The time has come that I must speak out against the inappropriate rhetoric
used by those who (ostensibly) advocate for FLOSS usage in automotive applications.
There was a catalyst that convinced me to finally speak up. I heard a
talk today from a company representative of a software supplier for the
automotive industry. He said during his talk: putting GPLv3 software in
cars will kill people and opening up the source code to cars will
cause more harm than good. These statements are completely disingenuous.
Most importantly, it ignores the fact that proprietary software in cars is at
least equally, if not more, dangerous. At least one person has already been
killed in a crash
while using
a proprietary software auto-control
system. Volkswagen decided to
take a different route; they decided to kill us all slowly (rather than
quickly) by using proprietary software to lie about their emissions and
illegally polluting our air.
Meanwhile, there has been not a single example yet about use of GPLv3
software that has harmed anyone. If you have such an example, email it to
me and I promise to add it right here to this blog post.
So, to the auto industry folks and vendors who market to/for them: until
you can prove that proprietary software assures safety in a way that FLOSS
cannot, I will continue to tell you this: in the long and sad tradition of
the Therac
25, your proprietary software has killed people, both
quickly and slowly, and your attacks on GPLv3 and software freedom are not
only unwarranted, they are clearly part of a political strategy to divert
attention from your own industry’s bad behavior and graft unfair blame onto
FLOSS.
As a side note, during the talk’s Q&A session, I asked this company’s
representatives how they assure compliance with the GPLv2 —
particularly their compliance with provision of scripts used to control
compilation and installation of the executable, which are so often
missing for many products, including vehicles. The official answer
was: Oh, I don’t know. Not only does this company publicly claim
security through obscurity is a viable solution, and accuse copyleft advocates
of endangering the public safety, they also seem to have not fully learned
the lessons of making FLOSS license compliance a clear part of their
workflow.
This is, unfortunately, my general impression of the status of the
automotive industry.
The time has come that I must speak out against the inappropriate rhetoric
used by those who (ostensibly) advocate for FLOSS usage in automotive applications.
There was a catalyst that convinced me to finally speak up. I heard a
talk today from a company representative of a software supplier for the
automotive industry. He said during his talk: putting GPLv3 software in
cars will kill people and opening up the source code to cars will
cause more harm than good. These statements are completely disingenuous.
Most importantly, it ignores the fact that proprietary software in cars is at
least equally, if not more, dangerous. At least one person has already been
killed in a crash
while using
a proprietary software auto-control
system. Volkswagen decided to
take a different route; they decided to kill us all slowly (rather than
quickly) by using proprietary software to lie about their emissions and
illegally polluting our air.
Meanwhile, there has been not a single example yet about use of GPLv3
software that has harmed anyone. If you have such an example, email it to
me and I promise to add it right here to this blog post.
So, to the auto industry folks and vendors who market to/for them: until
you can prove that proprietary software assures safety in a way that FLOSS
cannot, I will continue to tell you this: in the long and sad tradition of
the Therac
25, your proprietary software has killed people, both
quickly and slowly, and your attacks on GPLv3 and software freedom are not
only unwarranted, they are clearly part of a political strategy to divert
attention from your own industry’s bad behavior and graft unfair blame onto
FLOSS.
As a side note, during the talk’s Q&A session, I asked this company’s
representatives how they assure compliance with the GPLv2 —
particularly their compliance with provision of scripts used to control
compilation and installation of the executable, which are so often
missing for many products, including vehicles. The official answer
was: Oh, I don’t know. Not only does this company publicly claim
security through obscurity is a viable solution, and accuse copyleft advocates
of endangering the public safety, they also seem to have not fully learned
the lessons of making FLOSS license compliance a clear part of their
workflow.
This is, unfortunately, my general impression of the status of the
automotive industry.
The time has come that I must speak out against the inappropriate rhetoric
used by those who (ostensibly) advocate for FLOSS usage in automotive applications.
There was a catalyst that convinced me to finally speak up. I heard a
talk today from a company representative of a software supplier for the
automotive industry. He said during his talk: putting GPLv3 software in
cars will kill people and opening up the source code to cars will
cause more harm than good. These statements are completely disingenuous.
Most importantly, it ignores the fact that proprietary software in cars is at
least equally, if not more, dangerous. At least one person has already been
killed in a crash
while using
a proprietary software auto-control
system. Volkswagen decided to
take a different route; they decided to kill us all slowly (rather than
quickly) by using proprietary software to lie about their emissions and
illegally polluting our air.
Meanwhile, there has been not a single example yet about use of GPLv3
software that has harmed anyone. If you have such an example, email it to
me and I promise to add it right here to this blog post.
So, to the auto industry folks and vendors who market to/for them: until
you can prove that proprietary software assures safety in a way that FLOSS
cannot, I will continue to tell you this: in the long and sad tradition of
the Therac
25, your proprietary software has killed people, both
quickly and slowly, and your attacks on GPLv3 and software freedom are not
only unwarranted, they are clearly part of a political strategy to divert
attention from your own industry’s bad behavior and graft unfair blame onto
FLOSS.
As a side note, during the talk’s Q&A session, I asked this company’s
representatives how they assure compliance with the GPLv2 —
particularly their compliance with provision of scripts used to control
compilation and installation of the executable, which are so often
missing for many products, including vehicles. The official answer
was: Oh, I don’t know. Not only does this company publicly claim
security through obscurity is a viable solution, and accuse copyleft advocates
of endangering the public safety, they also seem to have not fully learned
the lessons of making FLOSS license compliance a clear part of their
workflow.
This is, unfortunately, my general impression of the status of the
automotive industry.
The time has come that I must speak out against the inappropriate rhetoric
used by those who (ostensibly) advocate for FLOSS usage in automotive applications.
There was a catalyst that convinced me to finally speak up. I heard a
talk today from a company representative of a software supplier for the
automotive industry. He said during his talk: putting GPLv3 software in
cars will kill people and opening up the source code to cars will
cause more harm than good. These statements are completely disingenuous.
Most importantly, it ignores the fact that proprietary software in cars is at
least equally, if not more, dangerous. At least one person has already been
killed in a crash
while using
a proprietary software auto-control
system. Volkswagen decided to
take a different route; they decided to kill us all slowly (rather than
quickly) by using proprietary software to lie about their emissions and
illegally polluting our air.
Meanwhile, there has been not a single example yet about use of GPLv3
software that has harmed anyone. If you have such an example, email it to
me and I promise to add it right here to this blog post.
So, to the auto industry folks and vendors who market to/for them: until
you can prove that proprietary software assures safety in a way that FLOSS
cannot, I will continue to tell you this: in the long and sad tradition of
the Therac
25, your proprietary software has killed people, both
quickly and slowly, and your attacks on GPLv3 and software freedom are not
only unwarranted, they are clearly part of a political strategy to divert
attention from your own industry’s bad behavior and graft unfair blame onto
FLOSS.
As a side note, during the talk’s Q&A session, I asked this company’s
representatives how they assure compliance with the GPLv2 —
particularly their compliance with provision of scripts used to control
compilation and installation of the executable, which are so often
missing for many products, including vehicles. The official answer
was: Oh, I don’t know. Not only does this company publicly claim
security through obscurity is a viable solution, and accuse copyleft advocates
of endangering the public safety, they also seem to have not fully learned
the lessons of making FLOSS license compliance a clear part of their
workflow.
This is, unfortunately, my general impression of the status of the
automotive industry.
The time has come that I must speak out against the inappropriate rhetoric
used by those who (ostensibly) advocate for FLOSS usage in automotive applications.
There was a catalyst that convinced me to finally speak up. I heard a
talk today from a company representative of a software supplier for the
automotive industry. He said during his talk: putting GPLv3 software in
cars will kill people and opening up the source code to cars will
cause more harm than good. These statements are completely disingenuous.
Most importantly, it ignores the fact that proprietary software in cars is at
least equally, if not more, dangerous. At least one person has already been
killed in a crash
while using
a proprietary software auto-control
system. Volkswagen decided to
take a different route; they decided to kill us all slowly (rather than
quickly) by using proprietary software to lie about their emissions and
illegally polluting our air.
Meanwhile, there has been not a single example yet about use of GPLv3
software that has harmed anyone. If you have such an example, email it to
me and I promise to add it right here to this blog post.
So, to the auto industry folks and vendors who market to/for them: until
you can prove that proprietary software assures safety in a way that FLOSS
cannot, I will continue to tell you this: in the long and sad tradition of
the Therac
25, your proprietary software has killed people, both
quickly and slowly, and your attacks on GPLv3 and software freedom are not
only unwarranted, they are clearly part of a political strategy to divert
attention from your own industry’s bad behavior and graft unfair blame onto
FLOSS.
As a side note, during the talk’s Q&A session, I asked this company’s
representatives how they assure compliance with the GPLv2 —
particularly their compliance with provision of scripts used to control
compilation and installation of the executable, which are so often
missing for many products, including vehicles. The official answer
was: Oh, I don’t know. Not only does this company publicly claim
security through obscurity is a viable solution, and accuse copyleft advocates
of endangering the public safety, they also seem to have not fully learned
the lessons of making FLOSS license compliance a clear part of their
workflow.
This is, unfortunately, my general impression of the status of the
automotive industry.
Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don’t mean
that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that
phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning
Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a
evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom
Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend
at FOSDEM 2016, where he and
I co-organize
the Legal
and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues,
Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).
Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some
breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about
to do the crazy thing that he’d done in the reverse a few years before: I
was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact,
because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn’t
book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back
round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning
(local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as
afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife,
sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight
to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.
I crossed the Pacific ocean, the international dateline, left a day on
deposit to pickup on the way back, and after 24 hours of almost literally
chasing the sun, I arrived in Melbourne on the morning of Wednesday 3
February, road a shuttle bus, dumped my bags at my room, and arrived just
in time for
the Wednesday
afternoon tea break at LinuxConf Australia 2016 in Geelong.
