Episode: 362
Title: HPR0362: Libre Planet 2009 Part 5
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0362/hpr0362.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 18:59:16

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Oh, yeah.
We have Kirin O'Rourden, who is the executive director of the N Software Patents campaign.
Comes to us from a very long background of fighting software patents in Europe with FSF
Eurobands on a zone.
And also being a really important part of the GPLV3 process, I'm sure a lot of you saw
the work that he did while that was going on.
So welcome, Kirin.
Applause
It's nice to actually feel welcome because for many years I was like the Boogie Manard
conferences, people would come and present their software and they'd show what new
features they had coded in the last year and then I'd come along and I'd say software
patents.
I have to tell everyone to be scared, so I do feel welcome.
When I started out working on software patents, I was working in Ireland and in Ireland
a group of us, we formed a group just to, or an organization, just to work specifically
on software patents.
It was called the Irish Free Software Organization and some people like our t-shirts.
We have a canoe playing a harp, so.
So my background, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a legal expert, I'm a computer programmer
by trade, or at least I was until I started getting interested in software patents.
So what this means is that I'm not a general spokesperson on software patents, so sometimes
people ask me for my opinion on the Tom Tom case or Will Bilsky go to the Supreme Court
and usually I don't know these things, I'm a programmer.
What I do know is what I saw in the European Parliament because I was working on this
between 2003 and 2005 and just from the general lobbying that we did during that and a bit
after as well.
So this is the first positive talk I've given about software patents.
Things are going well recently.
The most decisive battles in the last few years have been in the EU, the Bilsky case and
India.
So in the EU, very briefly what happened was that there was a proposal to house software
patents and we fought back and forth for what was actually eight years in total and in
the end the entire proposal was just scrapped.
So it was all that work for nothing but at least we showed that we could match the effort
of the pro software patent campaigners and we gained a lot of political support and we
showed that we can actually perform in this arena and that we can actually be involved
in the legislative procedures.
And it was also impressive from one other way because in Europe we didn't really have structures
working on software patents, not big structures at least.
It wasn't organized.
We used to read slash that and read about crazy patents in the USA and we thought I was
hilarious and then it landed on our coast.
But it was amazing very quickly those movements created and we managed to actually be effective
so that was impressive.
So then the second major decision was the Bilsky case and I didn't actually follow the Bilsky
case because another thing in Europe was we thought that it's pointless in the USA that
will be the last country to get rid of software patents.
So we were really happy when I read the results of the Bilsky case it was it's very useful
and the US board of appeals is now actually overturning certain patents mostly IVM patents
based on the Bilsky decision.
So it really does have a concrete outcome.
So when we declare victory it's not just a political victory because everyone has to declare
victory in politics it's actually a real victory and it doesn't just affect the USA because
a lot of software businesses are global and the Tom Tom case is a good example because
Tom Tom is a country company in the Netherlands but the litigation is happening in the US because
well that's the the course that Microsoft has filed the documents at and Microsoft has
contacted the International Trade Commission to ask for a block on Tom Tom's products.
So even for European companies what happens in the USA is important and a second reason
is that countries around the world when they're talking about their patent policy are usually
asked to harmonize with the rest of the world and the rest of the world usually means the USA.
So the Bilsky case is important for people all around the world and the third example the
third big decision was in India and most people don't even know that there was a big decision
in India I think it was 2005 those are proposal to change the legislation to have software
patents and those a mad battle for maybe three weeks and the media disgusted for about a week
and a half and then the parliament decided yeah that is a bad idea let's not have software
patents and in Europe we were left scratching our heads wondering what just happened there it
took us eight years to do that so we feel kind of inefficient now.
But the lack of awareness of what happened in India kind of means that there's a gap there's
something not happening right in the communication. So okay so I'm working for our end software
patents now and that's a campaign it's a slightly separate project from FSF but the funding has
come from FSF. However software patents it has to be made clear that it's not a free software
issue because we don't want people to think adopting free software means you now have a software
patent problem no software patents there are threat to all different types of users of software
for there are some problems that free software developers have for example we can't get a
license per copy or per user to enforce a patent so in that way software patents cause a particular
problem for free software but in other ways we have certain advantages for example our development
is distributed a lot of our developments by volunteers so there aren't big parts of gold that
litigators can can look at and another thing is that because free software can be edited by anyone
if there's a problem with one part of an application you don't have to take the whole application
off the market or tell people don't use the application we can just take out that one infringing
part and the rest of the application can continue to be used by as many people as possible so it's
there are pluses and minuses for free software in software patents but it's not at all a free
software problem and this has been confirmed by the the previous executive director of end
software patents spend lemons he did a study of how software patents are impacting American
companies and he found that the litigation is costing American companies 11.2 billion dollars
and most of the companies being litigated against it's not free software companies it's not
even software companies it's car manufacturers it's food companies it's any big company any company
with a part of gold in the bank because the point that Ben Clemens highlighted is that every company
is a software company every company has a few programmers down in the basement that keep the
email service working that make a website that give you options to interact with your clients
and every company that does this is without knowing it is in the software business and they're
they're the biggest targets it's not free software it's non software companies are the biggest
targets for software patents so this means that they should be doing the work not me so why aren't
they now this is this is the problem there are three categories of people the three main categories
that will fight against software patents now or in the future there is the free software community
there is a small companies in general and there is non software companies now in Europe we got a
lot of help from the small companies they have unions and the unions talk to the politicians and
they tell the politicians that software patents are too expensive completely unusable it doesn't
work with small companies in America what from what I've heard that isn't happening so much
the small companies they're all business partners of the the mega corporations and for some
and so they're scared of annoying their business partners in Europe the same small companies are
also business partners of mega corporations so that's something missing there I don't know why
the European companies aren't afraid of the same thing but we you know we should get the SMEs
active on this and we should also get the non software companies active on this we just have to
first convince them and explain to them that they are at risk and that many other companies have
already been targeted so in the in the long term hopefully the end the end software patents campaign
will be will rely on small small businesses making small donations and big non software companies
making big donations however that's not happening yet so at the moment we're mostly relying on the
free software community to kind of bootstrap the campaign but you know even if we rely on the free
software community this isn't a specifically free software problem so what we're focusing on
is either changing the legislation or getting new results in the in the courts now there have been
a lot of discussions about other ways of reducing the software patent problem in general these have
not been effective you know they they sometimes have small benefits or they work in small sectors
but in general they they will not solve the software patent problem i can briefly mention
one idea is patent pools all our friends put their pool and patents into a pool and then you know
if a big bully attacks us we can say well we have patents too but the problem is of course
most of our friends they have patent agreements already with the with the other patent holders
agreeing not to sue each other and also when our friends put patents into a pool saying we
won't use these against free software well you know it's our friends putting the software
patents in there and we weren't afraid of our friends doing us so it's not a not a big comfort
we can review patents we can look for prior art we can look for patents that are too obvious to
exist yeah that that can be useful it's you know very slow very expensive but it can be useful
sometimes if there's a particularly annoying patent we can get rid of that but in general it can't
solve the problem and the Tom Tom case is an example Tom Tom have been accused of violating eight
software patents i think three of them are sorry eight patents i think three of them are
software patents and there are patents that we know well we're very confident would be overturned
in a court it's the the Microsoft fat patents however they might be overturned in a court but
what's to say that if these three are all eight were overturned well Microsoft has 10,000
software patents or 10,000 patents what's to say the Microsoft won't just dig into their vault again
and dig out another age and say well okay you don't infringe those age do you infringe these eight
and this process can go on so in general to get rid of the problem we we have to have zero software
patents another problem with quality is that some software patents are good quality the RSA
algorithm at the MP3 encoding algorithm public key encryption these were patented in various
jurisdictions however you know there's no way you can go to a patent office and say you know this
this is a terrible idea it was completely obvious so trying to overturn in that way is it's very
unlikely to work it's not going to work completely and one last option is that our licenses we can
liken the gplv3 process we negotiated various clauses that could be added to gplv3 to protect
some free software users from the patents of companies that distribute gplv3 software but this
can only work against this only protects us against companies who are distributing gplv3 software
