hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0342.txt

Episode: 342
Title: HPR0342: Libre Planet 2009 Conference Episode 3 of 5
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0342/hpr0342.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 16:46:46

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Um...
Hello everybody. Welcome back.
I'm going to start this afternoon session with a panel. We, one of the really nice things
about opening this up to attendants beyond just free software foundation associate members
is that we've been able to bring in a lot of people from all around the world.
And we'd like to have this panel focus on some of the issues and talk about some of the
issues that arise with free software activism around the globe under the theme of Libra
Planet.
So let me introduce our panelists that we have, Brian Gough, is the founder of Network Theory
LTD, which publishes free software manuals. He's also a good new maintainer, maintains
the good new scientific library, and has been helping to organize the good new hackers
meetings, which have been a great event that's happened the last couple of years in the
good new projects. Brian McGarros is from San Francisco, and has been a free software activist
and organizer, especially with activities in Latin America, and especially Brazil, and
who owns the owns company, right, north by south, and Bradley Coon from the software freedom
conservancy, and software freedom law center, also a previous executive director of the
free software foundation, and a new contributor and long-time activist helped me get started
in free software too. So please welcome our panelists and let them take it with.
Okay, so I'm always really eager to talk to free software advocates from North America
and Europe about what's been going on past decade, really, in Latin America, because I
find that a lot of people, even people who are really involved in free software advocacy,
don't understand the extent and the scope of what's happening in Latin America, and how it
can be used for experience and used for ideas, and basically exporting what's happened in
Latin America to other parts of the world, because when people find out about the real extent
of what's happening in Latin America with free software, it's really beyond your wildest dreams.
And so to get into that, half a decade ago, President Lula de Silva of Brazil issued a presidential
decree mandating that all government entities and state-owned firms were to migrate to free
software, and that process began. At the same time, there were a lot of progressive initiatives
that began in Brazil, and all of those were based on free software, and a lot of them were
meant to address the issue of the digital divide that existed all over the world, but specifically
in Brazil, and so a lot of free software programmers and developers were recruited to participate
in these programs, setting up computer labs that were based entirely on free software from
everywhere, from the poorest parts of major metropolitan areas to the furthest reaches
of the Amazon. And these initiatives were going on at the same time as the government agencies
and state-owned firms were migrating to open source and free software, with some failures
along the way, and a lot of successes along the way. And as the Latin American governments
have started to come together more in a lot of other areas, so the forming of ALBA, their
opposition to the free trade areas of the America or ALCA or FDA, they've also started
to come together on the technology policy, and so what's happened in Brazil has gone
elsewhere. So Venezuela has adopted similar laws regarding migration to free software
for an entirely different reason, but the effect is the same, which is a wide popular movement
that uses free software as its base. It's also moved to Ecuador, it's moved to Paraguay
on a federal level where laws are being passed that mandate migration to free software,
and where incredible projects are being created entirely with free software. Aside from that
in Latin America, there's just, in general, a strong non-governmental movement for free software.
But I think we're trying to keep each of our segments short, and I could talk about all
the different initiatives that are going on in Latin America for a long time, but in the
interest of opening up to questions, I think we're keeping it to seven or eight minutes
and I don't know, I think I've probably reached that by now, but I would urge everybody
to check out research and then find out as much as they can about the movement that's
been happening in Latin America because the more you find out, the more amazed that you're
going to be. And my experience a lot in North American and European free software advocates
aren't really familiar with everything that's been going on.
I'm not sure of the format, but I think that we're going to use it.
I think we're going to do all of the statements and then open questions.
Yeah.
I think that's all right.
Okay, is this working?
Okay, good. So the title of this panel was given as free software activism around the world.
And I was going to talk about a specific development in Europe concerning the original
format free software activism, writing GNU software.
And I'm going to talk about the GNU hackers meetings that we've been holding. These are
informal technical meetings for GNU maintainers and active contributors typically lasting
a few days with some talks, but it's not really a formal conference. It's just to have
time for discussion and hacking. And the main purpose of the meetings is really for people
to get to know each other and to feel part of a community.
There are some projects like GCC and GNU, which are big enough that they already have their
own meetings and people can feel part of that as a community. But we've never really had a
place where all contributors to GNU software can come together and have their own activity.