Nearly everyone who heard this story — or saw me while it was
happening — asked me the same question: Why are you doing
this?. The five to six people packed in with me in my coach section on
the LAX→SYD leg are probably still asking this, because I had an
allergic attack of some sort most of the flight and couldn’t stop coughing,
even with two full bags of Fisherman’s Friends over those 15 hours.
But, nevertheless, I gave a simple answer to everyone who questioned my
crazy BRU→AMS→PDX→LAX→SYD→MEL itinerary: FOSDEM and LinuxConf AU are
two of the most important events on the Free Software annual calendar.
There’s just no question. I’ll write more about FOSDEM sometime soon, but
the rest of this post, I’ll dedicate to LinuxConf Australia (LCA).
One of my biggest regrets in Free Software is that I was once — and
you’ll be surprised by this given my story above — a bit squeamish
about the nearly 15 hour flight to get from the USA to Australia, and
therefore I didn’t attend LCA until 2015. LCA began way back in 1999.
Keep in mind that, other than FOSDEM, no major, community-organized events
have survived from that time. But LCA has the culture and mindset of the
kinds of conferences that our community made in 1999.
LCA is community organized and operated. Groups of volunteers
each year plan the event. In the tradition of science fiction conventions
and other hobbyist activities, groups bid for the conference and offer
their time and effort to make the conference a success. They have an
annual hand-off meeting to be sure the organization lessons are passed from
one committee to the next, and some volunteers even repeat their
involvement year after year. For organizational structure, they rely on a
non-profit organization, Linux
Australia, to assist with handling the funds and providing
infrastructure (just like Conservancy does for our member projects and
their conferences!).
I believe fully that the success of software freedom and GNU/Linux in
particular has not primarily come from companies that allow developers to
spend some of their time coding on upstream. Sure, many Free Software
projects couldn’t survive without that component, but what really makes
GNU/Linux, or any Free Software project, truly special is that there’s a
community of users and developers who use, improve, and learn about the
software because it excites and interests them. LCA is one of the few
events specifically designed to invite that sort of person to attend, and
it has for almost an entire generation stood in stark contrast the highly
corporate, for-profit/trade-association events that slowly took over our community in the
years that followed LCA’s founding. (Remember all those years of LinuxWorld
Expo? I wasn’t even sad when IDG stopped running it!)
Speaking particularly of earlier this year, LCA 2016 in Geelong, Australia
was a particular profound event for me. LCA is one of the few events that
accepts my rather political talks about what’s happening in Open Source and
Free Software, so I gave a talk
on Friday
5 February 2016 entitled Copyleft For the Next Decade: A
Comprehensive Plan, which was recorded, so you can watch it,
or read the LWN article about
it. I do warn everyone that the jokes did not go over well (mine never
do), so after I finished, I was feeling a bit down that I hadn’t made the
talk entertaining enough. But then, something amazing happened: people
started walking up to me and telling me how important my message was. One
individual even came up and told me that he was excited enough that he’d like
to match
any donation that Software Freedom Conservancy received during LCA 2016.
Since it was the last day of the event, I quickly went to one of the
organizers, Kathy Reid, and asked
if they would announce this match during the closing ceremonies; she agreed.
In a matter of just an hour or two, I’d gone from believing my talk had
fallen flat to realizing that — regardless of whether I’d presented
well — the concepts I discussed had connected with people.
Then, I sat down in the closing session. I started to tear up slightly
when the
organizers announced the donation match. Within 90 seconds, though,
that turned to full tears of joy when the incoming President of Linux
Australia, Hugh Blemings, came on
stage and
said:
[I’ll start with] a Software Freedom Conservancy thing, as it turns out.
… I can tell that most of you weren’t at Bradley’s talk earlier on
today, but if there is one talk I’d encourage you to watch on the
playback later it would be that one. There’s a very very important
message in there and something to take away for all of us. On behalf of
the Council I’d like to announce … that we’re actually in the
process of making a significant donation from Linux Australia to Software
Freedom Conservancy as well. I urge all of you to consider contributing
individual as well, and there is much left for us to be done as a
community on that front.
I hope that this post helps organizers of events like LCA fully understand
how much something like this means to us who run a small charities —
and not just with regard to the financial contributions. Knowing that the
organizers of community events feel so strongly positive about our work
really keeps us going. We work hard and spend much time at Conservancy to
serve the Open Source and Free Software community, and knowing the work is
appreciated inspires us to keep working. Furthermore, we know that without
these events, it’s much tougher for us to reach others with our message of
software freedom. So, for us, the feeling is mutual: I’m delighted that
the Linux Australia and LCA folks feel so positively about Conservancy, and
I now look forward to another 15 hour flight for the next LCA.
And, on that note, I chose a strategic time to post this story. On Friday
5 August 2016, the CFP for LCA
2017 closes. So, now is the time for all of you to submit a talk. If
you regularly speak at Open Source and Free Software events, or have been
considering it, this event really needs to be on your calendar. I look
forward to seeing all of you Hobart this January.
Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don’t mean
that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that
phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning
Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a
evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom
Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend
at FOSDEM 2016, where he and
I co-organize
the Legal
and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues,
Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).
Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some
breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about
to do the crazy thing that he’d done in the reverse a few years before: I
was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact,
because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn’t
book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back
round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning
(local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as
afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife,
sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight
to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.
I crossed the Pacific ocean, the international dateline, left a day on
deposit to pickup on the way back, and after 24 hours of almost literally
chasing the sun, I arrived in Melbourne on the morning of Wednesday 3
February, road a shuttle bus, dumped my bags at my room, and arrived just
in time for
the Wednesday
afternoon tea break at LinuxConf Australia 2016 in Geelong.
Nearly everyone who heard this story — or saw me while it was
happening — asked me the same question: Why are you doing
this?. The five to six people packed in with me in my coach section on
the LAX→SYD leg are probably still asking this, because I had an
allergic attack of some sort most of the flight and couldn’t stop coughing,
even with two full bags of Fisherman’s Friends over those 15 hours.
But, nevertheless, I gave a simple answer to everyone who questioned my
crazy BRU→AMS→PDX→LAX→SYD→MEL itinerary: FOSDEM and LinuxConf AU are
two of the most important events on the Free Software annual calendar.
There’s just no question. I’ll write more about FOSDEM sometime soon, but
the rest of this post, I’ll dedicate to LinuxConf Australia (LCA).
One of my biggest regrets in Free Software is that I was once — and
you’ll be surprised by this given my story above — a bit squeamish
about the nearly 15 hour flight to get from the USA to Australia, and
therefore I didn’t attend LCA until 2015. LCA began way back in 1999.
Keep in mind that, other than FOSDEM, no major, community-organized events
have survived from that time. But LCA has the culture and mindset of the
kinds of conferences that our community made in 1999.
LCA is community organized and operated. Groups of volunteers
each year plan the event. In the tradition of science fiction conventions
and other hobbyist activities, groups bid for the conference and offer
their time and effort to make the conference a success. They have an
annual hand-off meeting to be sure the organization lessons are passed from
one committee to the next, and some volunteers even repeat their
involvement year after year. For organizational structure, they rely on a
non-profit organization, Linux
Australia, to assist with handling the funds and providing
infrastructure (just like Conservancy does for our member projects and
their conferences!).
I believe fully that the success of software freedom and GNU/Linux in
particular has not primarily come from companies that allow developers to
spend some of their time coding on upstream. Sure, many Free Software
projects couldn’t survive without that component, but what really makes
GNU/Linux, or any Free Software project, truly special is that there’s a
community of users and developers who use, improve, and learn about the
software because it excites and interests them. LCA is one of the few
events specifically designed to invite that sort of person to attend, and
it has for almost an entire generation stood in stark contrast the highly
corporate, for-profit/trade-association events that slowly took over our community in the
years that followed LCA’s founding. (Remember all those years of LinuxWorld
Expo? I wasn’t even sad when IDG stopped running it!)
Speaking particularly of earlier this year, LCA 2016 in Geelong, Australia
was a particular profound event for me. LCA is one of the few events that
accepts my rather political talks about what’s happening in Open Source and
Free Software, so I gave a talk
on Friday
5 February 2016 entitled Copyleft For the Next Decade: A
Comprehensive Plan, which was recorded, so you can watch it,
or read the LWN article about
it. I do warn everyone that the jokes did not go over well (mine never
do), so after I finished, I was feeling a bit down that I hadn’t made the
talk entertaining enough. But then, something amazing happened: people
started walking up to me and telling me how important my message was. One
individual even came up and told me that he was excited enough that he’d like
to match
any donation that Software Freedom Conservancy received during LCA 2016.
Since it was the last day of the event, I quickly went to one of the
organizers, Kathy Reid, and asked
if they would announce this match during the closing ceremonies; she agreed.
In a matter of just an hour or two, I’d gone from believing my talk had
fallen flat to realizing that — regardless of whether I’d presented
well — the concepts I discussed had connected with people.
Then, I sat down in the closing session. I started to tear up slightly
when the
organizers announced the donation match. Within 90 seconds, though,
that turned to full tears of joy when the incoming President of Linux
Australia, Hugh Blemings, came on
stage and
said:
[I’ll start with] a Software Freedom Conservancy thing, as it turns out.
… I can tell that most of you weren’t at Bradley’s talk earlier on
today, but if there is one talk I’d encourage you to watch on the
playback later it would be that one. There’s a very very important
message in there and something to take away for all of us. On behalf of
the Council I’d like to announce … that we’re actually in the
process of making a significant donation from Linux Australia to Software
Freedom Conservancy as well. I urge all of you to consider contributing
individual as well, and there is much left for us to be done as a
community on that front.
I hope that this post helps organizers of events like LCA fully understand
how much something like this means to us who run a small charities —
and not just with regard to the financial contributions. Knowing that the
organizers of community events feel so strongly positive about our work
really keeps us going. We work hard and spend much time at Conservancy to
serve the Open Source and Free Software community, and knowing the work is
appreciated inspires us to keep working. Furthermore, we know that without
these events, it’s much tougher for us to reach others with our message of
software freedom. So, for us, the feeling is mutual: I’m delighted that
the Linux Australia and LCA folks feel so positively about Conservancy, and
I now look forward to another 15 hour flight for the next LCA.
