 Hi, I'm Karen Sandler. I am the Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Raise your hand if you've heard of conservancy. Okay, so a few people here. I'll explain more about what Software Freedom Conservancy does in a little bit. I also am a lawyer, which whenever I admit I feel like hiding behind a podium lest I get rotten fruit thrown at me, but I only do legal advice now for charities and so only really legal work in the public interest. So I'm pro bono counsel to the Free Software Foundation and GNOME and a couple of other organizations. I'm super into free and open-source software and I also am a patient. These are my Twitter handles, which I really have a lot of criticisms of Twitter, but I give them to you so that I know that if you're looking at your devices you are simply talking publicly about how awesome this talk is. So I'm a patient in that I have a big heart and I literally have a big heart. My heart is three times the size of a normal person's heart. It's called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and it's totally fine except that I have a very high risk of suddenly dying. It's like two to three percent chance per year and so I have a defibrillator that's implanted in my body and I cannot see the source code that is implanted in my body that is sewn in and screwed into my heart and this turned me into being someone who thought that open source was cool and pretty useful and a collaborative way to work and great in all those ways to to being someone who is really passionate about software freedom and it makes me the most terrifying thing at all a cyborg lawyer. But the whole process you know I wound up launching a research campaign about free and open-source software and about medical devices and their safety and I learned a lot from that whole process and what I learned really is that software is something to be passionate about. It's not simply something esoteric it's not simply something that we need to get things done. It is underlying the very infrastructure of what we do and is tied to who we are as people and as societies and that caused me to go from being sort of just interested in legal issues to being interested in the whole presence of free and open-source software in society and I went to I'm now not a lawyer for my everyday job I'm executive director of Conservancy so if you haven't heard of Conservancy it is a nonprofit charitable organization that that is the nonprofit home of 40 free software projects. Raise your hand if you are using one of our projects like Git maybe. We also are the home of Outreachy which is an internship program for women and people of color who are underrepresented in US tech and the idea behind that is to provide opportunities so we're a more inclusive community and what I think is most interesting about being a foundation being the nonprofit home of all of these free software projects is that really it's about power balance it's about providing a nonprofit home for these projects so that there is a community manifestation of of who these projects are and how they interact with the world and this this talk I have to admit that I I entitled this talk what Frank and Yas wanted me to talk about and so I crypt it from the press release of what makes free software project so successful and and what makes free open-source software so successful to me is about the ones that get it really right are the ones that get the power balance right that are balancing all of the interests that are at work in a free and open-source software project all of the the social and political legal and technical interest it's all about a balance of power now as one of our corporate funders loves to say to me every time I ask if his company will be continuing to sponsor us is is it's all about the money Karen it's all about the money follow the money where's your money coming from right how many people here are are paid to work on free and open-source software it's like half right maybe a little more you know sort of understanding where the money flows into a community is a really important piece of understanding what the interests are but where the money comes from isn't the only test to determine who should have a say and why in a project now money is really important right investors and companies are essential we probably wouldn't get most of our projects off the ground and we wouldn't continue to be able to make them so successful if they weren't also used in industry and if there weren't also companies that that cared about them and invested in them I think that being able to see the health of a project when you see what companies are adopting it and the rate of their adoption it is an indicator of health and it is important and you need to design a free and open-source software project and community such that such that those interests are represented and and there is that important investment I think the half of this room that raised their hands and said that they were working in a job where they're writing free and open-source software or contributing to free and open-source software is indicative of that it's what it's some what part of what keeps us going but we need to balance our long-term success versus our short-term success and long-term success comes from having a neutral playing field a neutral way for us to collaborate with each other so making sure that anyone who comes into a project can have a chance to have a say and contribute is a really important component of that and in the corporate perspective it comes down to often what is in a long-term community's interest is different than what a company's quarterly profit interests are so a lot of companies will be working towards quarterly results because that's how they can seek in you know investors that's how they can raise their next round of funding and that's what public companies will be looking to show to the market they'll be looking to show well in the last three quarters we've had you know increased you