If you think about all the programs in GNU, a lot of them are relatively small and not
everyone works on the big programs like GCC and people who work on a small package which
could be equally or in its own way essential for something. They can't necessarily sustain
a community around that package itself. So the idea of the meetings is to give people
like that place to come together. There aren't really many rewards for working on GNU
software necessarily. The feeling part of a friendly community is one thing that we cannot
offer. We've had two meetings so far, one in Spain, which was organized by GNU
Spain, the Spanish chapter, and one in the UK, which I organized. And we've had people
coming from across Europe to these meetings. We're planning more this year, including a
week-long new hackers meeting in Sweden in November, which will be part of the FSCOMS
free software conference there. I'm going to give a full talk tomorrow about the meeting
that I organized, where I'll report on the various activities that we have and explain
a lot more about the thinking behind the meetings and the motivation for them.
There are many ways to be active in promoting the idea of software freedom today. And for
some of us, the best way of contributing is writing and free software. The GNU
hackers meetings are really about increasing communication and motivation among those people
who want to promote software freedom by writing and working on GNU software and continuing the
development of the GNU system. It's been 25 years since the founding of the GNU
project. There have been a lot of changes in that time, not least that we've really achieved
the goal of having a free operating system that's available to everyone.
What I've found from the GNU hackers meetings is that GNU project has a lot of strong traditions
and values that still continue to inspire people today. And the number of people who come
from all across Europe, we've had people coming from Spain, from Czech Republic, from Sweden,
from France, from everywhere. It really shows that there's a lot of enthusiasm to build on
what we have achieved so far and continue the development of GNU, which is not just about
writing free software. A software that happens to be under a freelancer, but really about
having the idea of having a system which embodies the idea of freedom in many different ways.
And this sort of thing isn't always apparent when people meet up say other conferences,
like open source conferences, people don't really talk about that kind of thing.
But the GNU hackers meeting is an environment where people can interact in a safe environment
where they can discuss that kind of thing.
Another reason for having meetings is that, and I'll explain more about this tomorrow,
is that it's easy for people to lose motivation or to lose trust when all of the interaction
is by, that they have, is by email. Somebody who works on a project, which is relatively small,
they may be one of only a few people working on it. And if they, you know, you can easily imagine in that scenario
that it would be easy for them to lose motivation.
So, what we're looking to do by having these meetings is to really maintain people's motivation
and promote trust and commitment between contributors.
And that's really the role of the GNU hackers meeting, rather than a specific technical goal.
And that's what we're trying to do, given that we are a very, very dispersed group
and it's somewhat difficult for us to meet.
So, anybody who wants to hear more about the meeting that we had in the UK and the background behind it
can come to my thoughts tomorrow, which is in the high priority projects track.
And if there are any people in the audience who might be interested in organizing a GNU hackers meeting
somewhere else, for example, maybe here in the US or Canada, come and talk to me
and I can give you some practical suggestions on how to do that.
So, I'm a bit daunted to be on a panel about international free software and software freedom activism
primarily because I'm admittedly incredibly US-centric in my thinking.
And the most important thing I just remember about the international world
is it doesn't work the same way as the US, but I tend to understand mostly only how the US works in part
because I'm a little bit afraid to fly longer than seven hours or so,
so I don't go outside the US that often as it turns out.
And I've spoken some in Europe and Canada, but that's about the extent of my international travel.
And the place where I think the US is unique in regards to activism is we're generally apathetic nation, honestly.
We're not a nation that has done a lot of activism since basically the 1960s and early 1970s.
And therefore, it's more difficult here, I think, than other places to get people excited about a political or philosophical issue
of incredible importance just by talking to them and convincing them.
People outside the US, I think, are much more willing to think, wow, there's an important political thing
and maybe I should get involved with it.
But there is one trueism, I think, of all political activism.
Every movement is run by the people that show up.
And people used to ask me how I ended up being the executive director of the Free Software Foundation.
And the truly honest answer is I showed up.
Really, I showed up.
And I showed up first by following Richard Stallman around the conferences.
I remember distinctly at the 1997 Usenix following him around after his talk, trying to ask him questions,
following him into the bathroom.
Never follow somebody famous into the bathroom.
And I'm glad Stallman is an awkward enough person that he was not truly offended by that,
because he might make the same mistake that I did of following him into the bathroom talking to him about,
you know, I really care about Free Software, I really want to get involved.
And that leads me to the other point I want to make in my opening statement here,
that doing things that need to be done is incredibly important.
Most people, and I think the biggest mistake that people make,
when they try to get involved in free software activism,
is they go immediately to the thing that interests them the most.
And I have actually never done that.
If I went to the thing that interests me the most,
I probably would have ended up being a GCC contributor,
because I studied compilers in graduate school,
and that's what I was sort of trained to do.
But there was already plenty of people working on GCC
and involved in compiler hacking and programming language hacking.
And I would go to RMS and ask him,
what is the most important thing to work on?
