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