WEBVTT

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So, thank you everyone to coming to
this talk.

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Are you ready to start? Yeah, fabulous.

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

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Cause it is!

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A little bit about us.

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

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Software Freedom Conservancy.

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Raise your hand if you've heard of
Conservancy

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so, like 3/4 of the room.

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

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like <i>garbled</i>,
the list goes on and on.

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

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

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Debian participates in and

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

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

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

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

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

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really really passionate about software
freedom.

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

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

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

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

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How many people here know about the FSF?

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Wow!

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How many of you are members?

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Still good!

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Can we ask them how many are
Conservancy supporters?

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How many of you are Conservancy
supporters?

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Nice

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How many of you are both?

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Thanks!

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

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

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

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

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during this talk, come up afterwards and
highfive me.

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

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

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of this presentation, I will highfive you.

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

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

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

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You are also affiliated with all of
the orgs.

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Yeah.

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Officially, so…

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Which brings us to
"What is user freedom?"

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

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in Free and Open Source Software.

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

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like 5 people here who are new.

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[Applause]

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Brief introduction, do you want to
start that?

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Sure

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

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

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

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

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

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and we also have rights specifically
relevant to those"

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

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

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the slide is not… oh there it is

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Oops, now I have gone too far.

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Software freedom is an important piece of
user freedom.

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

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without software freedom.

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So, software freedom, should I just…
Yeah.

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Software freedom is a software that
you can…

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I love this picture, ???
for the FSF

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

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But it's software with 4 freedoms.

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

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

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There's different licenses that help
accomplish this.

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Free and Open Source Software is
predicated on a legal construct

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and there's this really special idea called
Copyleft where

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

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keep software free and to share it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When I was pregnant, I got shocked by
my defibrillator

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

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

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are over the age of 65.

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

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so the set of people who are in my situation

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being pregnant with a defibrillator was
just teeny tiny

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and no one had anticipated my condition
before.

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But I couldn't do anything about
that situation,

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

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and that was a real challenge.

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

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really evident

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and as I go through different stages
in my life,

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

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

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for all of the technology we rely on.

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I care about Free Software from a high
level.

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

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"User freedom enables consent"

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In order to consent, we have to have
autonomy,

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

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

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So without user freedom, without software
freedom,

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

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every single aspect of our lives.

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

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We were thinking about it and we were
able to divide

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

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The first one is autonomy.

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

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

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to modify it really underscores this point.

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We should have control over the
technology we rely on

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

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

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or whoever it is to modify our technology

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

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

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

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

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

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the way that the results are being used.

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This is very vital for our autonomy freedom.

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

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is within security.

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

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

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

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

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

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is really important too.

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There's this study called the 
"Honeymoon Effect"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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known vulnerabilities in that source
code and the software project

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and once there was one vulnerability

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found

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