And, on that note, I chose a strategic time to post this story. On Friday
5 August 2016, the CFP for LCA
2017 closes. So, now is the time for all of you to submit a talk. If
you regularly speak at Open Source and Free Software events, or have been
considering it, this event really needs to be on your calendar. I look
forward to seeing all of you Hobart this January.
Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don’t mean
that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that
phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning
Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a
evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom
Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend
at FOSDEM 2016, where he and
I co-organize
the Legal
and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues,
Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).
Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some
breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about
to do the crazy thing that he’d done in the reverse a few years before: I
was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact,
because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn’t
book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back
round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning
(local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as
afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife,
sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight
to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.
I crossed the Pacific ocean, the international dateline, left a day on
deposit to pickup on the way back, and after 24 hours of almost literally
chasing the sun, I arrived in Melbourne on the morning of Wednesday 3
February, road a shuttle bus, dumped my bags at my room, and arrived just
in time for
the Wednesday
afternoon tea break at LinuxConf Australia 2016 in Geelong.
Nearly everyone who heard this story — or saw me while it was
happening — asked me the same question: Why are you doing
this?. The five to six people packed in with me in my coach section on
the LAX→SYD leg are probably still asking this, because I had an
allergic attack of some sort most of the flight and couldn’t stop coughing,
even with two full bags of Fisherman’s Friends over those 15 hours.
But, nevertheless, I gave a simple answer to everyone who questioned my
crazy BRU→AMS→PDX→LAX→SYD→MEL itinerary: FOSDEM and LinuxConf AU are
two of the most important events on the Free Software annual calendar.
There’s just no question. I’ll write more about FOSDEM sometime soon, but
the rest of this post, I’ll dedicate to LinuxConf Australia (LCA).
One of my biggest regrets in Free Software is that I was once — and
you’ll be surprised by this given my story above — a bit squeamish
about the nearly 15 hour flight to get from the USA to Australia, and
therefore I didn’t attend LCA until 2015. LCA began way back in 1999.
Keep in mind that, other than FOSDEM, no major, community-organized events
have survived from that time. But LCA has the culture and mindset of the
kinds of conferences that our community made in 1999.
LCA is community organized and operated. Groups of volunteers
each year plan the event. In the tradition of science fiction conventions
and other hobbyist activities, groups bid for the conference and offer
their time and effort to make the conference a success. They have an
annual hand-off meeting to be sure the organization lessons are passed from
one committee to the next, and some volunteers even repeat their
involvement year after year. For organizational structure, they rely on a
non-profit organization, Linux
Australia, to assist with handling the funds and providing
infrastructure (just like Conservancy does for our member projects and
their conferences!).
I believe fully that the success of software freedom and GNU/Linux in
particular has not primarily come from companies that allow developers to
spend some of their time coding on upstream. Sure, many Free Software
projects couldn’t survive without that component, but what really makes
GNU/Linux, or any Free Software project, truly special is that there’s a
community of users and developers who use, improve, and learn about the
software because it excites and interests them. LCA is one of the few
events specifically designed to invite that sort of person to attend, and
it has for almost an entire generation stood in stark contrast the highly
corporate, for-profit/trade-association events that slowly took over our community in the
years that followed LCA’s founding. (Remember all those years of LinuxWorld
Expo? I wasn’t even sad when IDG stopped running it!)
Speaking particularly of earlier this year, LCA 2016 in Geelong, Australia
was a particular profound event for me. LCA is one of the few events that
accepts my rather political talks about what’s happening in Open Source and
Free Software, so I gave a talk
on Friday
5 February 2016 entitled Copyleft For the Next Decade: A
Comprehensive Plan, which was recorded, so you can watch it,
or read the LWN article about
it. I do warn everyone that the jokes did not go over well (mine never
do), so after I finished, I was feeling a bit down that I hadn’t made the
talk entertaining enough. But then, something amazing happened: people
started walking up to me and telling me how important my message was. One
individual even came up and told me that he was excited enough that he’d like
to match
any donation that Software Freedom Conservancy received during LCA 2016.
Since it was the last day of the event, I quickly went to one of the
organizers, Kathy Reid, and asked
if they would announce this match during the closing ceremonies; she agreed.
In a matter of just an hour or two, I’d gone from believing my talk had
fallen flat to realizing that — regardless of whether I’d presented
well — the concepts I discussed had connected with people.
Then, I sat down in the closing session. I started to tear up slightly
when the
organizers announced the donation match. Within 90 seconds, though,
that turned to full tears of joy when the incoming President of Linux
Australia, Hugh Blemings, came on
stage and
said:
[I’ll start with] a Software Freedom Conservancy thing, as it turns out.
… I can tell that most of you weren’t at Bradley’s talk earlier on
today, but if there is one talk I’d encourage you to watch on the
playback later it would be that one. There’s a very very important
message in there and something to take away for all of us. On behalf of
the Council I’d like to announce … that we’re actually in the
process of making a significant donation from Linux Australia to Software
Freedom Conservancy as well. I urge all of you to consider contributing
individual as well, and there is much left for us to be done as a
community on that front.
I hope that this post helps organizers of events like LCA fully understand
how much something like this means to us who run a small charities —
and not just with regard to the financial contributions. Knowing that the
organizers of community events feel so strongly positive about our work
really keeps us going. We work hard and spend much time at Conservancy to
serve the Open Source and Free Software community, and knowing the work is
appreciated inspires us to keep working. Furthermore, we know that without
these events, it’s much tougher for us to reach others with our message of
software freedom. So, for us, the feeling is mutual: I’m delighted that
the Linux Australia and LCA folks feel so positively about Conservancy, and
I now look forward to another 15 hour flight for the next LCA.
And, on that note, I chose a strategic time to post this story. On Friday
5 August 2016, the CFP for LCA
2017 closes. So, now is the time for all of you to submit a talk. If
you regularly speak at Open Source and Free Software events, or have been
considering it, this event really needs to be on your calendar. I look
forward to seeing all of you Hobart this January.
Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don’t mean
that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that
phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning
Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a
evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom
Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend
at FOSDEM 2016, where he and
I co-organize
the Legal
and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues,
Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).
Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some
breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about
to do the crazy thing that he’d done in the reverse a few years before: I
was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact,
because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn’t
book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back
round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning
(local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as
afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife,
sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight
to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.
I crossed the Pacific ocean, the international dateline, left a day on
deposit to pickup on the way back, and after 24 hours of almost literally
chasing the sun, I arrived in Melbourne on the morning of Wednesday 3
February, road a shuttle bus, dumped my bags at my room, and arrived just
in time for
the Wednesday
afternoon tea break at LinuxConf Australia 2016 in Geelong.
Nearly everyone who heard this story — or saw me while it was
happening — asked me the same question: Why are you doing
this?. The five to six people packed in with me in my coach section on
the LAX→SYD leg are probably still asking this, because I had an
allergic attack of some sort most of the flight and couldn’t stop coughing,
even with two full bags of Fisherman’s Friends over those 15 hours.
But, nevertheless, I gave a simple answer to everyone who questioned my
crazy BRU→AMS→PDX→LAX→SYD→MEL itinerary: FOSDEM and LinuxConf AU are
two of the most important events on the Free Software annual calendar.
There’s just no question. I’ll write more about FOSDEM sometime soon, but
the rest of this post, I’ll dedicate to LinuxConf Australia (LCA).
One of my biggest regrets in Free Software is that I was once — and
you’ll be surprised by this given my story above — a bit squeamish
about the nearly 15 hour flight to get from the USA to Australia, and
therefore I didn’t attend LCA until 2015. LCA began way back in 1999.
Keep in mind that, other than FOSDEM, no major, community-organized events
have survived from that time. But LCA has the culture and mindset of the
kinds of conferences that our community made in 1999.
LCA is community organized and operated. Groups of volunteers
each year plan the event. In the tradition of science fiction conventions
and other hobbyist activities, groups bid for the conference and offer
their time and effort to make the conference a success. They have an
annual hand-off meeting to be sure the organization lessons are passed from
one committee to the next, and some volunteers even repeat their
involvement year after year. For organizational structure, they rely on a
non-profit organization, Linux
Australia, to assist with handling the funds and providing
infrastructure (just like Conservancy does for our member projects and
their conferences!).
I believe fully that the success of software freedom and GNU/Linux in
particular has not primarily come from companies that allow developers to
spend some of their time coding on upstream. Sure, many Free Software
projects couldn’t survive without that component, but what really makes
GNU/Linux, or any Free Software project, truly special is that there’s a
community of users and developers who use, improve, and learn about the
software because it excites and interests them. LCA is one of the few
events specifically designed to invite that sort of person to attend, and
it has for almost an entire generation stood in stark contrast the highly
corporate, for-profit/trade-association events that slowly took over our community in the
years that followed LCA’s founding. (Remember all those years of LinuxWorld
Expo? I wasn’t even sad when IDG stopped running it!)
Speaking particularly of earlier this year, LCA 2016 in Geelong, Australia
was a particular profound event for me. LCA is one of the few events that
accepts my rather political talks about what’s happening in Open Source and
Free Software, so I gave a talk
on Friday
5 February 2016 entitled Copyleft For the Next Decade: A
Comprehensive Plan, which was recorded, so you can watch it,
or read the LWN article about
it. I do warn everyone that the jokes did not go over well (mine never
do), so after I finished, I was feeling a bit down that I hadn’t made the
talk entertaining enough. But then, something amazing happened: people
started walking up to me and telling me how important my message was. One
individual even came up and told me that he was excited enough that he’d like
to match
any donation that Software Freedom Conservancy received during LCA 2016.
Since it was the last day of the event, I quickly went to one of the
organizers, Kathy Reid, and asked
if they would announce this match during the closing ceremonies; she agreed.
In a matter of just an hour or two, I’d gone from believing my talk had
fallen flat to realizing that — regardless of whether I’d presented
well — the concepts I discussed had connected with people.
