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.