And I ended up doing a series of incredibly boring jobs
for RMS like planning, like coordinating his speaking travel,
which is done by the job that I created at FSF RMS Assist,
which still exists.
That was my first job at FSF.
And within a year of being RMS Assist,
he decided to make me executive director,
just sort of randomly one day.
He said, maybe I should just put you in charge.
Okay, that's what I'm going to do.
So I ended up being in charge of the FSF.
But even once I was in charge, my goal was always not to do
what was most exciting or interesting,
but to find the places in the free software space
that weren't getting addressed and chased them.
This is why I'm glad we still have the high priority projects list at FSF.
Those are the kinds of things that FSF has always been very good at doing,
naming things that really need attention.
And being somebody, I'm not a smartest woman,
I'm not somebody who can immediately see a pro,
see the problem in the best way to address it.
But I'm really good at following directions,
and I'm really good at working hard on something once I believe in it.
So I've always looked to my elders in the free software world
and said, what is the problems we need to be working on the most
and try to work on those and try to get active about those?
So that's sort of my central philosophy of free software activism
is show up and work on something that looks really urgent
and nobody else is working on.
So I think now we're going to try to keep this interactive and open to questions
and Jeremy was the first guy with his hand up.
So can we hand a mic to Jeremy and get started with the questions?
So I was really interested in your comments about Latin America
and how active free software is there.
Now, and you said, find out about it.
Well, the interesting thing is sort of living in the US or whatever
is you will never see that stuff.
You will never see reports of successful,
Linux installations or whatever.
That information is never reported.
Mainly because there's nobody sitting there,
or spoon feeding the press with press releases,
which is how you actually get things reported in the US.
So where do we find out about that stuff?
Because it would be really nice to be able to,
well, whenever you get one of these sort of Microsoft funded sort of,
oh, Linux fails in Staffordshire police force or whatever it is.
Which they love trotting out to say,
oh, Linux succeeds on 300,000 desktops in Brazilian government studies
that you could point people at.
And the other useful thing with that is,
is I've done a little bit of lobbying politicians
and governments like to talk to other governments.
They don't like to talk to grubby citizens and, you know, the hyperloid.
They like to talk to people like them.
So if there's, you know, if you could point at it,
if you could put something online where we could go to actually
get this information out, that would be really helpful.
Yeah. So we did.
So we, you can go to news.northxsouth.com.
And whenever I do talk about it, I do say,
like, I think that it's the only English language website
that specifically addresses the free software movement
in Latin America.
And I think you're right.
They're asking you shall receive.
Yeah, for the most part, you know, when Brazil first moves
to free software or when there's something really major
that happens, there's some press about it
in the Western media.
But for the most part, I think you're right,
that it's ignored.
And I think that, you know, part of that, too,
it falls on the North American and European movements
and that they're not aware of what's going on.
And so they're not actively promoting awareness
or going out of their way to talk about, you know,
you say that, you know, someone says to you,
you know, ah, free software, it's never really been tested
or what have, you know, as well.
It's running a country that's the size of the United States.
You know, it's an emerging economy.
It's basically to take it over in an entire continent
that they're comprised of emerging markets
and emerging economies.
And that's why I say that Latin America is such an incredible example
that we could be using if we knew more about it.
I'll wait for that.
Somebody should run the mic for John.
John had to run the mic at the first FSF membership meeting
like four years ago.
I showed up.
He showed up and ran the mic.
The problem is you get stuck doing the same thing over and over again.
So maybe somebody should have gone a break from running the mic.
Oh.
That was a good question.
First of all, I'd like to apologize for the fact that I'm lousy with names.
So if, would each of you mind just, you know,
telling me what your names are, so I know who to direct the question to.
I'm Brian.
Brian.
And I'm Bradley.
Brian, Brian, and Bradley.
Yep, sounds good.
Brian, Brian.
Okay.
Brian.
Okay.
Just a guy on left, Brian.
My question is for Ryan, one in the middle.
Just a few years ago, Eric Chris, here in Massachusetts, Chief Technology Officer for the state at the time,
issued a directive to state government that was, you know, really not that radical.
It was simply that state employees, when they wanted to requisition software,
not as it was portrayed that they had to use free software,
but rather that they had to consider it as one of their choices and make a case
for, you know, which of the possible choices out there was the most cost effective.
The end result as reported on Groclaw and as reported by one of the attorneys who created Groclaw
in a speech that I heard was that Microsoft pulled some very underhanded, very dirty tricks,
because I can't remember Chris' right hand man's name,
but basically caused him to get fired by releasing a bogus story about him doing something,
you know, spending money he wasn't supposed to have spent.