Then, I sat down in the closing session. I started to tear up slightly
when the
organizers announced the donation match. Within 90 seconds, though,
that turned to full tears of joy when the incoming President of Linux
Australia, Hugh Blemings, came on
stage and
said:
[I’ll start with] a Software Freedom Conservancy thing, as it turns out.
… I can tell that most of you weren’t at Bradley’s talk earlier on
today, but if there is one talk I’d encourage you to watch on the
playback later it would be that one. There’s a very very important
message in there and something to take away for all of us. On behalf of
the Council I’d like to announce … that we’re actually in the
process of making a significant donation from Linux Australia to Software
Freedom Conservancy as well. I urge all of you to consider contributing
individual as well, and there is much left for us to be done as a
community on that front.
I hope that this post helps organizers of events like LCA fully understand
how much something like this means to us who run a small charities —
and not just with regard to the financial contributions. Knowing that the
organizers of community events feel so strongly positive about our work
really keeps us going. We work hard and spend much time at Conservancy to
serve the Open Source and Free Software community, and knowing the work is
appreciated inspires us to keep working. Furthermore, we know that without
these events, it’s much tougher for us to reach others with our message of
software freedom. So, for us, the feeling is mutual: I’m delighted that
the Linux Australia and LCA folks feel so positively about Conservancy, and
I now look forward to another 15 hour flight for the next LCA.
And, on that note, I chose a strategic time to post this story. On Friday
5 August 2016, the CFP for LCA
2017 closes. So, now is the time for all of you to submit a talk. If
you regularly speak at Open Source and Free Software events, or have been
considering it, this event really needs to be on your calendar. I look
forward to seeing all of you Hobart this January.
Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don’t mean
that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that
phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning
Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a
evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom
Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend
at FOSDEM 2016, where he and
I co-organize
the Legal
and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues,
Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).
Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some
breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about
to do the crazy thing that he’d done in the reverse a few years before: I
was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact,
because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn’t
book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back
round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning
(local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as
afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife,
sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight
to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.
I crossed the Pacific ocean, the international dateline, left a day on
deposit to pickup on the way back, and after 24 hours of almost literally
chasing the sun, I arrived in Melbourne on the morning of Wednesday 3
February, road a shuttle bus, dumped my bags at my room, and arrived just
in time for
the Wednesday
afternoon tea break at LinuxConf Australia 2016 in Geelong.
Nearly everyone who heard this story — or saw me while it was
happening — asked me the same question: Why are you doing
this?. The five to six people packed in with me in my coach section on
the LAX→SYD leg are probably still asking this, because I had an
allergic attack of some sort most of the flight and couldn’t stop coughing,
even with two full bags of Fisherman’s Friends over those 15 hours.
But, nevertheless, I gave a simple answer to everyone who questioned my
crazy BRU→AMS→PDX→LAX→SYD→MEL itinerary: FOSDEM and LinuxConf AU are
two of the most important events on the Free Software annual calendar.
There’s just no question. I’ll write more about FOSDEM sometime soon, but
the rest of this post, I’ll dedicate to LinuxConf Australia (LCA).
One of my biggest regrets in Free Software is that I was once — and
you’ll be surprised by this given my story above — a bit squeamish
about the nearly 15 hour flight to get from the USA to Australia, and
therefore I didn’t attend LCA until 2015. LCA began way back in 1999.
Keep in mind that, other than FOSDEM, no major, community-organized events
have survived from that time. But LCA has the culture and mindset of the
kinds of conferences that our community made in 1999.
LCA is community organized and operated. Groups of volunteers
each year plan the event. In the tradition of science fiction conventions
and other hobbyist activities, groups bid for the conference and offer
their time and effort to make the conference a success. They have an
annual hand-off meeting to be sure the organization lessons are passed from
one committee to the next, and some volunteers even repeat their
involvement year after year. For organizational structure, they rely on a
non-profit organization, Linux
Australia, to assist with handling the funds and providing
infrastructure (just like Conservancy does for our member projects and
their conferences!).
I believe fully that the success of software freedom and GNU/Linux in
particular has not primarily come from companies that allow developers to
spend some of their time coding on upstream. Sure, many Free Software
projects couldn’t survive without that component, but what really makes
GNU/Linux, or any Free Software project, truly special is that there’s a
community of users and developers who use, improve, and learn about the
software because it excites and interests them. LCA is one of the few
events specifically designed to invite that sort of person to attend, and
it has for almost an entire generation stood in stark contrast the highly
corporate, for-profit/trade-association events that slowly took over our community in the
years that followed LCA’s founding. (Remember all those years of LinuxWorld
Expo? I wasn’t even sad when IDG stopped running it!)
Speaking particularly of earlier this year, LCA 2016 in Geelong, Australia
was a particular profound event for me. LCA is one of the few events that
accepts my rather political talks about what’s happening in Open Source and
Free Software, so I gave a talk
on Friday
5 February 2016 entitled Copyleft For the Next Decade: A
Comprehensive Plan, which was recorded, so you can watch it,
or read the LWN article about
it. I do warn everyone that the jokes did not go over well (mine never
do), so after I finished, I was feeling a bit down that I hadn’t made the
talk entertaining enough. But then, something amazing happened: people
started walking up to me and telling me how important my message was. One
individual even came up and told me that he was excited enough that he’d like
to match
any donation that Software Freedom Conservancy received during LCA 2016.
Since it was the last day of the event, I quickly went to one of the
organizers, Kathy Reid, and asked
if they would announce this match during the closing ceremonies; she agreed.
In a matter of just an hour or two, I’d gone from believing my talk had
fallen flat to realizing that — regardless of whether I’d presented
well — the concepts I discussed had connected with people.
Then, I sat down in the closing session. I started to tear up slightly
when the
organizers announced the donation match. Within 90 seconds, though,
that turned to full tears of joy when the incoming President of Linux
Australia, Hugh Blemings, came on
stage and
said:
[I’ll start with] a Software Freedom Conservancy thing, as it turns out.
… I can tell that most of you weren’t at Bradley’s talk earlier on
today, but if there is one talk I’d encourage you to watch on the
playback later it would be that one. There’s a very very important
message in there and something to take away for all of us. On behalf of
the Council I’d like to announce … that we’re actually in the
process of making a significant donation from Linux Australia to Software
Freedom Conservancy as well. I urge all of you to consider contributing
individual as well, and there is much left for us to be done as a
community on that front.
I hope that this post helps organizers of events like LCA fully understand
how much something like this means to us who run a small charities —
and not just with regard to the financial contributions. Knowing that the
organizers of community events feel so strongly positive about our work
really keeps us going. We work hard and spend much time at Conservancy to
serve the Open Source and Free Software community, and knowing the work is
appreciated inspires us to keep working. Furthermore, we know that without
these events, it’s much tougher for us to reach others with our message of
software freedom. So, for us, the feeling is mutual: I’m delighted that
the Linux Australia and LCA folks feel so positively about Conservancy, and
I now look forward to another 15 hour flight for the next LCA.
And, on that note, I chose a strategic time to post this story. On Friday
5 August 2016, the CFP for LCA
2017 closes. So, now is the time for all of you to submit a talk. If
you regularly speak at Open Source and Free Software events, or have been
considering it, this event really needs to be on your calendar. I look
forward to seeing all of you Hobart this January.
Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don’t mean
that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that
phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning
Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a
evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom
Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend
at FOSDEM 2016, where he and
I co-organize
the Legal
and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues,
Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).
Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some
breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about
to do the crazy thing that he’d done in the reverse a few years before: I
was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact,
because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn’t
book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back
round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning
(local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as
afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife,
sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight
to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.
I crossed the Pacific ocean, the international dateline, left a day on
deposit to pickup on the way back, and after 24 hours of almost literally
chasing the sun, I arrived in Melbourne on the morning of Wednesday 3
February, road a shuttle bus, dumped my bags at my room, and arrived just
in time for
the Wednesday
afternoon tea break at LinuxConf Australia 2016 in Geelong.
Nearly everyone who heard this story — or saw me while it was
happening — asked me the same question: Why are you doing
this?. The five to six people packed in with me in my coach section on
the LAX→SYD leg are probably still asking this, because I had an
allergic attack of some sort most of the flight and couldn’t stop coughing,
even with two full bags of Fisherman’s Friends over those 15 hours.
But, nevertheless, I gave a simple answer to everyone who questioned my
crazy BRU→AMS→PDX→LAX→SYD→MEL itinerary: FOSDEM and LinuxConf AU are
two of the most important events on the Free Software annual calendar.
There’s just no question. I’ll write more about FOSDEM sometime soon, but
the rest of this post, I’ll dedicate to LinuxConf Australia (LCA).
One of my biggest regrets in Free Software is that I was once — and
you’ll be surprised by this given my story above — a bit squeamish
about the nearly 15 hour flight to get from the USA to Australia, and
therefore I didn’t attend LCA until 2015. LCA began way back in 1999.
Keep in mind that, other than FOSDEM, no major, community-organized events
have survived from that time. But LCA has the culture and mindset of the
kinds of conferences that our community made in 1999.
LCA is community organized and operated. Groups of volunteers
each year plan the event. In the tradition of science fiction conventions
and other hobbyist activities, groups bid for the conference and offer
their time and effort to make the conference a success. They have an
annual hand-off meeting to be sure the organization lessons are passed from
one committee to the next, and some volunteers even repeat their
involvement year after year. For organizational structure, they rely on a
non-profit organization, Linux
Australia, to assist with handling the funds and providing
infrastructure (just like Conservancy does for our member projects and
their conferences!).
I believe fully that the success of software freedom and GNU/Linux in
particular has not primarily come from companies that allow developers to
spend some of their time coding on upstream. Sure, many Free Software
projects couldn’t survive without that component, but what really makes
GNU/Linux, or any Free Software project, truly special is that there’s a
community of users and developers who use, improve, and learn about the
software because it excites and interests them. LCA is one of the few
events specifically designed to invite that sort of person to attend, and
it has for almost an entire generation stood in stark contrast the highly
corporate, for-profit/trade-association events that slowly took over our community in the
years that followed LCA’s founding. (Remember all those years of LinuxWorld
Expo? I wasn’t even sad when IDG stopped running it!)
