are both?

Thanks!

If anyone, since I'm a volunteer with the
Free Software Foundation,

I'm also a lawyer and I only do pro bono
legal work now.

But since I'm a volunteer sometimes with
the Free Software Foundation,

I can say that if anyone signs up to become
a Free Software Foundation associate member

during this talk, come up afterwards and
highfive me.

And I can say, since I volunteer for the
Conservancy,

that if you would like to become a
Conservancy supporter by the end

of this presentation, I will highfive you.

So, in addition to those things, I'm also
on the board of the Open Source Initiative

I like to think this makes me doubly
qualified to talk about licensing

even though I'm less qualified than Karen
to talk about licensing.

You are also affiliated with all of
the orgs.

Yeah.

Officially, so…

Which brings us to
"What is user freedom?"

Raise you hand if this is, maybe, your
first conference

in Free and Open Source Software.

Let's give all these people a round of
applause there,

like 5 people here who are new.

[Applause]

Brief introduction, do you want to
start that?

Sure

User freedom is predicated, it's based
on the idea

we first need to understand and appreciate
that we have digital rights.

We're extending our rights that exist in
physical spaces to digital spaces.

And once we understand that, we can then
think about and talk about

"Well, there is this software and these
technologies that we're using

and we also have rights specifically
relevant to those"

So user freedom is the freedom that we
have relating to technology and software.

User freedom is a really important part
of our digital right, it's…

the slide is not… oh there it is

Oops, now I have gone too far.

Software freedom is an important piece of
user freedom.

User freedom, I think, it's very difficult
for user freedom to exist

without software freedom.

So, software freedom, should I just…
Yeah.

Software freedom is a software that
you can…

I love this picture, ???
for the FSF

You can buy this on a t-shirt
from them.

But it's software with 4 freedoms.

The ability to run a software, to make
modifications to the software,

to contribute back those changes and to
share the software generally.

There's different licenses that help
accomplish this.

Free and Open Source Software is
predicated on a legal construct

and there's this really special idea called
Copyleft where

we use copyright, which creates effectively
a monopoly, but in order to

keep software free and to share it.

This was kind of a crash course on
what Free Software is and

what Free Software Freedom is and how
it fits in the context of user freedom.

Did you want to add anything to that?
No, it's okay.

Now we want to tell you about why we care
about Free Software.

We mostly care because we care about
the future of our technology and

we care about how technology is interwoven
into the societies that we live in.

For me, the reason why I care about
sofware freedom is deeply personal,

I have this defibrillator, I can't see the
source code inside my body

but also, I can't modify it and I can't
change it.

When I was pregnant, I got shocked by
my defibrillator

because my heart was palpitating, which is
something that normal people who are pregnant

have palpitations, but the vast majority,
85% of people who have defibrillators

are over the age of 65.

And of the people who get defibrillators,
fewer than half of them are women,

so the set of people who are in my situation

being pregnant with a defibrillator was
just teeny tiny

and no one had anticipated my condition
before.

But I couldn't do anything about
that situation,

the only way I could deal with it was
to take drugs to slow my heartrate down

and that was a real challenge.

As I live with my defibrillator, the issues
around software freedom become

really evident

and as I go through different stages
in my life,

it becomes more and more obvious
how those map into societal issues.

So, for me, this just comes up over
and over again as a metaphor

for all of the technology we rely on.

I care about Free Software from a high
level.

This is a reinterpretation from a quote
given to me by Elana Hashman

"User freedom enables consent"

In order to consent, we have to have
autonomy,

and in order to have autonomy, we need
to be able to understand

what we're looking at and what we're
talking about.

So without user freedom, without software
freedom,

we wouldn't be able to look at these
technologies that are running

every single aspect of our lives.

So the question is, why should you care
about software freedom?

We were thinking about it and we were
able to divide

what we think are the core issues into
a few major categories.

The first one is autonomy.

Linking back to my heart condition, not
being able to even see the source code

on my own body, let alone have the ability
to work with medical professionals

to modify it really underscores this point.

We should have control over the
technology we rely on

and whether on not we are the ones who
want to modify the technology

or whether we want to work with
professionals or a team or regulators

or whoever it is to modify our technology

We don't have autonomy over our own
destinies, unless we have control

over our software, unless we can see how
it's written, see how it operates

and also have the ability to modify and
implement those modifications.

Autonomy also fits into that narrative
that I mentioned before about consent.

An enthusiastic consent to the way that
we're interacting with technology,

the way that the results are being used.

This is very vital for our autonomy freedom.

Another major category of areas where
we think that software freedom is essential

is within security.

We must have control over our security
tools. We must be able to review the

security software that we're using. We
need to not only be able to review the

source code and see how--
we may not always be able to see that

there are backdoors that having the
opportunity to review that source code

is a critical component, and the ability
to modify when there is a vulnerability

is really important too.

There's this study called the
"Honeymoon Effect"

raise your hand if you have heard of
the Honeymoon Effect, just curious

about that, just a few people.
They studied the number of

vulnerabilities in software over time
as opposed to bugs in software over time

The number of bugs in software is
generally a decreasing number as a

project matures. But then if you look
instead at known vulnerabilities, there's

this period of time where the known
vulnerabilities are flat and they call

the honeymoon period, because it
was the time where there were no

known vulnerabilities in that source
code and the software project

and once there was one vulnerability

found it increased at an almost

exponential rate. And it was interesting
and they studied how