Episode: 999
Title: HPR0999: Simon Phipps on Open Software: OGG Camp Part One
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0999/hpr0999.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 17:09:55

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The full circle podcast on hacker public radio in this episode of Camp 11 Simon Thips on
Open Software Hello World and welcome to our show on hacker public radio.
This is the first of our highlights of last summer's unconference, Oak Camp 11 held
at final maltings in the south of England.
The full circle podcast is the companion to full circle magazine, the independent magazine
for the Ubuntu community.
Find us at fullcirclemagazine.org forward slash podcast.
Simon Thips presented the opening session of the unconference to a packed main hall, speaking
on the topic of software freedom.
A computer industry veteran, Simon came on with an actual box of hats which he proceeded
to change at high speed, reminding me of Tommy Cooper in his heyday.
Simon has come up through hands-on roles as field engineer, programmer and systems analyst
run a software publishing company, worked with OSI standards in the eighties on the first
commercial collaborative conferencing software in the nineties and helped introduce both
Java and XML to IBM.
A founding director of the open mobile alliance, Simon is currently chief strategy officer
at independent software company fordrock and director of the open source initiative.
Here's an edited version of his presentation.
We'll play many hats.
We have hats that we wear for work, hats that we wear for home, you know, I tend to wear
this hat because it keeps the rain off, when I try to look respectable, I tend to wear
this hat.
When I'm trying to look cool and geeky, I tend to wear this hat, and when I re-refine
up to help in the open source activities over there, I wear this one.
Now the truth is that they all need all of those different hats that I'm wearing and I
can't just isolate off one of them at a time.
And so in this open session, I figure you're going to get two days of all the geeky stuff
with buttons to put in screens to look at and cool stuff to play with.
And what I'd like to remind you is of the reason why open source happened in the first
place.
I'd like to suggest to you that we are on a trajectory towards either freedom or right.
There have been lots of technology that was interesting to us all, but when the worldwide
web was invented and coalesced into something we wanted in our homes, when the technology
transferred out of the lab and into the pocket, transferred out of the lab into the home,
and transferred out of the lab into the heart of our lives, we were inevitably put on
a collision course with the authority that had grown up during the 19th and 20th centuries.
And although what happened in the UK over the last week was a load of thugs and idiots
who were stealing stuff and who, I hope, are going to enjoy the prison sentences, we're
going to see a whole lot more of that because what they were doing was they were pushing
an awikeness that was being exposed in society.
You see, the government's response to those rights is going to be to try to diminish your
freedoms.
Now, curiously, the example didn't happen in the UK this week, it actually happened
in San Francisco.
In San Francisco yesterday, the organisation that runs the subway there, the VART service,
decided that there was a risk that there was going to be a protest on one of their statements
about the outcome of a murder trial, where a transit policeman had killed somebody and
the transit policeman looked like he was getting away with it.
And there was going to be a peaceful protest, but decided that the risk of what happened
in London happening in San Francisco to great, and they shut down the cell phone service
at the station.
So you couldn't use your cell phone.
Now, I don't know whether they were entitled to do that, often when we make rules and
try and live only by the rules, people end up living at the margin.
When you're able to live by a transit police and by an internal compass, you live in a place
that satisfies the needs of your internal moral compass.
But when you live by rules, what happens is you get pushed out to the edge of the rules
and you live only on the edge of the rules.
So that's why big corporations think it's okay to do unethical things to make money.
They do say, because the rules say, they claim they say, that they've got to do for their
shareholders.
Think of the future.
So when you make rules, you push people to the edge of society and to the edge of the
rules.
And that's what we're going to see happening more and more.
We're going to see people being pushed to the edge of the rules.
And the thing is, in this world, Lawrence Leccik pointed out that code is law.
And what the law says doesn't matter very much on the ground.
It doesn't matter whether the bomb police in San Francisco were actually allowed to turn
off the cell phone network.
It turns out there was a switch on the wall that said cell phone network and they turned
it off and the cell phone was off.
And that was the law on the ground at the time.
And the thing is that we're moving from a society where the people who can set the law were
people in London, in pot offices.
So the people who make the law are people who wear back teachers.
So the truth is that because of the things we're interested in, because we're interested
in cool tablets and we're interested in limits and we're interested in web-hosted services
and we're interested in syndicated software and we're interested in digital music and
we're interested in digital video, because we're interested in those things.
We are going to become the people who hold the law in our hands.
And this is the reason why I've been telling people for quite some time now that what
really matters in their world is going to be software freedom.
Software freedom really matters.
It doesn't matter simply because you're going to be some kind of a radical annutator.
It matters because it matters of technology.
The principles of software freedom are your compass.
The lack of software freedom is a set of principles and you can tell when you're sticking
with the principles.
You'll remember that by the round of this photograph, I took this photograph from
battery park in New York.
And you can see that great symbol of liberty, the static liberty, standing visible for
everyone to see.
And in the background you can see the doctrines of New Jersey adopting the same posture.
And we can tell the difference.
We can tell this is about liberty and this is about commerce.
Maybe you don't think OpenCore is a problem.
OpenCore is where a company takes free software and they pack a load of stuff around it which
isn't free and sell you that.
And they tell you that because in the middle there's software freedom that they enjoy.
Therefore you can buy the thing on the outside which doesn't have software freedom.
That's OpenCore.
We're also threatened by cloud.
Cloud is a threat to your software freedom and it's a really big challenge actually working
out what it means for software freedom to happen in cloud computing.
We're stuck with cloud computing.