Speaking particularly of earlier this year, LCA 2016 in Geelong, Australia
was a particular profound event for me. LCA is one of the few events that
accepts my rather political talks about what’s happening in Open Source and
Free Software, so I gave a talk
on Friday
5 February 2016 entitled Copyleft For the Next Decade: A
Comprehensive Plan, which was recorded, so you can watch it,
or read the LWN article about
it. I do warn everyone that the jokes did not go over well (mine never
do), so after I finished, I was feeling a bit down that I hadn’t made the
talk entertaining enough. But then, something amazing happened: people
started walking up to me and telling me how important my message was. One
individual even came up and told me that he was excited enough that he’d like
to match
any donation that Software Freedom Conservancy received during LCA 2016.
Since it was the last day of the event, I quickly went to one of the
organizers, Kathy Reid, and asked
if they would announce this match during the closing ceremonies; she agreed.
In a matter of just an hour or two, I’d gone from believing my talk had
fallen flat to realizing that — regardless of whether I’d presented
well — the concepts I discussed had connected with people.
Then, I sat down in the closing session. I started to tear up slightly
when the
organizers announced the donation match. Within 90 seconds, though,
that turned to full tears of joy when the incoming President of Linux
Australia, Hugh Blemings, came on
stage and
said:
[I’ll start with] a Software Freedom Conservancy thing, as it turns out.
… I can tell that most of you weren’t at Bradley’s talk earlier on
today, but if there is one talk I’d encourage you to watch on the
playback later it would be that one. There’s a very very important
message in there and something to take away for all of us. On behalf of
the Council I’d like to announce … that we’re actually in the
process of making a significant donation from Linux Australia to Software
Freedom Conservancy as well. I urge all of you to consider contributing
individual as well, and there is much left for us to be done as a
community on that front.
I hope that this post helps organizers of events like LCA fully understand
how much something like this means to us who run a small charities —
and not just with regard to the financial contributions. Knowing that the
organizers of community events feel so strongly positive about our work
really keeps us going. We work hard and spend much time at Conservancy to
serve the Open Source and Free Software community, and knowing the work is
appreciated inspires us to keep working. Furthermore, we know that without
these events, it’s much tougher for us to reach others with our message of
software freedom. So, for us, the feeling is mutual: I’m delighted that
the Linux Australia and LCA folks feel so positively about Conservancy, and
I now look forward to another 15 hour flight for the next LCA.
And, on that note, I chose a strategic time to post this story. On Friday
5 August 2016, the CFP for LCA
2017 closes. So, now is the time for all of you to submit a talk. If
you regularly speak at Open Source and Free Software events, or have been
considering it, this event really needs to be on your calendar. I look
forward to seeing all of you Hobart this January.
Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don’t mean
that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that
phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning
Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a
evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom
Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend
at FOSDEM 2016, where he and
I co-organize
the Legal
and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues,
Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).
Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some
breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about
to do the crazy thing that he’d done in the reverse a few years before: I
was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact,
because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn’t
book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back
round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning
(local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as
afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife,
sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight
to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.
I crossed the Pacific ocean, the international dateline, left a day on
deposit to pickup on the way back, and after 24 hours of almost literally
chasing the sun, I arrived in Melbourne on the morning of Wednesday 3
February, road a shuttle bus, dumped my bags at my room, and arrived just
in time for
the Wednesday
afternoon tea break at LinuxConf Australia 2016 in Geelong.
Nearly everyone who heard this story — or saw me while it was
happening — asked me the same question: Why are you doing
this?. The five to six people packed in with me in my coach section on
the LAX→SYD leg are probably still asking this, because I had an
allergic attack of some sort most of the flight and couldn’t stop coughing,
even with two full bags of Fisherman’s Friends over those 15 hours.
But, nevertheless, I gave a simple answer to everyone who questioned my
crazy BRU→AMS→PDX→LAX→SYD→MEL itinerary: FOSDEM and LinuxConf AU are
two of the most important events on the Free Software annual calendar.
There’s just no question. I’ll write more about FOSDEM sometime soon, but
the rest of this post, I’ll dedicate to LinuxConf Australia (LCA).
One of my biggest regrets in Free Software is that I was once — and
you’ll be surprised by this given my story above — a bit squeamish
about the nearly 15 hour flight to get from the USA to Australia, and
therefore I didn’t attend LCA until 2015. LCA began way back in 1999.
Keep in mind that, other than FOSDEM, no major, community-organized events
have survived from that time. But LCA has the culture and mindset of the
kinds of conferences that our community made in 1999.
LCA is community organized and operated. Groups of volunteers
each year plan the event. In the tradition of science fiction conventions
and other hobbyist activities, groups bid for the conference and offer
their time and effort to make the conference a success. They have an
annual hand-off meeting to be sure the organization lessons are passed from
one committee to the next, and some volunteers even repeat their
involvement year after year. For organizational structure, they rely on a
non-profit organization, Linux
Australia, to assist with handling the funds and providing
infrastructure (just like Conservancy does for our member projects and
their conferences!).
I believe fully that the success of software freedom and GNU/Linux in
particular has not primarily come from companies that allow developers to
spend some of their time coding on upstream. Sure, many Free Software
projects couldn’t survive without that component, but what really makes
GNU/Linux, or any Free Software project, truly special is that there’s a
community of users and developers who use, improve, and learn about the
software because it excites and interests them. LCA is one of the few
events specifically designed to invite that sort of person to attend, and
it has for almost an entire generation stood in stark contrast the highly
corporate, for-profit/trade-association events that slowly took over our community in the
years that followed LCA’s founding. (Remember all those years of LinuxWorld
Expo? I wasn’t even sad when IDG stopped running it!)
Speaking particularly of earlier this year, LCA 2016 in Geelong, Australia
was a particular profound event for me. LCA is one of the few events that
accepts my rather political talks about what’s happening in Open Source and
Free Software, so I gave a talk
on Friday
5 February 2016 entitled Copyleft For the Next Decade: A
Comprehensive Plan, which was recorded, so you can watch it,
or read the LWN article about
it. I do warn everyone that the jokes did not go over well (mine never
do), so after I finished, I was feeling a bit down that I hadn’t made the
talk entertaining enough. But then, something amazing happened: people
started walking up to me and telling me how important my message was. One
individual even came up and told me that he was excited enough that he’d like
to match
any donation that Software Freedom Conservancy received during LCA 2016.
Since it was the last day of the event, I quickly went to one of the
organizers, Kathy Reid, and asked
if they would announce this match during the closing ceremonies; she agreed.
In a matter of just an hour or two, I’d gone from believing my talk had
fallen flat to realizing that — regardless of whether I’d presented
well — the concepts I discussed had connected with people.
Then, I sat down in the closing session. I started to tear up slightly
when the
organizers announced the donation match. Within 90 seconds, though,
that turned to full tears of joy when the incoming President of Linux
Australia, Hugh Blemings, came on
stage and
said:
[I’ll start with] a Software Freedom Conservancy thing, as it turns out.
… I can tell that most of you weren’t at Bradley’s talk earlier on
today, but if there is one talk I’d encourage you to watch on the
playback later it would be that one. There’s a very very important
message in there and something to take away for all of us. On behalf of
the Council I’d like to announce … that we’re actually in the
process of making a significant donation from Linux Australia to Software
Freedom Conservancy as well. I urge all of you to consider contributing
individual as well, and there is much left for us to be done as a
community on that front.
I hope that this post helps organizers of events like LCA fully understand
how much something like this means to us who run a small charities —
and not just with regard to the financial contributions. Knowing that the
organizers of community events feel so strongly positive about our work
really keeps us going. We work hard and spend much time at Conservancy to
serve the Open Source and Free Software community, and knowing the work is
appreciated inspires us to keep working. Furthermore, we know that without
these events, it’s much tougher for us to reach others with our message of
software freedom. So, for us, the feeling is mutual: I’m delighted that
the Linux Australia and LCA folks feel so positively about Conservancy, and
I now look forward to another 15 hour flight for the next LCA.
And, on that note, I chose a strategic time to post this story. On Friday
5 August 2016, the CFP for LCA
2017 closes. So, now is the time for all of you to submit a talk. If
you regularly speak at Open Source and Free Software events, or have been
considering it, this event really needs to be on your calendar. I look
forward to seeing all of you Hobart this January.
Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don’t mean
that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that
phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning
Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a
evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom
Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend
at FOSDEM 2016, where he and
I co-organize
the Legal
and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues,
Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).
Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some
breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about
to do the crazy thing that he’d done in the reverse a few years before: I
was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact,
because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn’t
book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back
round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning
(local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as
afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife,
sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight
to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.
I crossed the Pacific ocean, the international dateline, left a day on
deposit to pickup on the way back, and after 24 hours of almost literally
chasing the sun, I arrived in Melbourne on the morning of Wednesday 3
February, road a shuttle bus, dumped my bags at my room, and arrived just
in time for
the Wednesday
afternoon tea break at LinuxConf Australia 2016 in Geelong.
Nearly everyone who heard this story — or saw me while it was
happening — asked me the same question: Why are you doing
this?. The five to six people packed in with me in my coach section on
the LAX→SYD leg are probably still asking this, because I had an
allergic attack of some sort most of the flight and couldn’t stop coughing,
even with two full bags of Fisherman’s Friends over those 15 hours.
But, nevertheless, I gave a simple answer to everyone who questioned my
crazy BRU→AMS→PDX→LAX→SYD→MEL itinerary: FOSDEM and LinuxConf AU are
two of the most important events on the Free Software annual calendar.
There’s just no question. I’ll write more about FOSDEM sometime soon, but
the rest of this post, I’ll dedicate to LinuxConf Australia (LCA).