you know many of which are already our friends so there was no problem in the first place
and also the clause you know it couldn't be made there were limits to how strong it could be
because the stronger you make it the more afraid afraid the patent holders are going to be to
distribute gplv3 software so with our licenses we can only fix a very small a very small category of
the problem so some people wonder why we're focusing on software patents you know how can you
draw a line between different types of patents one of the most important things is the tactical
reasons because if we if we extend the the theory and decide that actually
software patents are bad and also all patents are probably bad what we do is then as well as
having Microsoft against us which is enough work we also have the chemicals industry and the
auto industry and the pharmaceutical industry against us and this is more work than we can handle
so in general we take a position on software patents but we we don't take a position on
pharmaceutical patents maybe pharmaceutical patents are bad maybe they're good that's just not
our area another problem is that the in other areas for example pharmaceuticals sometimes the
organizations that we think would be our natural allies the generic companies in pharmaceuticals
sometimes they don't like our policy because we we want no software patents but in the generic
industry a lot of the time they just want to talk about the length of patents or the how much
damages you get or how clear they should be you know our solution doesn't naturally apply to
their work so we're we've done the research on software we're sure that software patents are
by DSO we're focusing on getting rid of software patents so the way ESP is going to work is in under
Ben Clemens ESP worked on the Bill's case which was extremely important and Ben also did an
economic study of the cost of of software patents to American industry and so these were very
focused projects and now we're going to try and step step back a bit and look at the look at all
the projects that are happening regarding software patents and try to make all that information
available to the other projects because when I look back at the EU it's only been four or five
years but already the fantastic documents that we had at the time they're starting to disappear
their websites are changing some new sites are disappearing and it's it's very hard to find these
documents some of the documents were only distributed in a mailing list that don't even have a
public archive so what we're going to do is we're going to try and put all this information together
on a website and make it accessible so that the information in the EU is accessible to America
and Australia and New Zealand and everywhere else and the information from Bill's case available
to these as well so that other campaigns don't have to start from zero they can they can build on
what's already already been done so the main the first thing we're going to be putting online will be
a wiki and this will be in English first and hopefully then in other languages soon after
but that will be publicly modifiable and we hope that we'll be able to gather the information
from all parts of the world in different points of view and we'll be able to put it into some
categorized format that makes it easily accessible then we'll start doing mail just an email
alert maybe once a week on what's coming up in the next in the in the shorter midterm future what
needs to work on what what new events have taken place and we'll we'll put a blog and a new site
online as well there will be more court cases in the US not not in the very short term but there
will also be new developments in the EU and there are other developments in South Africa and New Zealand
that we're aware of however we will not work on all of these or we do work on them they won't be
the 100% focus because what we're going to try to do is work on each project but always with a
view to documenting everything all the steps so that our work on each project becomes a whole that
that is more useful for future campaigns so rather than end software patterns concurrently afford
to employ one person one person can be useful I don't want to reduce my effectiveness but one
person can't do all the work so it's more important to try and make a platform so that other people
can get active one thing we'll have to do is we'll have to build a you know a team a working
group for doing lobbying in the USA we have you know I have experienced in the EU we have some
experience with the Bilski case that will be useful as well but we still need to build a group
of activists that will be able to for example find a contact in the Senate whenever they're
discussing the pattern or format and some good news on this is that the league for programming
freedom which has been active on this fight against software patterns since 1991
89 okay well a long time okay so the the league for programming freedom is getting active again
so they have a website progfree.org and so hopefully you know we'll be able to work with them
as well as other groups and get a team active in America and in general the idea will be to
have a global coordination because so far all the campaigns have been you know focused on the EU
focused on Bilski however you know it's about time we actually started coordinating on a global
level because I'm pretty sure Microsoft has been a coordinating their pattern policy on this level
for a long time so some people have asked me how can information from you know anyone specific
jurisdiction be useful on a global level the legislation regarding software patterns is usually
quite vague because most patent legislation was written 30 years ago and it was written
you know before modern technologies existed a lot of it is based on the international trips agreement
which is a has a very vague wording so often the the wordings that exist in various jurisdictions
they're open to interpretation so even if in America the court case you know should have been
a legal issue you know it's about deciding what does the law say in that's the theory but in practice
you know the law is vague enough and that the interests can can be regard can be looked at and
people can decide is it a good idea not just is it what does the law say so in this way the legislation
is vague and we're going to have we have a lot of legal wordings that were developed during
the Bilski case and during other campaigns which can be useful for example you know we decided
that to be patentable an invention has to use forces of nature or it has to use applied natural
science or it has to have significant post post production output there are various wordings
and they might not fit into every jurisdiction but it's a good starting point for to give people
ideas for what wording might work in New Zealand or in Canada or in a future court case in USA
one important thing is that we always have to avoid saying that software is technical
and that seems a little bit counterintuitive but the the trips agreement which most countries
in the world have signed up to says that inventions in fields of technology are patentable
so in Europe we we had to all the time talk about it software is not technical so it takes a little
bit of linguistic gymnastics but it's just something you have to keep in mind from the start so
hopefully with the website making these issues clear we can hope we can help lobbyists or
campaigners avoid making the mistakes that we made in the early days in Europe
so this way we we managed to make use of campaigns whether they succeeded or not whether a
campaign has been effective or not we can always look at the legal wording and put them on a
website and you know contribute all these in all these these ideas so that something that failed
in one jurisdiction could be improved and it might might work in another jurisdiction
we also want to do examinations of some specific examples and just give two examples of
innovations that one that should be patentable and one that shouldn't be patentable the one that
could be patentable is anti-lock breaking this is the the car industry came to Europe the the
car industry from Asia came to Europe and argued for software patents because they said they have
breaks they have a computer and they have software and they don't change the brakes and they don't
change the computer they just change the software and also then they have anti-lock breaking systems
and so they said well this is obviously a software patent and you're against software patents
so we're against you so we have to work through the example and we managed to explain that actually
no this isn't this isn't a software patent it's being implemented in software but the patent
the innovation is on how the brakes are being used it happens to be controlled by software in
your implementation but you know you could it could be done manually or there would be theoretically
other ways of doing it it's not necessarily a software patent so this is a breaking patent
and we had to tell the car industry okay you know you don't have to fight against us we're not
trying to invalidate your your car patents but it was difficult at first for the politicians to
understand so you've got a question there the car industry patents and lock brakes and then you
learn to mimic that same thing with your foot are you a a theoretically maybe so if a rich enough
person starts doing that with their foot I think you should be worried
so can I have a question? Have you thought of somebody changing the software over it and
then getting it to firmware hardware and then claiming it to machine and how to take that
rather than talking? Well what what they could do is they could claim the whole the whole thing
as an invention but that wasn't stopped us from just taking the software idea and implementing
the software idea on our general purpose computers so yeah in Europe we had computer implemented
inventions instead of software patents it's which Microsoft always claims are on a limited
resource computer so I think they might be eligible for a patent if they managed to invent a
non-limited resource computer I think that would be quite an innovation
and that's one of the fundamental problems with software patents is that software is just so abstract
that it's possible to describe it in so many ways and it's very difficult to have any clear
patents on software there are people who say that the Bill's key case didn't actually change
anything is it your opinion that it did? Absolutely there are already been five software patents
that have been overturned based on the Bill's key case so it's it's clear that it has made a
difference. What was the nature of the change? The Bill's key case introduced a new test
excluded which basically required that there is some kind of activity I think it might have even
said physical activity significant physical activity in the innovation so this means that
what are called pure software innovations are excluded. Now the actual wording in the Bill's key
de-enrolling it's open to interpretation so it's not exactly clear however the US patent
office has rejected or they've overturned five existing software patents so they've decided
that it's substantial and it's realistic enough that there are grounds for actually
rejecting software patents based on the Bill's key decision. You talked about lobbying in the US
and legislation and that sort of thing can you give us any idea of the sort of shape that you
expect at legislation I mean they're probably going to be a little bit more complex than
no more software patents but do you know how that would be worn or how that could be worn out?