I already got taken to hell by it today and we are all going to live with cloud computing
no matter how hard it gets the amount by whosoever wants to in the computing industry.
And we have to work out how to map freedom into the cloud.
So what I mean by freedom, well the four freedoms, this is my paraphrase of the four freedoms.
The four freedoms are the freedom to use software for any purpose.
The freedom to study the source code so you know how it works.
The freedom to modify it so it does what you want and the freedom to distribute it so
that your friends, colleagues, customers and more can do the same things you can do.
The other software freedom and the idea of software freedom is that anything that abridges
those rights is wrong.
It's the freedom to succeed or to fail early because you're not burdened down with just
ifying the button.
If you're using Open Source software you can afford to fail earlier and that means you can
get to the point where you succeed early because you know that nothing works until you've
tried it three times.
So I'd like to suggest to you that software freedom in business is important because everything
that you value about Open Source software is the first derivative of software freedom.
Now what's diagnostic about protecting software freedom, but what's diagnostic is who ends
up with the software freedom.
You see people talk about software freedom and open source in business software but you've
got to ask yourself who is ignoring those freedoms.
If your supplier is enjoying your freedom, well that's fantastic and please your suppliers
enjoy those freedoms and I would find for their life to do so.
But you're not going to get any of these benefits that I've just told you about.
You're not going to get the freedom to use the software for any purpose without having
to worry about licensing terms, your supplier is.
You're not going to have continuity in a market that changes, your supplier is.
So it matters who has the software freedom and that's the diagnostic.
When you see Open Source menu, when you see free software menu, ask who ends up with
the software freedom.
I'd suggest to you that Open Source software is no more risky than any other kind of licensing,
hugely less risky and in some very important ways it comes with great benefits.
The first one is that that freedom to use the software for any purpose means that in your
business, as long as you're not distributing the software outside your business, there is
no need for you to count how many copies you're using and do license audit.
Software asset management is not something you have to do that can sort of suffer.
Something you have to do if you're distributing the outside your company, but you do that
anyway if you're distributing software because you've got to manually output to all the
libraries and software that you'll bring into the company anyway.
Open Source is just one more kind of software you're consuming and I'd like to suggest
you that that's a massive benefit.
The fact that if you use Open Source software in your business, you have reduced your
cost of managing your software infrastructure.
I'd like to suggest to you that we've got trapped by the grandest meaning of free.
I'd like to suggest to you that that only means free, that free, where you're more pure
when the guys from Ockham tell you there's free beer tonight, there is free beer tonight.
When they tell you that you see you hear, that's when they tell you that your software
freedom has been preserved, you go, because you see that free, that not paying word is
really interesting to us, whereas that liberty word, when you don't need liberty until
somebody tries to take it away and by the time someone challenges your liberty is too
late to protect it, the time that you need to protect your rights is when you don't
need them.
I'd suggest to you that what really matters is not the cost cut in history of free software
and the focus on price.
I'd suggest that if we didn't know better, we'd pay extra for Open Source software, because
it has something the proprietary software just doesn't have, it comes with freedom inside.
And so I'm calling on you here at Ockham this weekend to remember every time you see something
to ask, well where's the freedom in this?
So all the time you go through here, I'm asking you, every presenter, focus on freedom
and ask them what they're doing with the software or the technology they're working with to
protect your freedoms.
Now we're all drawing that line somewhere in our lives at the moment.
I know very, very few people who are able to stand and explain honestly that absolutely
everything in their life has got free software in it all the way down to the ground.
Everyone is compromising some way.
And so the message to you for Ockham is not get to be a radical that destroys the practicality
of life in pursuit of freedom, but rather be conscious, be conscious of your freedoms.
So be aware of where your freedoms are, because being aware of your freedoms is the key
to liberty.
Now I'd like to suggest to you that this could be the most important thing that you do,
because as we move forward in society, you're going to discover that it's those liberties
that allow you to operate in society that is going to get increasingly worried about
technology.
What's the point of having some sort of open data transparency directive across Europe
if all of the files are in a format, you have to buy a reader from Microsoft to read.
What is the point of being able to use any software you want if the computers you can buy
are all knocked down by software patents and design patents?
Who wants a world where Android is strong, but it's been barred from all markets by somebody
with a species patent or design claim?
And this is a world that's coming and the only people who are going to be able to organize
a protest against it, and you, because the other folks who organize protest about technology
are dead steel TVs.
So I don't know how you feel about this message.
The message that I've got to give to you is that software freedom is the key to what
we're doing with computers and technology.
We have to reinterpret it for the current era.
But the world is thinking we've got to adapt to it because we are the new policymakers.
We are the new legislators because the technology that we work on is the point where in practical
terms people of day-to-day experience look.
We are the people who are programming BlackBerry's secure messaging service.
We are the people who understand why it's a crazy idea to try and control and ban people
from using social media.
For goodness sake, has the man never worked out what social media is?
Does he, is no one advising anyone that can serve the government at the moment?
We are the people who have been very comment on that.
You are the people who have been comment on that.
So please, pay attention to people.
We need you.
Our frames depend on you.
Thank you very much.
That was Simon Fipp's presentation on software freedom from OgCamp 11.
OgCamp is a joint venture organised by those lovely podcasters, the Linux Outlaws and
the Ubuntu UK podcast.
With more highlights of the OgCamp Unconference coming up on the full circle podcast very soon,
including Karen Sandler and the OgCamp panel discussion.
For now, I'm Robyn Cattling.
Thank you for listening and goodbye.
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