Bradley Kuhn

Have ever wondered how FOSS was actually was supposed stay FOSS for the long term? Have you ever been unsure or confused why — in a world where Linux is on nearly every device — most people cannot actually run an alternative OS build on their device? This talk will leave you informed on these questions and prepared to participate in the next policy steps our community must take to bring back software freedom and rights to the next generation of FOSS users, activists and developers.

After thirty years of FOSS advocacy, issue and problems in approach have begun to emerge. Strategic mistakes in response to new technologies has often led to large areas of software endeavor to remain proprietary. While for-profit companies have been rewarded with great efficiency benefits and other perks from their adoption of FOSS, rarely do these benefits trickle down to consumers and end-users in their daily computing lives. This talk examines our past mistakes in advocacy and activism, and considers what to do next.

Recently, the process of FOSS license creation has been politicized from all directions, primarily by for-profit companies. We now see companies and their lawyers promulgating seemingly-FOSS but non-commercial-use only licenses. Even worse, some companies seek to redefine copyleft into a toxic system that is inoculated only by a separate proprietary license. Activists have meanwhile created well-meaning licenses that use denial of software freedom to advance important causes, but are ultimately non-FOSS. This talk discusses what we should do next about this complex confluence of events.

FLOSS “sustainability” has garnered much attention. Explosive growth yielded new interest in FLOSS, but concerns about critical bugs jarred newcomers. Unlike in earlier eras, we observe a complex cultural, financial, & leadership melding of for-profit mentality with traditional, radical values of software liberation. Delineating the ideologies and identifying corporate manipulation became difficult. In the midst of success, Open Source now exhibits major flaws. Fortunately, historical strategies that sustained our communities are poised for resurgence. This talk explores these issues.

Most embedded computing products run Linux. However, obtaining the complete, corresponding source code (CCS), which Linux's license (GPL) requires, can prove difficult. Linux's main sources are available upstream, but modified versions in products often contain incomplete source that doesn't build. Providing instructions to build & install is required by GPL to assure users' software freedom. Come learn about how to avoid this mistake by seeing a real-world example of how to do it right.