Well it'll come down to the lawyers will have to go through the history of American court rulings
and legislation in Europe we started off by saying you have to have an innovation in forces of
nature because in Germany there was a case law saying which said that a certain patent was
rejected because there was no innovation in forces of nature so we used that because there was
some precedent then later we we changed our minds and we used applied applied natural science
and this came from another court case so in general it will depend on the jurisdiction
but if we if we can gather together the terminology that worked in some jurisdictions then at
least we'll have a certain place and we can we can look at American legislation does the
term forces of nature have a meaning in American legislation maybe it does maybe it's very useful
or maybe we have to avoid it does apply to natural science have a meaning you know what what is
the meaning so these are you know it'll have to be decided at the time
okay one more one more okay I'm going to skip how lobbying is done
okay no very very basic things when we're doing the lobbying the most important thing probably is
that we always have to have a list of arguments we we often have ideas for the perfect argument we
have ideas for example explaining that softer patents cause monopolies or softer patents
interfere with freedom of expression or freedom of the press and then you can go to a politician
and you can actually find politicians that don't actually mind monopolies and think well you know
maybe it hurts our country but it gives us global dominance in that field or you have
politicians that aren't really big fans of freedom of the press because they got elected because
they're friends with the TV executives so there were some surprising things like that and also
the politicians you know politicians don't care about softer patents you know they we have they
always link each issue into what something they do care about so you know some politicians you know
had a history they used to be a journalist some worked on the coast and they they love
you know they think marine boundaries are important but you know what we have to do is we have to
have a list of arguments we have to have you know 10 15 different things and for each argument we
have to have studies back in them up because we can't just I can't you know go to a politician and say
you know we should block softer patents because they're bad for small companies and then they
ask me what small companies I say well it's my opinion they block small companies so for each of
the arguments so the arguments you know we have a you know the venture capitalists are we have
an venture capitalists that are against softer patents we have you know standards organizations or
companies that need to need standards they they find it very difficult to implement standards with
softer patents okay okay it blocks innovation it blocks free software in some ways free software
wasn't a very good argument maybe eight years ago but free software has become very prominent
nowadays so we can actually now talk to MEP or talk to politicians about free software developers
not being big fans of softer patents then the non-software patent companies hopefully they'll get
on board but even still even so we can still go to the patent the politicians with the the study
showing how softer patents are costing 11.2 billion and that's you know something that the
politicians can understand we can make the argument of women up please we can point out that
patents are bureaucratic you know this is every every software patent requires a bureaucracy in
the patent office in litigation between the companies the legal teams have to have to analyze
these things and we can also make the argument that software patents are generally bad for the
economy the the US patent office a patent and trademarks office is funded by the taxpayer
plus by the people who are applying for all these patents and the companies such as the non-software
patent companies that have paid out 11.2 billion they're the people who are paying for the patent
system in particular softer patents so this is an argument about the economy and it might
be the first argument that we think of when we think of softer patents but we have to always have
the list ready so that whenever we get a feel for what the politician's interest is that's how we
that we pick the right argument for the politician not our favorite argument okay so
okay that's that's what we're we're going to be doing hopefully the wiki will go online in
within the next two weeks hopefully there are so the main theme is that we're going to try and
make it possible for other people to get get involved donations will be needed at some point
of course the how fsf is handling donations for and software patents but and software patents
does have a separate bank account and we'll be doing its own fundraising so we're going to be
you know looking for help with that at some point pretty soon currently the the general model
of end-soft patents is pretty low cost so you know that's that's our philosophy but we you know
we just still have some costs so okay last question so the the people who put the software
patents in Europe are like zombies they don't stay dead are they coming back what are they
they're coming back but they're like a bad music band they've been coming back every year for
the last four years no no you see the problem is because in Europe we were completely disorganized
at the time they picked their favorite way of getting a list of the patents and they said okay
we'll just tell the politicians to change the legislation and everything will go smoothly and it
didn't and now they're looking around you know that was their favorite method and didn't work
so all the methods they're trying now they're it's all plan B plan C plan D so you know each time
they they make an attempt you know it's it's not it's not a very strong attempt however if they
keep on trying eventually they're going to get there so you know we have to also you know people
took a bit of a break in Europe after the the lobbying from in 2005 those you know people were
a bit burned out people were sleeping floor we actually slept many times on the floor in the
parliament it was like a an old school hacker community in in the free software community until
of course the politicians told us you know there are beds in the parliament you can just sleep in
the beds if you want oh yeah okay so so we started well there are the politicians beds but
politicians weren't present that's that's not how we do our lobbying okay so I think I think I
think I've eaten all the time okay thank you very much for attention and finally tonight we have
Richard Salman president of the free software foundation and founder of the GDR project
who I believe is going to cover a few different things we have the two free software
awards to hand out the award for the free software project and the award for the free software
project of social benefit and does everybody have a copy of the the JavaScript article
if anybody doesn't we have a few more that can be handed out
online I will put it up online momentarily but it's the one thing that is it yeah it was at the
registration table
oh there okay
well for many years we've been fighting to liberate the programs that we're invited to install
on our computers and of course if you get a copy of the typical GNU slash Linux distribution
it will have a long list of packages you could install and some of them are proprietary software
which is why we could only recommend a handful of the existing GNU slash Linux distributions the
ones that are entirely free but something stuck up on us on the side it turns out that installing
a package is not the only way software gets into your computer and then gets run by you
because there are some programs that install plugins so since several years ago we started to
campaign against the non-free plugins that browsers such as Firefox invite people to install
that's why we have icecat which has only free plugins the non-free plugins it doesn't mention
of course then there are other ways that your browser might invite you to install a program
for instance some web pages say how about installing Adobe non-free Postgres reader
or how about installing the non-free flash player so we've had to work very hard on fighting against
that but now there's another problem that we noticed there are other non-free programs that your
browser installs and runs and doesn't even mention because they're written in JavaScript
and they're included in a web page and just by looking at the web page you run the program
now sometimes it's installed temporarily and it sits in it's in your browser just for maybe
minutes other times it hangs around you know there could be a cache and then there are ways that
some JavaScript programs get installed semi-permanently into your browser but either way
as far as I'm concerned the program is getting installed on your machine and running there
and the browser is keeping you in the dark about this so that you don't even notice you don't
even get a chance it's in your browser just for maybe minutes other times that it hangs around
you know there could be a cache and then there are ways that some JavaScript programs get installed
semi-permanently into your browser but either way as far as I'm concerned the program is getting
installed on your machine and running there and the browser is keeping you in the dark
about this so that you don't even notice you don't even get a chance to think about whether this
is what you want to have happen on your machine so last summer I started working on how to
combat this pathway by which non-free software gets into our computers and here you see
the results. Basically we had to develop a criterion for how for when JavaScript is non-trivial
because there's some very trivial JavaScript that can just display a menu and other such things
and it would be pointless to make a fuss about that so we had to work out what seems like a
inadequate criterion for non-trivial JavaScript one that doesn't require a human being to judge
but that can be evaluated automatically and then we have to propose what needs to be done to create
the infrastructure to help people refuse to run non-free non-trivial JavaScript programs
so that we can start pressuring the servers that transmit these to start freeing them up.