One of my biggest regrets in Free Software is that I was once — and
you’ll be surprised by this given my story above — a bit squeamish
about the nearly 15 hour flight to get from the USA to Australia, and
therefore I didn’t attend LCA until 2015. LCA began way back in 1999.
Keep in mind that, other than FOSDEM, no major, community-organized events
have survived from that time. But LCA has the culture and mindset of the
kinds of conferences that our community made in 1999.
LCA is community organized and operated. Groups of volunteers
each year plan the event. In the tradition of science fiction conventions
and other hobbyist activities, groups bid for the conference and offer
their time and effort to make the conference a success. They have an
annual hand-off meeting to be sure the organization lessons are passed from
one committee to the next, and some volunteers even repeat their
involvement year after year. For organizational structure, they rely on a
non-profit organization, Linux
Australia, to assist with handling the funds and providing
infrastructure (just like Conservancy does for our member projects and
their conferences!).
I believe fully that the success of software freedom and GNU/Linux in
particular has not primarily come from companies that allow developers to
spend some of their time coding on upstream. Sure, many Free Software
projects couldn’t survive without that component, but what really makes
GNU/Linux, or any Free Software project, truly special is that there’s a
community of users and developers who use, improve, and learn about the
software because it excites and interests them. LCA is one of the few
events specifically designed to invite that sort of person to attend, and
it has for almost an entire generation stood in stark contrast the highly
corporate, for-profit/trade-association events that slowly took over our community in the
years that followed LCA’s founding. (Remember all those years of LinuxWorld
Expo? I wasn’t even sad when IDG stopped running it!)
Speaking particularly of earlier this year, LCA 2016 in Geelong, Australia
was a particular profound event for me. LCA is one of the few events that
accepts my rather political talks about what’s happening in Open Source and
Free Software, so I gave a talk
on Friday
5 February 2016 entitled Copyleft For the Next Decade: A
Comprehensive Plan, which was recorded, so you can watch it,
or read the LWN article about
it. I do warn everyone that the jokes did not go over well (mine never
do), so after I finished, I was feeling a bit down that I hadn’t made the
talk entertaining enough. But then, something amazing happened: people
started walking up to me and telling me how important my message was. One
individual even came up and told me that he was excited enough that he’d like
to match
any donation that Software Freedom Conservancy received during LCA 2016.
Since it was the last day of the event, I quickly went to one of the
organizers, Kathy Reid, and asked
if they would announce this match during the closing ceremonies; she agreed.
In a matter of just an hour or two, I’d gone from believing my talk had
fallen flat to realizing that — regardless of whether I’d presented
well — the concepts I discussed had connected with people.
Then, I sat down in the closing session. I started to tear up slightly
when the
organizers announced the donation match. Within 90 seconds, though,
that turned to full tears of joy when the incoming President of Linux
Australia, Hugh Blemings, came on
stage and
said:
[I’ll start with] a Software Freedom Conservancy thing, as it turns out.
… I can tell that most of you weren’t at Bradley’s talk earlier on
today, but if there is one talk I’d encourage you to watch on the
playback later it would be that one. There’s a very very important
message in there and something to take away for all of us. On behalf of
the Council I’d like to announce … that we’re actually in the
process of making a significant donation from Linux Australia to Software
Freedom Conservancy as well. I urge all of you to consider contributing
individual as well, and there is much left for us to be done as a
community on that front.
I hope that this post helps organizers of events like LCA fully understand
how much something like this means to us who run a small charities —
and not just with regard to the financial contributions. Knowing that the
organizers of community events feel so strongly positive about our work
really keeps us going. We work hard and spend much time at Conservancy to
serve the Open Source and Free Software community, and knowing the work is
appreciated inspires us to keep working. Furthermore, we know that without
these events, it’s much tougher for us to reach others with our message of
software freedom. So, for us, the feeling is mutual: I’m delighted that
the Linux Australia and LCA folks feel so positively about Conservancy, and
I now look forward to another 15 hour flight for the next LCA.
And, on that note, I chose a strategic time to post this story. On Friday
5 August 2016, the CFP for LCA
2017 closes. So, now is the time for all of you to submit a talk. If
you regularly speak at Open Source and Free Software events, or have been
considering it, this event really needs to be on your calendar. I look
forward to seeing all of you Hobart this January.
Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don’t mean
that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that
phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning
Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a
evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom
Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend
at FOSDEM 2016, where he and
I co-organize
the Legal
and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues,
Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).
Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some
breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about
to do the crazy thing that he’d done in the reverse a few years before: I
was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact,
because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn’t
book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back
round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning
(local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as
afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife,
sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight
to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.
I crossed the Pacific ocean, the international dateline, left a day on
deposit to pickup on the way back, and after 24 hours of almost literally
chasing the sun, I arrived in Melbourne on the morning of Wednesday 3
February, road a shuttle bus, dumped my bags at my room, and arrived just
in time for
the Wednesday
afternoon tea break at LinuxConf Australia 2016 in Geelong.
Nearly everyone who heard this story — or saw me while it was
happening — asked me the same question: Why are you doing
this?. The five to six people packed in with me in my coach section on
the LAX→SYD leg are probably still asking this, because I had an
allergic attack of some sort most of the flight and couldn’t stop coughing,
even with two full bags of Fisherman’s Friends over those 15 hours.
But, nevertheless, I gave a simple answer to everyone who questioned my
crazy BRU→AMS→PDX→LAX→SYD→MEL itinerary: FOSDEM and LinuxConf AU are
two of the most important events on the Free Software annual calendar.
There’s just no question. I’ll write more about FOSDEM sometime soon, but
the rest of this post, I’ll dedicate to LinuxConf Australia (LCA).
One of my biggest regrets in Free Software is that I was once — and
you’ll be surprised by this given my story above — a bit squeamish
about the nearly 15 hour flight to get from the USA to Australia, and
therefore I didn’t attend LCA until 2015. LCA began way back in 1999.
Keep in mind that, other than FOSDEM, no major, community-organized events
have survived from that time. But LCA has the culture and mindset of the
kinds of conferences that our community made in 1999.
LCA is community organized and operated. Groups of volunteers
each year plan the event. In the tradition of science fiction conventions
and other hobbyist activities, groups bid for the conference and offer
their time and effort to make the conference a success. They have an
annual hand-off meeting to be sure the organization lessons are passed from
one committee to the next, and some volunteers even repeat their
involvement year after year. For organizational structure, they rely on a
non-profit organization, Linux
Australia, to assist with handling the funds and providing
infrastructure (just like Conservancy does for our member projects and
their conferences!).
I believe fully that the success of software freedom and GNU/Linux in
particular has not primarily come from companies that allow developers to
spend some of their time coding on upstream. Sure, many Free Software
projects couldn’t survive without that component, but what really makes
GNU/Linux, or any Free Software project, truly special is that there’s a
community of users and developers who use, improve, and learn about the
software because it excites and interests them. LCA is one of the few
events specifically designed to invite that sort of person to attend, and
it has for almost an entire generation stood in stark contrast the highly
corporate, for-profit/trade-association events that slowly took over our community in the
years that followed LCA’s founding. (Remember all those years of LinuxWorld
Expo? I wasn’t even sad when IDG stopped running it!)
Speaking particularly of earlier this year, LCA 2016 in Geelong, Australia
was a particular profound event for me. LCA is one of the few events that
accepts my rather political talks about what’s happening in Open Source and
Free Software, so I gave a talk
on Friday
5 February 2016 entitled Copyleft For the Next Decade: A
Comprehensive Plan, which was recorded, so you can watch it,
or read the LWN article about
it. I do warn everyone that the jokes did not go over well (mine never
do), so after I finished, I was feeling a bit down that I hadn’t made the
talk entertaining enough. But then, something amazing happened: people
started walking up to me and telling me how important my message was. One
individual even came up and told me that he was excited enough that he’d like
to match
any donation that Software Freedom Conservancy received during LCA 2016.
Since it was the last day of the event, I quickly went to one of the
organizers, Kathy Reid, and asked
if they would announce this match during the closing ceremonies; she agreed.
In a matter of just an hour or two, I’d gone from believing my talk had
fallen flat to realizing that — regardless of whether I’d presented
well — the concepts I discussed had connected with people.
Then, I sat down in the closing session. I started to tear up slightly
when the
organizers announced the donation match. Within 90 seconds, though,
that turned to full tears of joy when the incoming President of Linux
Australia, Hugh Blemings, came on
stage and
said:
[I’ll start with] a Software Freedom Conservancy thing, as it turns out.
… I can tell that most of you weren’t at Bradley’s talk earlier on
today, but if there is one talk I’d encourage you to watch on the
playback later it would be that one. There’s a very very important
message in there and something to take away for all of us. On behalf of
the Council I’d like to announce … that we’re actually in the
process of making a significant donation from Linux Australia to Software
Freedom Conservancy as well. I urge all of you to consider contributing
individual as well, and there is much left for us to be done as a
community on that front.
I hope that this post helps organizers of events like LCA fully understand
how much something like this means to us who run a small charities —
and not just with regard to the financial contributions. Knowing that the
organizers of community events feel so strongly positive about our work
really keeps us going. We work hard and spend much time at Conservancy to
serve the Open Source and Free Software community, and knowing the work is
appreciated inspires us to keep working. Furthermore, we know that without
these events, it’s much tougher for us to reach others with our message of
software freedom. So, for us, the feeling is mutual: I’m delighted that
the Linux Australia and LCA folks feel so positively about Conservancy, and
I now look forward to another 15 hour flight for the next LCA.
And, on that note, I chose a strategic time to post this story. On Friday
5 August 2016, the CFP for LCA
2017 closes. So, now is the time for all of you to submit a talk. If
you regularly speak at Open Source and Free Software events, or have been
considering it, this event really needs to be on your calendar. I look
forward to seeing all of you Hobart this January.
Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don’t mean
that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that
phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning
Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a
evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom
Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend
at FOSDEM 2016, where he and
I co-organize
the Legal
and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues,
Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).
Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some
breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about
to do the crazy thing that he’d done in the reverse a few years before: I
was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact,
because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn’t
book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back
round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning
(local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as
afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife,
sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight
to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.
I crossed the Pacific ocean, the international dateline, left a day on
deposit to pickup on the way back, and after 24 hours of almost literally
chasing the sun, I arrived in Melbourne on the morning of Wednesday 3
February, road a shuttle bus, dumped my bags at my room, and arrived just
in time for
the Wednesday
afternoon tea break at LinuxConf Australia 2016 in Geelong.
Nearly everyone who heard this story — or saw me while it was
happening — asked me the same question: Why are you doing
this?. The five to six people packed in with me in my coach section on
the LAX→SYD leg are probably still asking this, because I had an
allergic attack of some sort most of the flight and couldn’t stop coughing,
even with two full bags of Fisherman’s Friends over those 15 hours.
But, nevertheless, I gave a simple answer to everyone who questioned my
crazy BRU→AMS→PDX→LAX→SYD→MEL itinerary: FOSDEM and LinuxConf AU are
two of the most important events on the Free Software annual calendar.
There’s just no question. I’ll write more about FOSDEM sometime soon, but
the rest of this post, I’ll dedicate to LinuxConf Australia (LCA).
One of my biggest regrets in Free Software is that I was once — and
you’ll be surprised by this given my story above — a bit squeamish
about the nearly 15 hour flight to get from the USA to Australia, and
therefore I didn’t attend LCA until 2015. LCA began way back in 1999.
Keep in mind that, other than FOSDEM, no major, community-organized events
have survived from that time. But LCA has the culture and mindset of the
kinds of conferences that our community made in 1999.
LCA is community organized and operated. Groups of volunteers
each year plan the event. In the tradition of science fiction conventions
and other hobbyist activities, groups bid for the conference and offer
their time and effort to make the conference a success. They have an
annual hand-off meeting to be sure the organization lessons are passed from
one committee to the next, and some volunteers even repeat their
involvement year after year. For organizational structure, they rely on a
non-profit organization, Linux
Australia, to assist with handling the funds and providing
infrastructure (just like Conservancy does for our member projects and
their conferences!).
I believe fully that the success of software freedom and GNU/Linux in
particular has not primarily come from companies that allow developers to
spend some of their time coding on upstream. Sure, many Free Software
projects couldn’t survive without that component, but what really makes
GNU/Linux, or any Free Software project, truly special is that there’s a
community of users and developers who use, improve, and learn about the
software because it excites and interests them. LCA is one of the few
events specifically designed to invite that sort of person to attend, and
it has for almost an entire generation stood in stark contrast the highly
corporate, for-profit/trade-association events that slowly took over our community in the
years that followed LCA’s founding. (Remember all those years of LinuxWorld
Expo? I wasn’t even sad when IDG stopped running it!)
Speaking particularly of earlier this year, LCA 2016 in Geelong, Australia
was a particular profound event for me. LCA is one of the few events that
accepts my rather political talks about what’s happening in Open Source and
Free Software, so I gave a talk
on Friday
5 February 2016 entitled Copyleft For the Next Decade: A
Comprehensive Plan, which was recorded, so you can watch it,
or read the LWN article about
it. I do warn everyone that the jokes did not go over well (mine never
do), so after I finished, I was feeling a bit down that I hadn’t made the
talk entertaining enough. But then, something amazing happened: people
started walking up to me and telling me how important my message was. One
individual even came up and told me that he was excited enough that he’d like
to match
any donation that Software Freedom Conservancy received during LCA 2016.
Since it was the last day of the event, I quickly went to one of the
organizers, Kathy Reid, and asked
if they would announce this match during the closing ceremonies; she agreed.
In a matter of just an hour or two, I’d gone from believing my talk had
fallen flat to realizing that — regardless of whether I’d presented
well — the concepts I discussed had connected with people.
Then, I sat down in the closing session. I started to tear up slightly
when the
organizers announced the donation match. Within 90 seconds, though,
that turned to full tears of joy when the incoming President of Linux
Australia, Hugh Blemings, came on
stage and
said:
[I’ll start with] a Software Freedom Conservancy thing, as it turns out.
… I can tell that most of you weren’t at Bradley’s talk earlier on
today, but if there is one talk I’d encourage you to watch on the
playback later it would be that one. There’s a very very important
message in there and something to take away for all of us. On behalf of
the Council I’d like to announce … that we’re actually in the
process of making a significant donation from Linux Australia to Software
Freedom Conservancy as well. I urge all of you to consider contributing
individual as well, and there is much left for us to be done as a
community on that front.
I hope that this post helps organizers of events like LCA fully understand
how much something like this means to us who run a small charities —
and not just with regard to the financial contributions. Knowing that the
organizers of community events feel so strongly positive about our work
really keeps us going. We work hard and spend much time at Conservancy to
serve the Open Source and Free Software community, and knowing the work is
appreciated inspires us to keep working. Furthermore, we know that without
these events, it’s much tougher for us to reach others with our message of
software freedom. So, for us, the feeling is mutual: I’m delighted that
the Linux Australia and LCA folks feel so positively about Conservancy, and
I now look forward to another 15 hour flight for the next LCA.
And, on that note, I chose a strategic time to post this story. On Friday
5 August 2016, the CFP for LCA
2017 closes. So, now is the time for all of you to submit a talk. If
you regularly speak at Open Source and Free Software events, or have been
considering it, this event really needs to be on your calendar. I look
forward to seeing all of you Hobart this January.
Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don’t mean
that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that
phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning
Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a
evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom
Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend
at FOSDEM 2016, where he and
I co-organize
the Legal
and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues,
Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).
Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some
breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about
to do the crazy thing that he’d done in the reverse a few years before: I
was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact,
because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn’t
book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back
round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning
(local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as
afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife,
sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight
to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.
I crossed the Pacific ocean, the international dateline, left a day on
deposit to pickup on the way back, and after 24 hours of almost literally
chasing the sun, I arrived in Melbourne on the morning of Wednesday 3
February, road a shuttle bus, dumped my bags at my room, and arrived just
in time for
the Wednesday
afternoon tea break at LinuxConf Australia 2016 in Geelong.
Nearly everyone who heard this story — or saw me while it was
happening — asked me the same question: Why are you doing
this?. The five to six people packed in with me in my coach section on
the LAX→SYD leg are probably still asking this, because I had an
allergic attack of some sort most of the flight and couldn’t stop coughing,
even with two full bags of Fisherman’s Friends over those 15 hours.
But, nevertheless, I gave a simple answer to everyone who questioned my
crazy BRU→AMS→PDX→LAX→SYD→MEL itinerary: FOSDEM and LinuxConf AU are
two of the most important events on the Free Software annual calendar.
There’s just no question. I’ll write more about FOSDEM sometime soon, but
the rest of this post, I’ll dedicate to LinuxConf Australia (LCA).
One of my biggest regrets in Free Software is that I was once — and
you’ll be surprised by this given my story above — a bit squeamish
about the nearly 15 hour flight to get from the USA to Australia, and
therefore I didn’t attend LCA until 2015. LCA began way back in 1999.
Keep in mind that, other than FOSDEM, no major, community-organized events
have survived from that time. But LCA has the culture and mindset of the
kinds of conferences that our community made in 1999.
LCA is community organized and operated. Groups of volunteers
each year plan the event. In the tradition of science fiction conventions
and other hobbyist activities, groups bid for the conference and offer
their time and effort to make the conference a success. They have an
annual hand-off meeting to be sure the organization lessons are passed from
one committee to the next, and some volunteers even repeat their
involvement year after year. For organizational structure, they rely on a
non-profit organization, Linux
Australia, to assist with handling the funds and providing
infrastructure (just like Conservancy does for our member projects and
their conferences!).
I believe fully that the success of software freedom and GNU/Linux in
particular has not primarily come from companies that allow developers to
spend some of their time coding on upstream. Sure, many Free Software
projects couldn’t survive without that component, but what really makes
GNU/Linux, or any Free Software project, truly special is that there’s a
community of users and developers who use, improve, and learn about the
software because it excites and interests them. LCA is one of the few
events specifically designed to invite that sort of person to attend, and
it has for almost an entire generation stood in stark contrast the highly
corporate, for-profit/trade-association events that slowly took over our community in the
years that followed LCA’s founding. (Remember all those years of LinuxWorld
Expo? I wasn’t even sad when IDG stopped running it!)
Speaking particularly of earlier this year, LCA 2016 in Geelong, Australia
was a particular profound event for me. LCA is one of the few events that
accepts my rather political talks about what’s happening in Open Source and
Free Software, so I gave a talk
on Friday
5 February 2016 entitled Copyleft For the Next Decade: A
Comprehensive Plan, which was recorded, so you can watch it,
or read the LWN article about
it. I do warn everyone that the jokes did not go over well (mine never
do), so after I finished, I was feeling a bit down that I hadn’t made the
talk entertaining enough. But then, something amazing happened: people
started walking up to me and telling me how important my message was. One
individual even came up and told me that he was excited enough that he’d like
to match
any donation that Software Freedom Conservancy received during LCA 2016.
Since it was the last day of the event, I quickly went to one of the
organizers, Kathy Reid, and asked
if they would announce this match during the closing ceremonies; she agreed.
In a matter of just an hour or two, I’d gone from believing my talk had
fallen flat to realizing that — regardless of whether I’d presented
well — the concepts I discussed had connected with people.
Then, I sat down in the closing session. I started to tear up slightly
when the
organizers announced the donation match. Within 90 seconds, though,
that turned to full tears of joy when the incoming President of Linux
Australia, Hugh Blemings, came on
stage and
said:
[I’ll start with] a Software Freedom Conservancy thing, as it turns out.
… I can tell that most of you weren’t at Bradley’s talk earlier on
today, but if there is one talk I’d encourage you to watch on the
playback later it would be that one. There’s a very very important
message in there and something to take away for all of us. On behalf of
the Council I’d like to announce … that we’re actually in the
process of making a significant donation from Linux Australia to Software
Freedom Conservancy as well. I urge all of you to consider contributing
individual as well, and there is much left for us to be done as a
community on that front.