Clearly, Microsoft with, you know, whose value is roughly the same size as the amount that Bernie made off-swindled,
has the resources to target anybody they choose to and pretty much bring them down.
So, when you said that the President of Brazil decided that, you know,
that Brazil from Ben's Fourth was going to use free software,
I'm wondering how she dodged the bullet, and one of the things I'm wondering is,
was there, you know, what was there sort of a national pride issue here?
We're not going to be ruled by those, you know, people up, you know, people up north,
or, you know, how did she manage not to get her entire administration brought down?
Sure. And it's not just Brazil, right?
Other countries who are a lot smaller than Brazil.
I mean, what you're saying is legitimate that, you know, Microsoft certainly has the power to create problems for governments that take a stance like this.
Brazil is, you know, a huge country with a huge economy. I mean,
much smaller countries have gone the same route and faced the same threat, you know, like Ecuador,
Bolivia is doing it, Nicaragua, El Salvador, et cetera.
Part of the reason that Latin America is going in this direction, I think, is that,
it's part of the generation that has come to power are the first progressive leaders who are coming to power once democracy has been restored in countries in Latin America.
So, you know, for 500 years, there was colonialism, and then there was imperialism,
and then there was just outright military dictatorships that were supported by the United States.
And those started to be overthrown in the 80s and up into the 90s.
And this movement that's happening in Latin America is broader than just technology, but technology is a part of it.
And so there are issues of technological sovereignty in choosing free software.
And aside from that, just the values of free software sort of sync up with the values of this generation of people who are putting into power these progressive leaders.
I mean, Lula's party is the workers party, you know, which has traditionally been like a socialist, what socialist parties call themselves.
Hugo Chavez had outright said that he's a socialist, Cuba is a communist country, Ecuador is run by a president who's affiliated with socialist parties.
So yeah, I think the answer to your question is that it is an issue of technological sovereignty that Latin America as a continent has said that we're not going to be America's United States backyard anymore.
And that this is part of that. And, you know, the huge, and again, I think this is something that's under reported and Western media or misreported, intentionally misreported.
But there is a really strong movement in Latin America right now, which is a reaction to decades of military dictatorships, desquads, disappearances.
And the free software movement is just the technology arenas participation in that broader movement.
And one thing to note is in the US, maybe we're beginning right now because of what's happening in the economic climate to realize that corporate corruption is a central part of what tends to move things around here.
In other countries, people realize that longer ago than we did, if we didn't realize it yet. And so there's a likelihood there can be more quick to react to corporate corruption and call it out.
I met a lot of people who had gotten involved in software freedom advocacy from the OOXML ODF wars because there were all these ISO meetings around the world where it was one of these situations I was talking about.
People who showed up got to speak because hardly anybody showed up as Jeremy point out in his talk. Of course, the decision already been made.
But when people showed up to speak about the problem, realize that the decision already been made by some company buying people off, that got them angry enough to get involved in activism.
So that's one thing to keep in mind about when Microsoft goes around and buys the ISO in every country to make OOXML pass.
They're actually inspiring a generation of activists who are going to get excited. So it's not all bad when they do that because it backfires on them. And it will continue to backfire on them, I think.
If I can ask a follow-up, do any of you see any lessons from this?
Do any of you see any lessons from this? How would this play out in other regions of the world that are in any way applicable to US society?
I think that when you look at some of the other areas of the world that have started to adopt free software as policies, you can see that they follow this pattern.
So another country outside of Latin America that has been really moving towards free software is South Africa.
And again, they share a lot in common with Latin America and apartheid regime was propped up there by the United States and the United Kingdom for years and years.
And so they have this sense of wanting technological independence from Microsoft in India, states that are controlled by more progressive parties have also started to shift to free software.
And so I think the lesson that can be taken out of it is that an RMS has spoken a lot about this which I find interesting and we write about it on our news site which is that there are reasons for adopting free software like issues of sovereignty that can be more appealing to people than just cost or ideas of code freedom.
You can appeal to people from a stance of sovereignty and independence which are feelings that run a lot deeper than just some of the things that people in the United States and the United Kingdom find important.
My question is for Brian, maybe you can speak to this, we were talking about writing code and then adoption and I'm wondering if there's a correlation to having hackers in different places and the adoption.
And so I don't know if we have lots, lots, lots more people writing code in Brazil now because the government supports it and then sort of a second piece of that is where do you think the newer places that we're recruiting people to write a new code are these days like what's on the horizon.
So maybe that'll be where we'll see more adoption.
That's a question for me. I don't know anything about the question of adoption.
So I can't really comment on that. I would say that in terms of where we're getting contributors in the GNU project, what we're seeing is essentially a form of promotion where maybe people who are maintainer on a distribution like devian, if the GNU maintainer retires and they will step up and become a GNU maintainer.