know or you know productivity or increased profit margins from for you know these reasons and that that allows them to have increased investments that helps them with sales their customers want to see that from quarter to quarter they are you know they're showing growth and they're growing and they're showing a development of their business model but what's in their quarterly results their quarterly interests may not be in even in that own company's long-term interests right and what we've seen in free and open source software over the years is that free and open source software provides the ability to look really towards long-term results and and sometimes companies may be wouldn't be able to make the choices that a long-term focus community does because free and open source software because they're they're getting pressure from their investors or from their customers in short-term interests and one of the things that conservancy that we see all the time is that is that even in you know in very successful projects and in starting projects there's a lot of pressure from the companies that have an interest to make certain decisions that may not be in the long-term interests of the project but those companies don't necessarily have the luxury to think that way even though it will be in their long-term interests and so having this balance of power around companies is you know is is one of the things that is what one of the reasons why free software does so well is that we we await the importance of community and we and we build all these different kinds of mechanisms to make sure that that these interests are are a bit balanced so more on background for me I am a natural optimist I I like sort of wake up in the morning and I just I I don't know how I got so lucky but I sort of wind up thinking the world is great people are great I love each and every one of you you know how I I really feel about the world but I'm a lawyer and as a lawyer we're trained pessimists right we have to think about all the terrible things that can happen you have to constantly think about how things can go wrong in order to make sure that they can go right and I find that sometimes that I've got that conflicting interest but as a trade pessimist we have to safeguard ourselves for when things invariably go wrong because they will and there are a number of different mechanisms that we have in place to do that one of them is foundations like Conservancy there are a ton of foundations in our field all of them will tell you that they are a neutral playing field for projects to participate right and and and many of them are and I'd say actually all of them are but they all mean different things when they say that they all mean a different balance of interests foundations really can help provided that you really think about governance and you think about the ways in which you want your community to develop in the future having a corporate home and so when I say foundations I mean you know Conservancy is one Apache Software Foundation is another the Linux Foundation is another and they're all made on different models some of them like Linux Foundation are trade associations where they are a organized as a group of companies representing their member companies interests and and can look for long-term you know they the technical term is common business interest so they look for the long-term health of the industrial players right and then others like Conservancy or Apache or software in the public interest or the Free Software Foundation are organizations that are that are charities in the United States and their equivalents to those organizations that are based in in Germany and the Netherlands that are active in the free software space too and there are a few that are starting up right now there's like a really active there are like I think three initiatives to form fiscal sponsorship organizations in Europe so really kind of a fascinating and exciting time but the but foundations really can help but they're only one piece of the puzzle right having a non-profit home is one thing that that a lot of successful free and open source software projects have because it allows them to handle all of the legal things but also provides them a structure for governance that's outside of any one company it allows a way for people to talk to each other and have authority but not but but not you know like sort of a little bit separate from the technical direction of the project and of course licensing has a huge component of that and sometimes these interests from a foundation level and the license level are not entirely on the same page so one of the things that's cool about free and open source software is that is that by definition with a free and open license it means that you can take your work somewhere else so the ability to fork if it's free and open it can be used by anyone for for any purpose and even if there is a CLA even if there is there are other mechanisms like a foundational structure built in that might be exclusionary if at the end of the day you get to the end of the road and you're really frustrated about where the project has gone you can always climb over this barrier and take yourself or somebody else and use it I know that's not a huge surprise to this community to explain that but but with with different licensing the ability to do this is really different right so if you've got a copy left license and raise your hand if you know the difference between a copy left license and a permissive license or rather raise your hand if you're not sure what the difference is there are okay so actually more people here don't know the difference between a permissive and a copy left license than have heard of conservancy so so I will quickly explain because I think a lot of these talks sometimes take for granted that we know that we're all sort of on the same page so so free and open source software is predicated on licensing it's one of these funny things that the software