Now occasionally these programs are very large the one that's used for Google Docs I'm told is
half a meg in the form of obfuscript which is JavaScript when you squeeze out all the white space
and make every name one letter so that nobody can understand the program
but a lot of them are fairly short and there's no particular reason why the company would care
if their JavaScript program would were free and with no particular reason they would stubbornly
refuse to do it if they had people pushing them to do it so I have high hopes that if we can
get enough people to start complaining that they'll start doing that they'll start making
most JavaScript programs free so here you see how we propose for people to label their free
compressed or compacted JavaScript programs how to say we're to find the source code
and how to change browsers so that they won't run non-free JavaScript programs that are
non-trivial and be so that you can reliably get a chance to run modified versions of the free
JavaScript programs because here's a peculiar wrinkle if you automatically run the JavaScript
that comes in the web page if you don't have a chance to say no don't run that version run my
version then in effect you don't really have the freedom to change that program it's the same
kind of problem that teavolization causes even though this is a different mechanism it isn't
teavolization but it has the same result which is that theoretically you can change the program
it's just that when you're running it over here you can only run the unchanged version
and thus it's unacceptable for the same reason teavolization is unacceptable practically speaking
freedom one the freedom to study and change the program means you gotta be able to run your
version instead of some other version now this is half this is one side of the problem that web
applications cause for computer users freedom the other side has to do with the software on the
server and as I see it the place where that's mainly an issue is when the program is used for
doing your computing that is when you do your computing with somebody else's copy of a program
then you never control your computing because even if it's free software the one who owns the copy
is the one who controls it and that's not you so you don't control your computing so we're going
to have to reject software as a service but this doesn't mean the majority of web servers because
most of them are doing a broad range of other things and the problems I see in software as a
service don't apply to web servers that are used for distributing information or inviting people to
search some information or e-commerce or for collaborative development of something so those I
see as being different kinds of issues software as a service is a rather narrow category of web
servers but we've got to pay attention to it if somebody says don't do your computing by running
the program yourself let us run it for you this is something you have to watch out for
but for now we're going to tackle the JavaScript side of things which is very directly
distribution of non-free software to the user
so well it looks like I didn't even need all the time I've got so I might as well move on
to giving the free software awards so which one is getting the award first
beats venom oh okay so this one is the free software award which we will give
to beats venom of the developer of post-fix
this is pretty can I get a few photographs together yes because I can't with guys all there is
well I guess with that lens you could take that picture from the back of the floor
I think it's a standard size yes but this is bigger than I expected
so there's a microphone over there it's a few words
I'm sorry I didn't actually prepare any speech for this so I will keep it really really short
thank you very much for the award it's it's now almost 11 years
since I started working on post-fix and it has grown quite a bit not just in size but also in
functionality but it's just a good thing so I think I'll leave it by here thank you very much
again see you later
and now we have the award for applying the ideas of free software or free software
to other social issues and this goes to creative comments so who is accepting the award
now I'm I use some of creative commons as licenses and I'm very happy with the work they do
there's just one other thing I wish they would also do and that is start advocating a
freedom to share all the creative commons licenses give the users the freedom to share
now what you need to do is start saying this is this is what's right and we're doing it because
it's right thank you thank you it's incredible honor to receive this award creative comments
ought to be giving an award to the free software foundation because without the FSF and Richard
Solomon creative commons would not it would not have been possible I guess one small thing people
might not realize about creative commons is that we actually write some free software and support
of our mission in fact a sheet is one of our software engineers and I started off as one there
and one piece of free software a very small piece is actually JavaScript and it's under the GPL
and the free software foundation actually has used our GPL JavaScript code our little widgets we
wrote to put on web pages to make it easier to make donations to creative commons and free
software foundation took that and changed it and used it as the GPL allows
and I guess just one other thing I would say is that it's interesting how young creative
commons and the free culture movement or whatever you want to call it and I know some people say that
those aren't exactly the same thing and they aren't when you realize that PostFix is 11 years old
creative commons is six years old I remember when PostFix was a brand new project and everybody was
still running send mail so we're still very young and I appreciate all of the lessons that Richard
and many of you have taught us in particular people like Mako Hill and others whose names I'm
forgetting now so please continue to teach us those lessons and apply the lessons of free software
to your other activism including in free culture and I just just one one other sort of this is a
little bit of an apology but I can remember when people are still having advocacy wars on
on using that and it seems like most then people advocating for the new Linux were often telling
programmers you really need to release your code and it was even though the end goal was freedom
for users enough programmers had to be convinced to begin with and I think that's the place where
we've been in the culture space for a while but I do want to begin advocating from the user
from the user's perspective more strongly going forward so thanks thanks a lot
so we're now done thank you for coming
is that around remind me if I forget one of them first of all please take any plates and things out
of the room with you because we get fine for cleanup and that's not a good use of your membership
dues and we have an on conference tomorrow so please make sure to submit your session ideas ideas
and look at what's there on the wiki and what's outside on the boards and I feel like there's
a third thing I'm forgetting but we are going from here to red line and Harvard Square you can ask
any of the staff for directions on how to get there for dinner and drinks after this so I hope
to see everybody there and please come tomorrow as well oh comment forms are what I forgot
I think everybody has those if not they're at the registration table this is our first attempt
at turning this into a two-day conference we'd really appreciate any advice you could give
us so far for during the day tomorrow and what we could do better for next time around so thank you
everybody
the day doing I just want to welcome everyone back and say I'm excited to see so many people here
obviously everyone came here today because they they care about freedom or maybe you heard
there was free coffee so whether a person who writes code or helps your neighbors install free
software or you organize DR on boycotts in your community you're here today because you care
about free software and you decided to do something about it and even get up early on a Sunday so
that's exciting we're going to get a lot of work done today and not only are we going to add to
the tools that we have currently to promote and protect and develop free software I hope we're
also going to make some great connections so beyond the work that we get done today I hope you'll
take the energy from this gathering back to your neighborhoods and your communities and you know
your buddies on IRC and and all that kind of stuff so so take it back but also remember to keep
in touch with us we want to hear about what you're doing in your neighborhoods you know send us
links to your stories and your blogs get on each other's mailing list so you know stay in touch
and of course if you guys didn't already know I'm the free software foundations membership
coordinator so I want to thank everyone who's already a member and urge the rest of you to
consider becoming a member you can come and sign up with me at any time today and I also hope
that when you go home you'll ask your friends and colleagues to join us because although it's
really great to see lecture hall A with a capacity of 150 you look in about half full it'd be really