I think that's where most GNU contributors are coming from these days.
Yeah, I think one of the problems that I've seen, I've seen this most in India, I've talked to some folks who have tried to do free software advocacy in India.
It's very difficult to get, despite at least of people who would actually have the training to contribute to open source and free software, sorry I said open source.
But those folks are generally in their own communities internally and even though they haven't had access, they're not really getting in touch and collaborating with the upstream folks who are mostly Europeans and U.S. folks and U.S. Canadian folks mostly.
So it's a really big challenge for international activism of trying to get the code bases of free software coordinated in a way that actually has people able to contribute upstream.
A lot of the Brazilians free software development that I've heard about, and it's actually on a couple years behind on this summit, it even corrects me, but it's a lot of internal stuff that's getting built, like I heard a couple years ago about this like full replacement of Lotus Notes that they did in Portuguese.
It's widely used throughout Brazil, it's under GPL, but it's never been translated any language for Portuguese and it's not used widely outside of Brazil.
And they're not really connected with people doing the same kind of work, replacement work for other, for the same products in the U.S. and Europe and so forth.
So it's a real challenge, I don't have, maybe you have some ideas of how we could start to bridge those gaps.
I think that, so last year for the first time, Brazil organized a Congress of Latin American countries who were developing free software, and you're right, there are a lot of new pieces of software, or one that they really pushed is called EXPRESSO, which is something that's built on PHP, Group Wear, that they use internally a lot.
And so the first step for them is that they wanted to get together all the Latin American countries and start to coordinate on that level.
So applications that were written in Portuguese, getting those translated to Spanish, and then go from there and translate into English.
So there are efforts towards coordination, and I think those are just, those will continue.
Okay, it seems like India is such an obvious choice because everybody who's educated India speaks English.
So there's no language barrier within India.
I'm sort of at a loss of how to better integrate the Indian free software developers with people in the sort of traditional European and U.S. and North American free software space.
Thank you guys for that, bring them up, because it's been quite a challenge, I think.
One thing I say on the subject, which I'm going to be talking about tomorrow, is that, do you think one of our problems is that we are very dependent on email as a form of communication, and that's not really conducive to building personal relationship.
It's what you need to get people really committed into working on projects.
I have a question for Ryan, going back to the freedom and interoperability of other cultures in other cultures, South America is much like Scandinavia where they're more socialist oriented and they're open and integrated and willing to think out of the box.
And then you have countries like China that are more, you know, we're going to control everything in Saudi Arabia that they're going to control everything that goes in and out of their their walls.
What I see in the movements of South America, politically as well as information is the imperialism, the colonialism, the paramilitarism, their key approach was to keep education and information out of the hands of the masses.
So when I looked at Tiananmen Square and that was only made possible because of the old facts machines, you couldn't, you could hide the data that you were faxing back and forth.
Only the person that picked up the facts could see it in the person making it. Now, faxing is all integrated, everything's integrated online where anything can be looked at and extricated.
And how do you see, I just see that activism politically and free software activism almost has to go hand in hand and it has to be started at agress roots and educational level.
And without that integration, it'll never take off even here.
I think there's validity to, I mean, you know, even the reason how I got involved with working with Latin American free software developers was 10 over a decade ago when opposition to FTA free trade agreement Alco was beginning.
We started working on projects that included Latin American developers because they were building support software for people who are opposing those trade agreements.
And certainly in Latin America, the movement towards free software goes hand in hand with this broader activism movement and Brazil, sort of the same forces that are pushing towards free software the same forces who created the world's social forum as a counter to.
Whatever I forget, whatever the annual meeting.
So at any rate, what's that?
Yeah, exactly, Davos. Yeah, so the world economic forum, so the world social forum, I mean, it's this group of people who are really pushing for free software.
And, you know, I think that within the, within the, within the North American and European free software world, there's, there's always been a controversial thing about tying it to politics.
And you have some folks who want to tie it to libertarian politics, which certainly don't mix with the kind of politics that Latin American movement is talking about.
And then you have some people who, who argue that, you know, I guess these are more of the open source people, but, but there's still a lot of people who say just keep politics out of it because that's not going to help us achieve adoption.
I think in Latin America, and maybe there's another lesson from Latin America is that if you want free software to be adopted by governments, the massive corporations on an entire continent, then maybe it doesn't need to be tied to a broader activist movement that shares those values.
Because in the United States and other places we've been unsuccessful in doing it segregated from, from anything political, from a broader context.
Yeah, it just seems to me that if you, if we trained a majority of the end users, the others have to follow.