freedom comes from kind of a legal hack and and copy left is the idea that you take copy right but to but to share and so and so copy left licensing the very overly simplistic explanation of it is that copy left says you can do whatever you want with the software provided that if you make changes and distribute those changes you do so under the same license so there is sort of reciprocal obligations and the detractors call it viral I like to think of it as snowballing for forever free permissive licensing says you can do whatever you want with this software period including proprietorization so with a with a permissive license often you have you have a bit of a sometimes you have a fracturing in the market so you have companies want often are very keen on permissive licenses because that means that they can take the software and and go off and create their own fork of it their own special sauce and only contribute back to the community what they choose to contribute back now there's no I don't mean to put any judgment on permissive versus permissive licensing versus copy left many of conservancies projects are copy left and many of them are permissively licensed and actually back in the day especially there were a lot of really strong arguments about what is freedom and that in order to have a really free project you couldn't use copy left because copy left in that view imposed restrictions and so the copy left people were saying no no our work is forever free and the permissive license people were saying well that's not really free because you can't use it for everything so like different ideas of what of what freedom are but when you have permissive licensing versus copy left licensing one of the things that's most interesting is that with copy with copy left you have kind of a built-in even playing field right you have a built-in equal footing for everybody and with permissive licensing often companies have to build in a lot of infrastructure so Martin Fink last year at Linux con year up not quite a year ago gave a talk where he said that HPE he'll packer enterprises prefers the GPL and prefers copy left and the reasons why he talked about that were that if you use if you use a permissive license then you suddenly get into the foundation space where you have to impose all this infrastructure to make sure that everyone is playing fairly that everyone and so what happens is that you have often these foundations with you know with governance committees where companies buy seats on the different you know on boards and can have a particular say and and companies get comfortable with that because they feel like their investment is assured as long as they have an invest as long as they rely on the software for their business they will be investing in it and their fees on the advisory board or you know on the board of directors or whatever that seat is will pay off and so they'll pay that anyway but Martin's point is that it's it's simply a waste of money because it will not assure any a fair playing field in the long run and it assures it now to some extent but then the community becomes fractured and you can't really guarantee what companies will give back with copy left you have this even playing field you have the chance always to take the current state of play of the software and and and go beyond the roblox that are ahead of you and I think that that everybody does need to participate in equal footing in order for a project to be truly successful all of the projects that have really succeeded in the long run have done so either in the copy left space where there's an equal footing because of the license or in the last permissive space when by usually through social pressure so there are some very successful permissively licensed projects where people are are are even footing because they are in food because the companies feel like understand the value of community and understand that they want to invest in the same way as they might in the copy left community but having all of that infrastructure around foundations is much much easier when you have a copy left project and the stronger the copy left the less money you need and time you need to spend on governance because you have that baked in fairness so thinking about what makes projects successful and the balance of power it's not simply the balance of power between a company and the community although and companies in each other although those are very important and making sure that companies can participate fairly amongst each other and also that individuals and hobbyists can contribute as much as possible you know is one of the key areas but another area that is very important is that there's a balance between a company and its employees how many people here have ever signed an employment contract an employment agreement so that's like three-quarters of the audience how many people here are students that's like there are like four or five students so I wouldn't necessarily expect students to to have already signed an employment agreement so I'd say that's that's virtually everybody how many people here negotiated their agreement before they signed it like wow a lot of people you guys are great so maybe like five or five to ten people here have negotiated their employment agreements so everyone should know that you absolutely can negotiate your employment agreement which is something that a lot of people simply don't know and this is one of the one of the areas where that I find is tied to successive free and open source software projects that many times employees of companies are able to to have to keep their contributions not not everybody does this but in a lot of the key successful communities companies have been more willing to let employees keep their contributions and when I mean that keep their contributions I mean you can negotiate with your company to keep the copyrights that you write as part of your job it can be part of the negotiated process you can also negotiate