 Good morning Welcome to the legal and policy issues dev room My name is Tom Marble, and I'm here with one of my co-organizers Richard Fontana We also have two other core organizers Karen Sandler and Bradley Kuhn who are off doing the FOSDEM keynote at the moment, but we'll be back Later today in this room Some of you may know that this is the Eighth year that we've done the legal and policy issues dev room and it's been really an interesting ride because we started out with the idea of describing or talking about the issues that enable free software and open source to exist and starting off with things like copyright law and patent law and trademark law and Broaden that into governance issues issues like copyright license agreements And all sorts of other things and it turns out that every year there's always more new information around The ecosystem of free software that we need to talk about it was actually several years ago that we heard In this dev room about the GDPR. I think mark you gave a talk about that. Yeah So that's where I first heard about the GDPR and I have to give All of the Europeans a big props for the GDPR because you probably know this already but globally companies are enacting privacy To comply with the GDPR even if they're not European and that's just an testament to the influence that that you've had Which is great. I also want to say that This dev room is intended to be a place of discussion and we while we have a lot of lawyers that are presenting We absolutely encourage people that are not lawyers that our developers are involved in the community to come and share their experiences with us and Hopefully our speakers will give you all a chance to ask them some really provocative questions and we can have some good discussion We have a great lineup today. And in fact, we have several Panels that will allow opportunity for discussion including at the end of the day We have our organizers panel where we hope to have some lively discussion so It's a very busy day. I want to thank you very much for for coming and at this point. I'm going to give the mic to my Organizer Richard Fontana if you'd like to say a word or two Thanks, Tom. Well, it's great to be here. I have no prepared remarks, but Tom wanted me to to say a few words So I think this has been this event has been has had a big impact on my my life. I think it's been Fantastic each year that we do this we get such a great lineup of speakers We have not only sort of followed the evolution of legal and policy issues in the larger free software and open source world As Tom was saying, but I feel like we've actually had an impact on sort of driving where Conversations are going and I think that's really great and and What's also sort of unique about this event is that it is part of FOSDM. It's a it's a developer Hacker-driven event. It's not a lawyer controlled event. It's not a secretive event. It's a it's a public open chaotically organized thing and that's just very special and it's becoming More and more uncommon and I think it's really great and it should be a great event today You can see how many of the lawyer-related go-to where You basically have to be a lawyer or have to Well, there's I don't think there's any that that really have being a lawyer as a criterion But but many of them do our invitation only well not many but there's there's some important ones that are invitation only There are historical reasons for that but that's kind of unfortunate And I think it's really great that this event shows that you can have an entirely open alternative