They have to turn back to them because their user base, their consumer base is all oriented in one specific manner.
In education is just the only way like through the, through the school programs I'm thinking, I don't know.
Something you mentioned gave me an idea of that.
And a country like Brazil where there's so many people that may be using free software that there's a considerable amount of development work going on as well.
The spreadsheet program that you mentioned probably could be a good asset if it were translated back and brought back here or to at least translate it into English.
I would think that FSF would have an interest in identifying those applications that are being developed elsewhere and bringing them back here.
Perhaps even pay a little bit to do it. Just an idea.
And, you know, to go on with that, there's even some really, really important works.
Cuba, part of the free software work that Cuba does is reverse engineering device drivers for a medical equipment because of the embargo that they have against them.
Sometimes Europe has, sometimes the EU has an embargo against them, but always the United States has an embargo.
A lot of the work that they've done have been, you know, heart monitors or what have you, they reverse engineers, the device drivers.
And then that's free software that give away that they don't have any proprietary license.
I don't know if it's specifically GPL, but it would be if they knew if they were prompted to do that.
I agree. There is a ton of software being produced in Latin America, especially important stuff like that that should be integrated into the broader movement around the US, UK, European movement.
It's why I'm always excited, always interested in talking as much as I can to whoever I can about what's going on in Latin America for all these reasons that we're talking about.
This is actually part of a broader problem, which basically free software ends up being a victim of its own success because there's so many free software subcommittees now around particular code bases, around particular programming language, around particular library sets that don't interact that much.
And it's very difficult to get them interact. I think the hacker meetings you're talking about is a good way to get developers who are working on basically orthogonal systems to meet each other.
Because I see a lot of folks who don't know about each other's libraries, don't know about each other's software work, and it's basically still a word of mouth situation to get people hearing about other people's software projects.
And we are facing that scaling challenge right now as a community that I don't have any specific solutions for.
I'm just pointing at the problem and talk to people who work in different languages and use and so forth.
And on your original point, I'm certainly aware of, in Europe, there are Spanish app applications and things like ELP enterprise resource planning, which as far as I'm aware, they're really only available in Spanish, which could be translated and made generally available.
But I do think this comes down to a problem of communication.
When the GNU project started, it was a question of everybody. Essentially, the components were independent, and we could all work on them individually.
But now that phase is really over, and we're into an integrative phase now, which really depends on having more communication between all these different subcommittees.
I don't know, the guy on the left. Right left?
Bradley. I know how to be in it.
You talked a bit about getting people involved in important projects and areas in free software.
And one of the things that I found even with myself, even though I consider myself a moderately technical,
is that there's kind of people put off and don't know exactly what they could do for free software because they think that maybe the advocacy might be over their head or that they can't specifically code.
How would you market or advertise to people to get involved that aren't necessarily as technical as others?
It's a hard question for me to answer because I am technical, and it's hard to imagine what folks go through who don't want a program.
Actually, it's funny because I was primarily a programmer, and I never really did much programming on free software, going back to this philosophy of everybody seemed to want to write programs for free software, and I said, well, what's actually more urgently needed?
Most people need coordination help, and there are always logistics related to projects that they need help with.
And you can only really find out about them if you want to by joining their mailing list or listening to what they're complaining about.
That's really the best way to do it.
One of the first things I did, and I don't know if I went on up to this, for free software project because I ran the voting for naming the GNU Cache project, which was not, I wrote a little script to do it, but it didn't have to be technical.
I could have just kept track of all the emails and counted up the votes.
I don't like to credit for it because the name's not that great, but that's what one.
And everybody voted, everybody in the community voted, and that's what they decided on, but that was not a technical job.
And the reason I knew about that is because the last proprietary program I used on a regular basis was Quicken, and I was looking for a replacement.
So I subscribed to the GNU, while that then was the ex account mailing list, which they were looking for a new name, and I said, well, that's something easy I can do.
I don't know anything about this code base, but I can run there, I can run there, programmed it both for a new name.
And there's little administrative things that every project needs that you can find.
If you ask the right people, I'm sure if you talk to people around here, they're working on some project that has an administrative need.
Now, administrative work is boring as hell, but people are really appreciative of it, and it really needs to be done.
My work with the Summer Freedom Conservancy, we're all about serving the administrative needs of projects.
Now, I don't want to sit there and watch bank accounts.
I mean, I'm actually trained as a programmer, I really am.
But the thing is, there's nobody else who's willing to watch a bunch of bank accounts for projects, so I do it.
And Jeremy calls me up and tells him when the zombie project needs to spend money on something, and I do it.
Yeah, it's boring, but that way, Jeremy can be off working on some, but which is really important.