awesome to be at one of the larger rooms down the hall next year and see that room full so thanks a
lot you know John has a few words for us welcome to the first ever day two of this event it's
only ever been one day before I wanted to emphasize part of what Deb just talked about which is the
permanence trying to build a permanent project out of this whole event and Lieber Planet actually
Lieber Planet 2009 is the name of this conference but it's also the name of a project that we've
been working on for longer than I care to admit it's an idea that started with Joshua Gay and it
has to do with getting people to organize around the world for free software activism based on geography
and projects and so kind of come under one umbrella that expresses some common themes that we
can all get behind and the Lieber Planet Wiki that we've been using for this conference is the
start of that project really and what we want to do is make sure that all these sessions that are
happening are also making permanent contributions to this project so the idea is that you know if
you're right to the free software foundation you you generally get an answer usually we're not
like Apple who I had to write to you know five or six times to get an answer to a simple question we
we view our we want to be responsive to people and we we prioritize that but at the same time we
need to get out of the way when it comes to some things every day people write to us with great
ideas about free software and we turn into some kind of bottleneck because we only have a staff of
ten people and there's only so many things we can work on at one time and there's only so much we
can do so we want to have that activity and those conversations instead of happening one to one
between us and the people writing to us happen on the Wiki and in a way that builds a permanent thing
that other people can use so if you write a letter that you take to your locality to get your
public schools to use free software you put that on the Wiki then somebody else who wants to do that
same thing in their locality can just find that and stumble on it in the same way that you
stumble on pieces of free software that do things that you want to do with your computer people can
build on that and people can build on that in the way that the new project has worked for software
but for activism so I hope in all these sessions people keep that in mind that you know keep
permanent notes on the Wiki even if they're not pretty even if they're ugly and have typos
it's the same thing that happens with free software somebody stumbles on that finds it improves it
and puts their version up for another person to use and find and I think if we start following that
process for activism more in our movement we can have more successes around the world and without
any one central group you know being a bottleneck and and holding things up so that's what I'm hoping
for we'll come out of today and if you have any ideas about the projects itself then please
talk to me about it and I think I may actually be doing a session today focused on building that
project as its own entity there. We've also had the Floss Manual's book sprint going on during
this conference and I think Adam if you want to make an announcement about that.
God, my name's Adam Hyde from Floss Manual's. We write manuals about how to use free software
and we have a social methodology we call it a book sprint. We write manuals like this this is
how to bypass internet censorship, wrote it in five days and it's available for free online we also
produce books so right now we're writing a manual introducing people to the command line and we're
going to write it in two days because we think it's possible so thanks to the FSF we had the PR
that went out actually attracted 130 new members to Floss Manual's which is incredible for our sets
like a 25 percent increase in our registrations and there have been people working overnight from
all around the world creating really fantastic content so if you'd like to come and join us and
finish it off we want to have the manual finished by five o'clock today and I think it's entirely
possible we have the processes to put it online immediately in book form at a PDF so that you can
buy it from Lulu.com as a book. Yeah so please come and join us if you can't make it you can
email me at adamatfastmanuals.net and with any one-liners or short scripts or anything like
that we can also include that within the book but if you can attend the event it would be fantastic thanks.
Now Matt and Rob are going to tell us about how the schedule for today is going to be organized and go.
Hi so there's three tracks to the event today there's
oh sure the URL for the schedule is quite long it's well thank you we'll link you from
from edge of the wiki and in about five minutes yeah that that makes sense.
I can put it in for a little bit. Okay so we have so yesterday you gave us all ideas on the wiki
and on post-it notes in the hallway and at the end of yesterday we sat down went through those
kind of found the ones that were similar and the same and put them together then put those into
the schedule so moving the bagel we have on the free software activism track and this is a
little bit guerrilla in nature so people might find out what's working right now. So right after
this we have here's the list we have if you can read my disgusting handwriting we have Brian
Brian are you there there he is fantastic it's getting really well so far. Mark Rosenthal how I
saw coming in there he is free software activism yeah we have Alexandra with the Linux
Libre project again after yesterday we want to hear more about that and also there's a talk about
free software in Latin America which we need someone to talk about
is Ryan still here maybe he's not here today yet but he may get here in time.
Leave a comment which will be John I think and maybe Debra as well leading that one we have a
request for the license loving which West Brett. Okay Donald was Donald right there in the front row
so I'm going blind so someone from the FSF will be able to talk about licensing and then there's a
request for a talk about free software in schools and libraries which Dennis may be able to help
us out with you'll try. Laurie? Excellent okay well maybe you two could chat about that after this
and see if we can get all together by whatever time that actually occurs for something for 15
no 15.45 we didn't put the times on these sorry last minute effort so for high priority projects
we have Monty from Ogg see you here okay John Eason's going to talk about Ogg today if John
is here somewhere thank you to the back of that yep and we have a break Mark Jones who I have
seen there's Mark looking about cool boots and then we have a plan for talk about phones the
open mocha and some of the free software stuff going on with other phone platforms so I think
John and probably a sheesh who's not here yet no no it's opposite of that in America
and then we have to talk about games and there were lots of talks about games one of them just said
games on it so I'm not sure what that means but plans for free games what free games might mean
that kind of thing and then at 15.15 we're encouraging everyone who's in the high priority projects to
go over to Adam and right for half an hour okay there's no excuse and then at 15.45 we have the
guys mouthful with the camera okay well this is our suggested schedule so we can now use this time
to flip things around and that kind of thing and then the next part
and so we have another track for freedom for network services and the idea of this we're
going to begin with James James is that with the free software cloud and then there are a couple of
requests for talking about free Gmail and what that might mean so again I think a sheesh
Mike where's a sheesh here be here okay okay good so I mean that's replacements Gmail and also
people are interested in Gmail or protocol stuff for Gmail hacking Gmail you know sniffing that kind
of thing as well break then again social networking people looking to write replacements for
Facebook or write social networks that again might turn to their private stuff the the
PNX the cloud nine stuff again YouTube and search replacing those with free software for dynamic
services free data and Slurpy you know Slurpy is a term that I believe Evan mentioned
the night it's also a drink this part sponsored by 711 good point it will point out man
we've already dodged the trademark bullet there we go um but I think that was the idea of
basically having some kind of tool that you could use and just point it at Facebook and it like
sucks out all your information out Facebook and puts it into this new wonderful free thing
and then there's the idea of free servers free hosting and free storage and what that might mean
and then there was a request for a talk about a policy towards free network services which
um again we need to look around so
got a pen right here this is how agile we are
what does that say
so uh you guys mentioned that you have to leave earlier so maybe we could swap
alpha with the phones how does that hand people
is that gonna be okay is that so putting you in at 145 is that that's cool okay great
hopefully next year there'll be a web application for uh doing these boards