I hope that this post helps organizers of events like LCA fully understand
how much something like this means to us who run a small charities —
and not just with regard to the financial contributions. Knowing that the
organizers of community events feel so strongly positive about our work
really keeps us going. We work hard and spend much time at Conservancy to
serve the Open Source and Free Software community, and knowing the work is
appreciated inspires us to keep working. Furthermore, we know that without
these events, it’s much tougher for us to reach others with our message of
software freedom. So, for us, the feeling is mutual: I’m delighted that
the Linux Australia and LCA folks feel so positively about Conservancy, and
I now look forward to another 15 hour flight for the next LCA.
And, on that note, I chose a strategic time to post this story. On Friday
5 August 2016, the CFP for LCA
2017 closes. So, now is the time for all of you to submit a talk. If
you regularly speak at Open Source and Free Software events, or have been
considering it, this event really needs to be on your calendar. I look
forward to seeing all of you Hobart this January.
Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don’t mean
that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that
phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning
Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a
evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom
Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend
at FOSDEM 2016, where he and
I co-organize
the Legal
and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues,
Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).
Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some
breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about
to do the crazy thing that he’d done in the reverse a few years before: I
was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact,
because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn’t
book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back
round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning
(local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as
afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife,
sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight
to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.
I crossed the Pacific ocean, the international dateline, left a day on
deposit to pickup on the way back, and after 24 hours of almost literally
chasing the sun, I arrived in Melbourne on the morning of Wednesday 3
February, road a shuttle bus, dumped my bags at my room, and arrived just
in time for
the Wednesday
afternoon tea break at LinuxConf Australia 2016 in Geelong.
Nearly everyone who heard this story — or saw me while it was
happening — asked me the same question: Why are you doing
this?. The five to six people packed in with me in my coach section on
the LAX→SYD leg are probably still asking this, because I had an
allergic attack of some sort most of the flight and couldn’t stop coughing,
even with two full bags of Fisherman’s Friends over those 15 hours.
But, nevertheless, I gave a simple answer to everyone who questioned my
crazy BRU→AMS→PDX→LAX→SYD→MEL itinerary: FOSDEM and LinuxConf AU are
two of the most important events on the Free Software annual calendar.
There’s just no question. I’ll write more about FOSDEM sometime soon, but
the rest of this post, I’ll dedicate to LinuxConf Australia (LCA).
One of my biggest regrets in Free Software is that I was once — and
you’ll be surprised by this given my story above — a bit squeamish
about the nearly 15 hour flight to get from the USA to Australia, and
therefore I didn’t attend LCA until 2015. LCA began way back in 1999.
Keep in mind that, other than FOSDEM, no major, community-organized events
have survived from that time. But LCA has the culture and mindset of the
kinds of conferences that our community made in 1999.
LCA is community organized and operated. Groups of volunteers
each year plan the event. In the tradition of science fiction conventions
and other hobbyist activities, groups bid for the conference and offer
their time and effort to make the conference a success. They have an
annual hand-off meeting to be sure the organization lessons are passed from
one committee to the next, and some volunteers even repeat their
involvement year after year. For organizational structure, they rely on a
non-profit organization, Linux
Australia, to assist with handling the funds and providing
infrastructure (just like Conservancy does for our member projects and
their conferences!).
I believe fully that the success of software freedom and GNU/Linux in
particular has not primarily come from companies that allow developers to
spend some of their time coding on upstream. Sure, many Free Software
projects couldn’t survive without that component, but what really makes
GNU/Linux, or any Free Software project, truly special is that there’s a
community of users and developers who use, improve, and learn about the
software because it excites and interests them. LCA is one of the few
events specifically designed to invite that sort of person to attend, and
it has for almost an entire generation stood in stark contrast the highly
corporate, for-profit/trade-association events that slowly took over our community in the
years that followed LCA’s founding. (Remember all those years of LinuxWorld
Expo? I wasn’t even sad when IDG stopped running it!)
Speaking particularly of earlier this year, LCA 2016 in Geelong, Australia
was a particular profound event for me. LCA is one of the few events that
accepts my rather political talks about what’s happening in Open Source and
Free Software, so I gave a talk
on Friday
5 February 2016 entitled Copyleft For the Next Decade: A
Comprehensive Plan, which was recorded, so you can watch it,
or read the LWN article about
it. I do warn everyone that the jokes did not go over well (mine never
do), so after I finished, I was feeling a bit down that I hadn’t made the
talk entertaining enough. But then, something amazing happened: people
started walking up to me and telling me how important my message was. One
individual even came up and told me that he was excited enough that he’d like
to match
any donation that Software Freedom Conservancy received during LCA 2016.
Since it was the last day of the event, I quickly went to one of the
organizers, Kathy Reid, and asked
if they would announce this match during the closing ceremonies; she agreed.
In a matter of just an hour or two, I’d gone from believing my talk had
fallen flat to realizing that — regardless of whether I’d presented
well — the concepts I discussed had connected with people.
Then, I sat down in the closing session. I started to tear up slightly
when the
organizers announced the donation match. Within 90 seconds, though,
that turned to full tears of joy when the incoming President of Linux
Australia, Hugh Blemings, came on
stage and
said:
[I’ll start with] a Software Freedom Conservancy thing, as it turns out.
… I can tell that most of you weren’t at Bradley’s talk earlier on
today, but if there is one talk I’d encourage you to watch on the
playback later it would be that one. There’s a very very important
message in there and something to take away for all of us. On behalf of
the Council I’d like to announce … that we’re actually in the
process of making a significant donation from Linux Australia to Software
Freedom Conservancy as well. I urge all of you to consider contributing
individual as well, and there is much left for us to be done as a
community on that front.
I hope that this post helps organizers of events like LCA fully understand
how much something like this means to us who run a small charities —
and not just with regard to the financial contributions. Knowing that the
organizers of community events feel so strongly positive about our work
really keeps us going. We work hard and spend much time at Conservancy to
serve the Open Source and Free Software community, and knowing the work is
appreciated inspires us to keep working. Furthermore, we know that without
these events, it’s much tougher for us to reach others with our message of
software freedom. So, for us, the feeling is mutual: I’m delighted that
the Linux Australia and LCA folks feel so positively about Conservancy, and
I now look forward to another 15 hour flight for the next LCA.
And, on that note, I chose a strategic time to post this story. On Friday
5 August 2016, the CFP for LCA
2017 closes. So, now is the time for all of you to submit a talk. If
you regularly speak at Open Source and Free Software events, or have been
considering it, this event really needs to be on your calendar. I look
forward to seeing all of you Hobart this January.
Up until mid-2010, any rogue website could get a good sense of your browsing habits by specifying a distinctive :visited CSS pseudo-class for any links on the page, rendering thousands of interesting URLs off-screen, and then calling the getComputedStyle API to figure out which pages appear in your browser’s history.
After some deliberation, browser vendors have closed this loophole by disallowing almost all attributes in :visited selectors, spare for the fairly indispensable ability to alter foreground and background colors for such links. The APIs have been also redesigned to prevent the disclosure of this color information via getComputedStyle.
This workaround did not fully eliminate the ability to probe your browsing history, but limited it to scenarios where the user can be tricked into unwittingly feeding the style information back to the website one URL at a time. Several fairly convincing attacks have been demonstrated against patched browsers – my own 2013 entry can be found here – but they generally depended on the ability to solicit one click or one keypress per every URL tested. In other words, the whole thing did not scale particularly well.
Or at least, it wasn’t supposed to. In 2014, I described a neat trick that exploited normally imperceptible color quantization errors within the browser, amplified by stacking elements hundreds of times, to implement an n-to-2n decoder circuit using just the background-color and opacity properties on overlaid <a href=…> elements to easily probe the browsing history of multiple URLs with a single click. To explain the basic principle, imagine wanting to test two links, and dividing the screen into four regions, like so:
Region #1 is lit only when both links are not visited (¬ link_a ∧ ¬ link_b),
Region #2 is lit only when link A is not visited but link B is visited (¬ link_a ∧ link_b),
Region #3 is lit only when link A is visited but link B is not (link_a ∧ ¬ link_b),
Region #4 is lit only when both links are visited (link_a ∧ link_b).
While the page couldn’t directly query the visibility of the segments, we just had to convince the user to click the visible segment once to get the browsing history for both links, for example under the guise of dismissing a pop-up ad. (Of course, the attack could be scaled to far more than just 2 URLs.)
This problem was eventually addressed by browser vendors by simply improving the accuracy of color quantization when overlaying HTML elements; while this did not eliminate the risk, it made the attack far more computationally intensive, requiring the evil page to stack millions of elements to get practical results. Gave over? Well, not entirely. In the footnote of my 2014 article, I mentioned this:
“There is an upcoming CSS feature called mix-blend-mode, which permits non-linear mixing with operators such as multiply, lighten, darken, and a couple more. These operators make Boolean algebra much simpler and if they ship in their current shape, they will remove the need for all the fun with quantization errors, successive overlays, and such. That said, mix-blend-mode is not available in any browser today.”
As you might have guessed, patience is a virtue! As of mid-2016, mix-blend-mode – a feature to allow advanced compositing of bitmaps, very similar to the layer blending modes available in photo-editing tools such as Photoshop and GIMP – is shipping in Chrome and Firefox. And as it happens, in addition to their intended purpose, these non-linear blending operators permit us to implement arbitrary Boolean algebra. For example, to implement AND, all we need to do is use multiply:
black (0) x black (0) = black (0)
black (0) x white (1) = black (0)
white (1) x black (0) = black (0)
white (1) x white (1) = white (1)
For a practical demo, click here. A single click in that whack-a-mole game will reveal the state of 9 visited links to the JavaScript executing on the page. If this was an actual game and if it continued for a bit longer, probing the state of hundreds or thousands of URLs would not be particularly hard to pull off.
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