So there's lots of little things like that, and heck, if you want to do administrative work, I have a list of volunteer administrative projects you can do for Conservancy.
See me later.
One area that I would, just in answer to that, one area that I would say where less technical skill is needed, which is an incredibly important area, is documentation.
In terms of a creep increasing adoption of the software, basic tutorial information, that's a moderately used user could easily write.
Explain to somebody who doesn't know anything about a piece of software to get them up speed.
We are severely lacking in that area, and we've got the book sprint here at this meeting, this one example.
But if somebody has knowledge about using software and writing a tutorial, it's a really good way to help people.
Yeah, one other thing I wanted to add, because you said you were somewhat technical.
One of the things I do now when I want to get involved with a new project is I start writing test coverage for it, and writing tests is some of the more easy to get your mind around programming that you can do.
So if you're a little bit of a programmer, most free software programs don't have good test coverage, because most of them were started before we started to realize you should write tests first, and then write the code.
You know, we're still all getting used to that idea. So going and finding what code's not covered with tests and writing tests is a great way to get involved if you want to do a little bit of programming, but aren't really hard core yet.
And I even do that myself when I'm new to a project, because it's an easy way to learn the code base.
It's easy to do while you watch TV. I write test a lot while I watch TV.
I'd add in that this is another place that we could learn, take a lesson from Latin America, which is that one of the most impressive projects that go on there are the opening of computer labs, community computer labs.
And so then it's all based on free software and open source, and it's a way to get people comfortable with using an open free software desktop of free software user interface, free software programs like open office.
And you can see that the majority of the work involved in setting up community computer lab is not technical.
I mean, there is, but I mean, you know, finding a space, finding a space, getting it set up, doing coordinating all that work is all non technical work.
So, and it's another vehicle that's spread the use of free software in Latin America.
Well, just a comment about I'm from Mexico and I'm involved in the Mexican community. Hi, Ryan.
In the past, with the past president, the, all the presidential thing, the servers, the website and all that, that was based on open source.
And there was a very strong support for open source movement. And but with these new president, it all rolled back because the ice, some kind of related with someone in Microsoft and the problem we're facing now is that we're pushing ideas for the government to adopt open source in their offices.
So that expenses go lower. But what we, where we're encountering is that Microsoft give bonuses to these guys that buy the software.
So because we have bad salaries and all that corruption is is very easy for Microsoft to push all that of this software.
And while we're keeping these, these battle and we're still fighting that in and hope in the next president or something, we can change that.
And unfortunately, this president gave Bill Gates a medal a couple of months ago.
Yeah. And the other problem is that though, though riding after the election just didn't last long enough.
Yeah, they didn't. That's really the problem. Yeah, and, and well, that's, that's just.
You should have imported militants from wahaka. And that would have been the answer. Yeah.
And this I think one of the challenges of time, time these things to political parties. I mean, it's sometimes you have to because you're riding away and you're getting something done, but, but you run into problems like this where parties out of power.
And you're stuck. I mean, it's, I, I like to think of free software activists primarily to try to be as apolitical as possible. It's, it's one of these great ideas that eventually every party is going to adopt. I mean, I mean, it's quite a libertarian say, well, you know, free software fits exactly with the libertarian philosophy.
Coming to say the same thing capitalists say the same thing. And so, and so we're one of these things that's such a good idea that we can make it.
We can pitch it to fit any political ideology. And so I just try to focus on rights and freedoms of computer users and try not to get to political as far as political parties go because you never know when a particular party is going to go out of power.
Yeah, I'm going to, well, to follow up on that, I guess, I think it hasn't been politicized enough in some ways. I mean, we can see these sort of intricate linkages between socialism and free software. And, you know, the, I'm wearing this thing that calls me an activist or whatever.
And then like the largest US gathering of activists, the free software foundation wasn't there at the US social forum. And I think that actually linking and like trying to talk to activists, political activists about free software.
They're like, you know, fuck you. I'm, you know, I'm happy with my Facebook and being able to connect with these people really quickly and I don't care about free software.
So I mean, actually enhancing the political message could be really important.
We've been thinking kind of along those lines with the FSF. I don't know if you saw something that we published a year and a half or so ago free software free society.org, which was a statement that we got a number of other non technical activist groups to sign on to.
Using the occasion of opposing festive, but also just promoting the importance of free software, avoiding having filters on your proprietary filters on your free speech and your activism is important for any kind of group.
So I mean, at least we totally agree and we're trying to move in that direction in terms of getting non technical organizations that have any kind of political agenda.
It doesn't matter what it is. Everybody has the common interest of needing to have unfiltered communication with whoever their supporters are and, you know, networking capabilities and all that sort of thing.