that social networks
that's the Slurpy
yeah
you want to combine them
this is about three data not just about free Facebook this is about all three data
so that might be a little bit much to get into half an hour repacing Facebook and data and
Slurpy things are you volunteering to talk about Slurpy
okay
okay sound effects provided by Abby okay
so you have notice you're here the end here there are these big huge gaps
and these gaps are not intentional uh no they're not accidental so i'm not working up yet
they're not accidental um during these spaces we have lots and lots and lots of little five minute
sessions set out and so if you have and there's no excuse for not having some of you
something to talk about it could be check out my website or check out this thing i'm working on
or this idea i'm thinking about doing this is the time to talk about it
if you want to talk about something come up to the board take the Slurpy and write in your schedule
here and if you can also add it to the wiki because it'll keep Bradley happy
so um i don't want to i don't want to stampede i mean that would
yeah stampede me right now come on nothing
you can yeah okay great so um does this seem reasonable to people anyone got any suggestions or
changes to make to this one so it in like 25 minutes we're going to have sorry
they go they go across they do yeah so if you draw a line in here
they go in
the stampede was a minnego sorry the stampede's over
i'm kidding come come stampede i was thinking that uh in soul in network services
what is the most basic network service
money money
so free paypal so so the exactly okay the dollar bill is it's even though you've got it
in your pocket they're stealing from you by depreciating its value okay the US Constitution
specifies that the only money you can have is gold and silver therefore assuring that you
cannot be stolen from so if we're talking like free software we should talk like free money
that's not really a network service there
it's a patty smith song
but i don't like facebook but i do like money so the two seem at opposite
exactly like money okay
i yeah if i've been talking about it this is rid of five minutes serving it
yeah yeah pop right right now okay excellent great
pan right in
well free money it sounds funny right each track is in its own room the room step perhaps the room
they are like one and nine one and one thirty and i think we will
okay hang on so can we get a microphone into the audience and can people who want to talk
use the microphone because that would work a lot better
who wants to talk stand up you want to talk
just uh just a real quick question um okay how rigidly do you expect to stick to these
schedules i mean if i want to be at the slippery one and i figure okay that's 245
am i going to get there and find that well there was a little slack and so
no there will be there will be people so in each conference i will be handling network services
rob will be handling handling projects and debora will be handling the activism and we are going
to make you stop you're going to be there with the whip we will dive in front of the boards we will
snatch microphones we'll do whatever you have to do to stick to the schedule
ready done so you know one step then there needs to be good
but
if there is yep, no
Okay. So we're going to do the free software activism track in 111. Do you want to write
that here? As you can see freedom for network services is going to be in room 110. And then
I think we're going to do high priority projects in room 113. And right now we have a flash
manuals. Are you guys in 109 or are you moving across the hall? It doesn't matter to. Huh?
Yeah. Okay. So flash manuals is 112. We have for overflow room 109, which is a little bit
bigger and close to the other tracks. We also have 103B, which is smaller. So if you get
really excited in a session and want to take like two people down the hall, 103B is great
for that. And 101B, although there's a few suitcases in there. So you'll be also watch
dogging luggage while you have your excitement small group in there. And then this room is available
to us all day. So you know, you can come sit in your, you know, do whatever you like.
Yeah. This is the command center. Exactly. And then. And I do request that we refer to
it as the command center as well. So yeah. Okay. So if people are happy with this, are
people happy with this? We have the dance from Jason. Is anybody unhappy with this? If
you are, raise your hands. One man. Microphone right there. Right about him. Speakers cannot
raise their hands. Okay. We're going to make them happy right now. Right about him right
there. Yeah. Raise your hand if you want to speak. Keep it raised. I can't figure out how
to be in two places at once. The constant physics track is over to the left. It's just entangled
with the others. So you can't see it. That's a question of faith, I think. Okay. Brian
at top. Rob. Brian. Hi. Is there a specific time where we can have a key signing session?
So for key signing, there will be a room available all day. I suggest we make some vague, we can
have key signing in the command center if that works for people. I would pick up to have some
specific times as well. Okay. Key signing at. Yeah. How about during this half? It's a
break here. It's half an hour long. So we could actually have key signing during this break.
And if you want somewhere with sunshine, it can be right out in front of lecture hall. Yeah.
So that's the half hour break at two o'clock. Cool to ask you. Yeah. Cool to ask you. I have
a question there from Peebo. Sorry. Peebo. It's the new thing. Yeah. I was going to suggest
that perhaps the signs ought to be near the rooms so that you can pop out of one room. Look
at the schedule. Yeah. I think what we do is after this, we'll get them to the rooms, but
get any information that's relevant to all of them on this, on the blackboards. That doesn't
work and you know that doesn't work. It's also going to be on the wiki. Going to be on
the wiki. And is it now linked from the front page of the wiki? I think we'll have
chalkboards in each of the two rooms. Yeah. So the five minute sessions as people sign
up for them, they can just put them on the chalkboard in that room. So anytime you can come
and you know or ping someone on a poundly green planet on three node like hey is anything
come up in your room on the five minute tracks that was awesome. So or you can just come
and put your head in and look at the chalkboard. If you know free now you can get on free
later. Sure. We have like five rooms and one piece of chalk. This is amazing. There's
like 400 years worth of stuff down here as well.
Okay, there's a box of chalk over here.
It is at 1415.
Okay.
So type. If you want to come to the key signing type gpg-finger and whatever information finger
your own username and whatever information that gives you that's what you need on a piece
of paper to give to people. You need an individual piece of paper for each person you want
to exchange with. That's probably all you need desperately. There are other things about
key signings that probably don't make. Yeah, some people like to see ID. So I'm not really
an ID person. So I don't really care. But other people. Some people want ID. Some people
don't want ID. I don't trust what the government documents say about you. That's the free
money to it, rather. Okay. I think command centers should be an RE or an EAR. It's a
American. Okay. So if everyone's happy with this, maybe you could use this opportunity
to add five minutes to the wiki. If you have laptops, if you don't have laptops, find
a friend with a laptop. And we'll also put the each track will have their five minutes
track on the top board. You can put it up there. Right. But you should try and use both
so that we don't under the two things at the same time. So put your five minute track
on the top board in the track that it's that it goes to. But also try and get it on to
the wiki at the same time because otherwise we end up with two things happening at once.
So you should talk not to the wiki, but to not to the talk board, but to these things.
So they'll post it notes and sharp these outside each room next to one of these boards.
Add your talk on there on a post it. And there will be a finite number of post it notes
as well to ensure things don't go crazy. Okay. We actually have a little extra time.
We do. There's still probably coffee in the whole way. People are going to get it.
There's probably still bagels and things. And people can come back. Hang on, John's going
to talk. You'll notice that we end at five o'clock, the
wind down time. So we're not talking about permanence and keeping notes and things
like that earlier. That's time when we're all going to come back in here at the end of
the day. And hopefully everybody from each session, somebody from each session will take
a minute or two and tell everybody else what happened in that session. So since we can't
be in two places at once, we can still get some idea what everybody was doing, what was
going on here. So hopefully if in each group you keep either a page on our wiki or your
own wiki and then can point everybody to that link when you come back in here and give
us some idea what happens and what projects people might like.
