Last spoke 10 years ago in Canberra Linux.conf.au
Things have improved in the last ten years
- $10s of billions of value have been lost in software patent war
- But things have been so bad that some help was acquired, so worst laws have been pushed back a little
- “Fear of God” in industry was enough to push open Patent pools
- Judges determined that Patent law was getting pathological, 3 wins in Supreme court
- Likelihood worst patent laws will be applied against free software devs has decreased
- “The Nature of the problem has altered because the world has altered”
The Next 10 years
- Most important Patent system will be China’s
- Lack of rule of law in China will cause problems in environment of patents
- Too risky for somebody too try and stop a free software project. We have “our own baseball bat” to spring back at them
The last 10 years
- Changes in Society more important changes in software
- 21st century vs 20th century social organisations
- Less need for hierarchy and secrecy
- Transparency, Participation, non-hierarchical interaction
- OS invented that organisation structure
- Technology we made has taken over the creation of software
- “Where is BitKeeper now?” – Eben Moglen
- Even Microsoft reorganises that our way of software making won
- Long term the organisation structure change everywhere will be more important than just it’s application in Software
- If there has been good news about politics = “we did it”, bad news = “we tried”
Our common Values
- “Bridge entire environment between vi and emacs”
Snowden
- Without PGP and free software then things could have been worse
- The world would be a far more despotic place if PGP was driven underground back in 1993. Imagine today’s Net without HTTPS or SSH!
- “We now live in the world we are afraid of”
- “What stands between them and us is our inventions”
- “Freedom itself depends on how we make use of the technologies we are creating.” – Eben Moglen
- “You can’t trust what you can’t read”
- Big power in the wrong is committed against the first law of robotics, they what technology to work for it.
- From guy in twitter – “You can’t trust what you can’t read.” True, but if OpenSSL teaches us anything you can’t necessarily trust what you can
- Attitudes in under-18s are a lot more positive towards him than those who are older (not just cause he looks like Harry Potter)
- GNU Project is 30 years old, almost same age is Snowden
Oppertunity
- We can’t control the net but opportunity to prevent others from controlling it
- Opportunity to prevent failure of freedom
- Society is changing, demographics under control
- But 1.6 billion people live in China, America is committed to spying, consumer companies are committed to collecting consumer information
- Collecting everything is not the way we want the net to work
- We are playing for keeps now.
