maddog Hall

There was a time when people wrote software for their own needs.   Knowing that selling software is hard (and to a very small market compared to today's markets) they shared their software with "Birds of a Feather" to help others who neeed it.

Over time, markets grew and the desire to make money pulled the making of software from being fun to being a (sometimes mind-numbing) job.

Can we Make Software Fun Again? (MSFA)?

In many countries around the world state and federal universities are tuition free for qualified students, but often many students can not take advantage of this because their families are too poor for the additional fees for room, board, computers, books, transportation, Internet and many of the other costs of schooling.

Project Caua shows computer savvy students how to use their skills to sell and support FOSS projects on Open Hardware to small business owners while working only part time while attending high school or university.

At the end of Ken Thomson's keynote last year:

https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/20x/presentations/keynote-ken-thompson

a person asked how Ken's talk relavant to Free Software.   This talk answers that question.

The talk will be illustrated with photographs and music recorded from my own collection of instruments, many over 100 years old (older than either Ken or myself!)

In the 14 years that the Southern California Linux Expo has existed, a lot has changed in the Free & Open Source Community.  We've invited three very distinguished speakers from the SCALE community as well as the FLOSS community at large,  Jon "Maddog" Hall, Jono Bacon and Keila Banks, to reflect on where the community has been, where it currently is, and what the future holds.