If you can and you have the ability to do so with the laptop, record the audio if you
can, in August. And we will post it to the website.
Okay, I think we are done here for now. So 11 o'clock, rooms 111, 101, 113. We have
Monty, if he shows up. Monty, hey! Okay, Monty's at the back there. We have Brian
Gough right over there. And we have James, Fritzlefer Cloud. So go and get caffeinated, eat
bagels, do lots of things. And we'll be back at 11.
Hey, I think we're all out here. Hey, so thank you for coming back. Before we get
started, I'd like to introduce a man very dear to all of us, FSF World Member, Benjamin
Michael Hill. So I don't have anything prepared.
So I just came from the board meeting which was today and I accepted Microsoft's buy-out
offer, the staff saw fired, not just kidding. No, all good news. I just wanted to say that
because of the board meeting, I was able to miss at least today's and because of coming
down with the flu, of course, like the day before the meeting, I managed to miss some
of the talks yesterday. But from what I've seen, it's all been great. I'm really looking
forward to catching up by looking at some of the recordings and also looking at some
of the notes that people have produced in the sessions today. I tried to sort of follow
what was going on as I could on the Wiki and spaces during the board meeting. I want
to say thank everyone who has come out and for those of you who are sort of stuck through
this and contributed a lot. Just thank you very much. I think that this has been a real
success and I look forward to seeing everyone of the next one.
All right. Oh, it grendels? I think that's a long, that's a long, good boy.
We can decide if we're going to be up here.
Hello? Okay, yeah. So as far as the three tracks that happened today, we also had the
last two days, the floss manuals guys, they're by Adam here, making a book. So Adam's
going to give us a quick update. Hopefully we finish the book.
Here we go.
Okay, I think you might have to just produce the resolution you just, okay, I don't know.
Wow, it's an enormous pointer.
So yeah, we spent two days, more or less nine to five days. The free software foundation
sent some PR two days ago and we had 130 people registered to floss manuals, which for us
is just fantastic. And in two days, we wrote 169 page manual about how to use the command
line. It's an introduction for movies, the content is available for free. You can always
see it on the floss manuals site and this is just probably, I can't even see it so well.
You see the index on the left and it goes through very carefully through, you know, for somebody
who's never used the command line before, it just explains what the command line is, the
anatomy of a command, then it goes through basic commands, more advanced stuff, piping
history, then it goes through even more advanced things and then finally into scripting.
And so this was written by, I don't know, roughly about, actually you can see, everything,
all the credits are tracked automatically and so you can see if we scroll down. It's under
the GFDR, is the FDR on the GPR and so these are the people that are contributed to the
various chapters. So it's automatically logged and recognized and credited. So in addition
to that, if you go to the floss manuals front site, you can actually buy, it's already
available as a book, so we just published it like 10 minutes ago. And height off the press
and it's available in the floss manuals bookstore and yeah, it's in book form or free online
and you can come along to the floss manuals, go to the right section at any time, update
and edit the content, add new chapters, improve it to whatever you want. And we can update
those sources both online and in the book within a matter of minutes. So yeah, Sarah,
to book in two days. It's a good effort. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you, Adam. Okay, so we just moved this thing. This is amazing. I want
one for my house. So we had three tracks today and I thought what we do is get everyone
get the people who manage the tracks up to introduce the people for the various talks.
So if I think first we'll have Deb who led the free self activism, which is a huge
piece of card somewhere. There we are. Okay. Let me tell you about the day one. Yeah, go
to the podium. I'll be a glider for testing. Okay. And maybe if people who run these things
when I come down and say a few words as well. Well, we actually not to show up the other
two tracks, but we actually took notes in our track. So we actually encased the bodies
of people who gave talks in the lead. So Matt always wins. So we did the free self
activism track and maybe people would raise their hands. And I think we have everyone
come down and we don't have time for the other two. Okay. So we talked to Brian Gough first
about the new hackers meetings. And then Mark Rosenthal gave a talk about how to make
connections with decision makers. Then we had an update on Linux labor with Alice Oliva.
And then Ryan McGarrows joined still by Alex talked about free software in Latin America.
And John Sullivan came in and talked to us about Libre Planet. And after that, oh, we
skipped too far. Oh, no, it's not. Oh, then we did the license, love in. I think did
you name it that? I did, yeah. Okay. We have Donald and Brett. And that was people had
a lot of questions about the AGPL in there. So I tried to store some of that info. Then
we had a little bit of a roundtable talking about schools and libraries. And we realized
that holy crap, we put a lot of stuff into one session because when we started talking
about libraries, we realized there were at least three different aspects of libraries
that we were talking about. So there's like the public terminal you go in and use. There's
what gets scanned in for archiving. And then there's digital media that you borrow from
the library. So we ended up having our leftover lightning talks on schools in a specific
high schools. We did a couple other lightning talks. I talked about running effective in
real-time meetings. We had an update for the League for Programmer Freedom. We had a
little chat about human rights and the concept of free software from Alex. Donald came back
and told us more patent crap, basically, that the poor people working at the USPTO are just
never, ever, ever going to effectively be able to search for prior art unless we do something
about that. And then we heard about what is going on in Romania. So Marius, who I, oh,
yep, okay. So yeah, it was very exciting. We talked a lot about making connections. So
it was a good, good day.
Fantastic. I think we have a round of applause for those people, please.
Hello. Rob Myers ran the track on the high priority projects. So you know, this is the
high priority projects. Essentially a bunch of projects that we at the FSF identify as
being the current main concerns free software. So the things like Flash and Skype, which are
programs that a lot of people who use free software tend to install, perhaps against better
judgment, because there are no free alternatives. And so this track was about that. So I'll hand
over to Rob.
Hello. Excellent.
So we started off finding out about Og Theora, which is the free video codec, and found
out all the trade-offs between different ways of compressing video and what the alternatives
are, and where Og Theora fits into the ecosystem for free video. And then we found out about
the history and current structure of the GNU Octave project, which is a free alternative
to Matt Lab. Thank you. I don't do much math. So that's, but again, that's good. Core
Boot is a free BIOS, which, personally, I really want to get on my laptop, but apparently
that's really hard. So that's not going to be just yet. But Core Boot will free the last
bit of your computer from the project software, which is the BIOS actually loads the operating
system. After that, we had LFL, which I thought was really cool. It's a sort of free HD
video camera, where both the software and the design and configuration of the hardware
are free. And I just had visions of arrays of those being used by Hollywood movies or
for medical imaging with it, I think it could be really good. And after the break, we had
a kind of open discussion about games, which was quite interesting for me because a lot
of it was focused around the practical side of getting games compiled and installed and
just running on GNU Linux distros, which apparently gamers who want to run cutting-edge
games, even when they're actually written for GNU Linux sometimes have trouble doing that.