I have a people who show up answered to your question somewhat. Non-profits, generally speaking, 501C3 non-profits in the US are the most free software unfriendly of all organizations.
They're even more free software unfriendly than for-profit corporations because for-profit corporations basically make decisions based on bottom lines and it's easy to show with the open source arguments why their bottom line is better.
But the other thing that's true about non-profits is that they're very technologically unsavvy. I mean, I'm sorry about non-profits outside of our space.
So if you have another cause that you're excited about, be environmentalism, whatever it is, find the non-profits in your area that are doing work in that regard and go volunteer for them specifically on technology issues, giving them free software solutions.
Because they probably really need to help technologically and if you're saying I'm willing to volunteer but I'm only going to do free software, they'll probably say okay as long as it works and just make it work.
And that's a great way to cross over that space between other activists because they get these near zero cost licenses from Microsoft and they're just happy to keep taking it.
And the biggest technology sort of forum, for-non-profits in the US called N10 is basically owned by Microsoft.
So it's really hard to get the message across them but volunteering always gets their attention.
So it's one way to help bridge that gap, I think.
I would add just really quick that the movements that were connected to Latin America, I mean how I got involved with Latin American free software programmers, revolved around organizations like Indie Media and the technical groups within there are extremely committed to free software and open source.
Whereas maybe the free software advocates aren't present at the activist things, the tech activists within the movements are 100% about free software.
Can you talk or just one more question?
I just wanted to ask if you really did bully the last point you made Bradley about the-
It's such a good idea, everyone can agree with it, like the libertarian's agree with the free software's a good idea, capitalist agree it's a good idea.
Is that really true though, about free software because Jeremy was making the point earlier that they really like BSD licensing.
They like the idea of open source things they can raid but GPL software capitalists don't like, is that or am I wrong?
I don't think that's true, I think that a lot of the capitalist type people, I mean IBM's a great example, really prefer the GPL because it keeps their competitors from being able to basically creates this space they feel safe in because with BSD stuff they can get undercut by their competitor and their competitor can take their technology and build on it and not get back.
But GPL creates this common space that they can trust.
So I think, I mean, you may be right about the libertarians, I mean, if Eric Raymond is the representative of libertarians, I don't know.
You've got two members of the libertarian party that keeps the state committee sitting when you write this right now.
Okay, so there you go, talk to them if you want to hear a libertarian's for free software versus open source.
But I think the freedom arguments work well, I mean, the free software against work well with pretty much people from every part of the political sphere that I've talked to.
I even found a political philosophy that I can't find a way to craft the software freedom, software freedom argument to them that makes sense, not just the open source argument.
And people who basically don't, US people are responsive to the open source thing because, like I said in my opening statement, people in the US are incredibly apathetic and that's something we have to learn how to change as a culture.
And I have no idea because I'm not a, I'm not a sociologist to understand how to make US people on apathetic.
But if you find somebody who is truly on apathetic and has some sort of passion about some philosophy, I think generally you can find a way to make, it's like anti-slavery, right?
I mean, the anti-slavery arguments you can make in every spectrum because it's right to be against slavery.
Free software, I think, is actually the same way.
We have just one over here and then we have to figure out.
Okay, sure, yeah.
But everyone is still here so you can come up in the break.
So I have a question for everyone about the range of, of lures in various countries and any changes in them, which is making it easier or more difficult for the job.
And a free software vis-a-vis the issue of government procurement, especially such that it's very difficult here in the US to even get something that's well governed not to evaluate on equal terms with software.
And as opposed to, you're opposed to say in France where I'm given to understand that government procurement law is a favor, open source solutions or economic benefit.
And there's some sort of EU directive about that, especially understood what extent other European countries have taken the EU directive that isn't written very strongly.
And try to do something with that.
Well, I'm not really familiar with the details, but it's certainly a general trend in Europe.
In the UK we're coming up towards an election and all of the three main parties are talking about open source.
They're saying that they're in favor of it, and that's all of them.
So that's an encouraging sign, whether that will actually translate into anything in the long run.
That's really the opposite, because there have been a lot of tonight's concerns.
But certainly the trend is in my direction.
I just wanted to add real quick before we have to end.
I have proposed something for tomorrow that goes deeper into all the different stuff that's happening in Latin America because you could go on and on about it forever and there are a lot of really interesting things that have happened.
I can't exactly share how tomorrow is working, but I at least proposed it.
If you're interested further, go to it if it happens.
And my closing statement is that Evan is an excellent example of somebody who saw a problem showed up and started working on it.
So I'm going to stop talking and let him talk.
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