meetings-archive.debian.net/.../Debian_in_the_Dark_Ages_of_Free_Software.webm

Can you hear me?

Better.

So, hello everyone.

Welcome again to DebConf, I guess.

It's a great pleasure to be back again at one DebConf and a great honor to be doing one of the opening talks.

I confess I wasn't really expecting that honor.

I just wanted to propose a session which was supposed to be a self held sessions for those of us that think there are some worries about where the free software is going in general.

And the role distributions have to play in the current state of affairs.

So this talk will be about a couple of journeys at once.

The first journey is a journey through emotions, through good feelings about what we have achieved in Free Software over the past 15 to 20 or 30 years depending on how long you've been involved.

The second journey is essentially my own journey through software freedom from the day I started discovering Free Software and what I've ended up doing since then.

Starting with the positive news.

This is how I got involved myself in 1997.

I understand that there are people in the room who have involved since way earlier than that, others that have been involved since way later than that.

That's my story.

I hope you'll find

When I started as a freshman in a computer class at university of Bologna, there was a huge tiping point, a huge hype point for the so-call opensource movement.

That was the year the ??? has been published.

That was the year ??? Netscape decided to opensource its own code.

That was the moment in the history of free software when people were trying to sell to the industry what free software was doing, and I'm not using that word in a bad sense.

So there was reasonable concern that without involvement of the industry, the free software movement wouldn't have got far.

So they were trying to tell about free software in an industrial-friendly way.

Essentially, the rhetoric at the point was that if you do development of software in the free software way, in a more open way, a more participative way, you will end up having better software and that by merely opening up you code you'll have these flocks of programmers coming to you project and end up helping you.

A few years later, I realised that I personnaly didn't believe much in that idea: it's only because your software is open that it's gonna be better, but it was a fair thing to try at the time.

What I discovered a bit later is actually what ??? was essentially the philosophy of free software.

The fact that computer user should be in charge and in control of their own machine, that should have some basic freedom.

You about the 4 freedoms, I'm not going to repeat them here, but my personal point is that the narrative of free software is something that resonated with me a lot at the time.

As a student, I realised that by having free software at my fingertip as a computer student, I could debug any single layer of the software stack and look at how things are going.

I didn't have to trust the teacher on how an operating system should be developed.

I was able to open up ??? in the linux kernel and look at the actual scheduling algorithm that was being implemented in the real kernel.

Not that I really got all of it at the time but the possibility was just breathtaking for me.

Later on, I ended up distilling the main intuition of free software, which is the one I used to explain free software to people, which is intuition of control.

So, I ended up believing that the main reason why I've been involved in this movement for about fifteen years is that I really believe that every single computer user, and that's a lot of people these days, should be in control over their own computations.

Everything you're doing with a device which is mediated via software is controled by someone, either it is you or it is someone else.

And the best episode, the best narrative to explain that to people that they've been using for quite a while is this passage from the novel "Makers" by Cory Doctorrow which is a bit long so I'm not gonna read it in detail, but essentially there is one character of the novel which is Lester which is explaining to another character the importance of controling your own devices, your own tools.

The first example he takes is the example of the hammer, a physical hammer, and he goes on saying that if you own a hammer, essentially you could do whatever you want with it.

You can use it for its main purpose, or you can use it for something completely different which was not meant to be its original purpose but it's you that decide.

He compares that a ??? device which is the "Disney in a box" in the novel and Disney in this book is the big evil villain which is oppressing people and essentially Disney in a box is a glorified 3D printer that can only print what Disney wants it to print for that day.

One day, it will print a goofie character, another day it will print Donald Duck, but it's not you who decides.

It's Disney that decides what the printer is gonna print for you that day.

You own the device but you are not in control of what the device does.

The big quote for me is that if you don't control your life, you're miserable.

This notion of essentially oppression is what has been motivating me for all these years.

So the fact that if you are not in control of your own computation, then someone is oppressing you.

Someone is usually the person or the company or whatever that has created the software, that has the power to change the software instead of you.

This is something that really ??? me.

What I was doing at the time with my computer, well I was doing pretty standard stuff.

I was using some hardware we had at the time which was mostly desktop and local network servers.

I didn't have a laptop because it was really expensive for a student so I did get a laptop much later.

And I was doing some content production, some content consumption.

The kind of content I did produce at the time was mostly office suites, desktop publishing and this kind of stuff.

I was doing some communication, some email, some IRC, some newsgroup which was really cool at the time for geek communities.

And I was doing some software development as a newbie but it was what I was doing at the time.

I also did some content consumption, some gaming which are arguably some content that someone else is producing for you to consume.

I was doing some web browsing.

Internet was not as popular as it is today, but there were some websites you could find interesting.

In that situation, with this kind of computing, the actual path to software freedom and to control was fairly clear.

It was difficult, but it was fairly clear