So that's quite interesting. After that, we went to visit the Floss Manuals guys. We've
just seen the Floss Manual for GNU Linux commands. I think it's amazing. And then it was
phones, which I didn't get to go to. Yeah. So for the phone thing, yeah, we did
a little bit of a swap around. And John and I went to the phone thing, and John gave
a demonstration of the OpenMoco free runner. He managed to break his phone just before the
talk. So I didn't go too well. And I showed my unlocks Google Android phone, and we basically
came to the conclusion that while having a phone that runs a lot of free software, but
not all free software is not a bad thing, we ultimately want the free runner to be the
fairer of choice. And one way you can support that is to buy free runner. Okay. And nobody
seemed to want to do a five minute slot. They're all wanting to hear the free software
song. So that was it for the day. No.
Okay. Somebody would say, we should all be thinking, right? At the end, we'll have a little
sick song. Okay. Well, you're going to be surprised when we hear what we had on the network
services. I can see that the timing of this could be excellent at the back there. So this
could work out quite well. So on the network services track, we spoke initially about the
free software cloud. We had James Duncan come down from Montreal and explain some of the
things that he's doing. And quite rightly, I think Bradley called him to ask on it and
said, hey, where's your source code? You're mailing lists and things. And so we came up with
a plan to put together a list of demands for him to take back with him. And then he promptly
vanished a sheesh and Bradley again spoke a little bit about the user free Gmail. And I
forget what the name of that thing is. Yeah, it's like Google reader, but it's free software.
We can't have a front end for that, but no back end. So there was the discussion about
about getting that in place. And then we had social networking jets about getting Facebook
and the notions of a free Facebook. And then Charles gave us a little bit of a demonstration.
Sorry, a little bit of a discussion about his new project, which I forgot my name off. I'm
sorry. We spoke briefly about YouTube and Ganesh Robb, Rob Savoy came and spoke just a little
bit about Signal, which is a new media server that the Ganesh developers have produced. So now,
as well as being able to have a free flash front end, you could actually have a free flash
back end. So now you can actually sit up your own alternative to YouTube. And we came up with
a name, Good YouTube, which is registered to a guy in Costa Rica or something. Then we had
a break and some key signing took place. And we came back and spoke about the ideas of the
free data and Slurpy, which I was not there for. So Rob, you wrote this one, remember? We
switched to this was your roof thing with a phone thing. So you wrote this one. I was at the
polity. I'm just I'm confused. I'm so sorry. I was there for that one. As she spoke about the idea
of using using Facebook in a certain way to pull out information and to essentially by
possibly breaking the terms of service on things like Facebook, you set a precedent that
essentially we're not going to take this nonsense from people like Facebook. We speak about free
stuff, free servers and please come and see that. We speak about free servers hosting storage,
the idea of setting up personal servers that run on 300 or so servers on a big machine that
run very cheaply, people can purchase. And then there was the policy towards free network services,
which I was not there for. So my steps up for that one. And it was discussion of how well
when I was there, it was discussion of how much can be done by lobbying government to try and
keep the network free. And in contrast to how much should be done to actually work practically
to keep the network free using free software and how narratives of trying to keep the network free
using government lobbying need to be complemented with a bit of free software to actually work to
make sure the network is practically free as well. Okay. And then we go into the five minute talk
thing. We had a few. Bradley, of course, not so I would five minutes, insist on 10. And
spoke with Danny about the new website that's up today, which is code.autonomous. Auto.
Okay. But yes, it's coming soon. And then Cat from Wikimedia came and spoke about the licensing
changes that are potentially going on over there and the voting. And unlike Rob Myers and his
high-paray projects, we actually had musical interludes. And Cat is now going to perform for us
on the recorder, the free software song.
During the YouTube discussion, I think somebody made a joke about what would appear on
YouTube. Oh, just the recordings of like RMS and the free software songs. So, first of all,
I have a question about that. About the song?
Okay. Could you come down here and say on a microphone? I'll say on the set. Yeah, grab that.
Oh, okay. This was a song to, you know, was the dance, was the music to a dance that we used to
do at the MIT Folk Dance Club that was taught by Eve Moro from, I think, he's from in Montreal.
And I have a bit of a, you know, Folk Dance music collection. So, when I noticed a couple of years
ago that Stolman had written words to it and the words were actually on the web, I went looking
through my record collection for, do I have a recording melody? No. So, I figured, oh, well,
it must be on the web somewhere. Can't find it. Eventually, I located Eve Moro's website and,
you know, it's not on there either. And I'd like to suggest that somebody should approach
Eve Moro and see if he'd be willing. It looks like this is something that he personally collected
while, you know, being a, you know, folklorist traveling through what was then Yugoslavia. So,
assuming Eve Moro is still alive, I'd like to suggest that we approach him and, you know,
request that he license it under an open license. Or, uh, better, yeah, a free license. Yeah.
Sorry, I misspoke a free license. That's okay. We'll forgive you. Just pay the fine on the way out. Thank you.
Okay, uh, and we had a brief discussion about free money, which I did not fully understand.
And then, I spoke briefly, I was actually going to provide to that Danny's book,
where's Danny? Danny's over there. About the wonderful USB memory cards that the
FSF now offers as a bonus when you become a member. And, uh, Deb, do you want to say a few words
about the company becoming a member? Danny's bringing the card down.
Who here is already a member? That's, that's pretty good, but not perfect.
Oh, yeah. So, Brad has one in the cards. Show it off. Okay. So, in an effort to bribe, I mean,
encourage people to become members. We decided to update the existing bootable membership card
into a super slim credit card sized USB card that fits like in your wallet. It's got a
gig of space on it and it's running a fully bootable, good new sense version. So, you can just
put that in there and you have an entire operating system. Plus, I think the free software songs on
there. Uh, so, those of you, of course, they can edit it and do whatever they want.
Those of you who are already members know how you enter the secret cabal. I'm going to
explode the myth and let you know just how easy it is. Uh, you just give us $10 a month,
or you can do it as lump sum of $120 for a year. Or if you're a student, we'll let you get away
with just half of that, or $5 a month. Uh, you can do it online. Or if the impulse
sues you this very minute, you can come up to me and give me your credit card. Um, or cash.
Or cash. And we also accept personal checks or money orders. Yes. Yes. So, uh,
I think, yeah. In addition to the bootable membership card, uh, you also get an FSF email address.
Um, and you get the bullet in twice a year and you get 20% off all of our books and t-shirts.
And you get access to our exclusive member forum. And the exclusive members forum.
You do have to do with that. Obviously, yes. The warm glow of support
for software is why you would really do it. Thank you. Uh, yeah. So I think that's, uh, that's about
wrap to come. Before you close, does anybody know of my visiting? My username is myhees.org.
Now, free money is a complicated subject. So if you go to myhees.org, you can educate yourself
on a very important topic, which affects freedom in a basic way.
Okay. Go to that website.org.
Okay. Um, thank you all for coming. Um, the only thing to say now is if you can help us
at all with the very more like packing things away, that'd be a more, uh, that'd be amazing.
Take your bottles, take your cans, whatever you've got around by your feet.
Just pick it up and take it with you. That'd be fantastic. And also, uh, we are going to
grandles then nine o'clock in Harvard Square. Oh, people who are hungry now are going to
very youngs. Okay. Thank you for coming and see you next year.
Okay.
And finally, let's get a round of applause for the organizers for, for everyone to put this together.
All right.
So we'll now commence singing the free software song.
If, uh, if anyone wants to, you can now do some more key signing as well.
Uh, key signing out in the, in the corridor outside the key signing. Please.
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