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 git, ???, Inkscape, ???, 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.