certain things about whether you know what projects you'll work on and what what licenses they'll be published under this is something that that if more employees did more companies would be willing to do it because they'd realize that they need they need to pay attention to that in order to to recruit the best talent but it's actually also assuring the success of free software projects down the road because because what seems evident today to you as an employee working at a company if you're going and I think that there are a few people in this room who who know this very very well that what what how you feel when you take the job at the beginning of the day of a relationship with an employer may not be how you feel a year or two down the road working on copy-lefted projects or projects where you have this kind of balance of power baked in make it a little bit easier you can always take your code somewhere else but having this ability to to to always think like a fake think like a pessimist you know you have to think about all the ways that these things can go wrong and provide the mechanism so that the product of your work will be safe down the road and that is how we are able to interact with each other in a way that creates a truly neutral playing playing field and so I encourage everyone Conservancy is actually starting a new project called a contract patch where we are working on providing standard language for employment agreements so that so that developers and contributors have a opportunity to simply provide sample text when they're negotiating their their employment agreement so they can say so you could say like while you're negotiating the contract I really want clauses one three and four from this particular you know from this from contract patch and the company can say oh well we never take four but we might take one and you can add that in terms of your salary negotiations you can ask for the asking for for for negotiate like asking for changes in your employment agreement is just simply another form of compensation so if you've never thought about it before if you're offered a job you should always negotiate the salary I didn't know this for the longest time but you you usually when companies are offering you a job they give you a they the salary they offer to you is not generally as high as the salary they would expect because they expect you to come back and ask for more so if you don't ask for more you're basically just taking a little bit less money that's not always the case but it's usually the case that you're just taking a little bit and it's same with the these contracts is that they are they are drafted as strongly as they possibly can so that when somebody comes and asks for a change they can give you something like lawyer it's a standard drafting technique that lawyers have where you you always have something you can give away so that you can have a negotiate you make somebody leave the table feeling like they walked away with something even if it was something you were always prepared to give and so this is sort of the basic so we're we're working on some some resources to help with this but simply asking the questions goes a long way and so that's sort of in the the balance of power in terms of how everyone can contribute to a project and I would say that that everyone means everyone which I guess is a trueism stated like that but but means that we also need to pay attention to the demographies of our the demographics of our communities and understand that we need to welcome everyone to be contributors to our project so we have all of these invisible barriers that we don't even realize that we have and if you look around at your communities and you see that everyone looks a lot like you or everyone's coming from your same perspective that probably means that there are some invisible barriers that you didn't realize were there and you don't notice because you're someone who is part of the the inside team already you're someone who's already a part of the people who are welcome into that space and this is one of the reasons why we care so much about outreach and programs to improve diversity in these communities because studies show that projects that are developed by a broader range of perspectives produce better results the projects they're created are better because if you have different kinds of people who are contributing to the project they're more likely to notice if there's if there's a problem or if there's something that's not as good for someone with a slightly different perspective than you if you work with only people who are like yourselves you're gonna create a project that people like you are gonna love but you want your software to have much broader reach than just people like you you want so your software to to be used and useful and liked by everyone in order to do that you have to have a wider perspective people contributing to it so diversity is a really important component of that and successful free and open source is the thing is I can't like say the exact recipe for a successful free and open source software project because they're all a little bit different and I think one of the things that's strongest about free and open source software is they can all grow organically to be their strongest version of themselves and all be slightly different but having these invisible barriers removed the visible and invisible barriers are are really important so I'd say you know let's systematically look for these barriers and remove them both the invisible ones and the visible ones by choosing projects with a strong copy left license you already take care of a lot of the social problems that it takes a long time to negotiate the proper governance for projects the ways that you can have hobbyists and equal footing to to companies and you make sure that your project is there for the long run I would say that that it's about embracing the collaborative spirit all around one of the things that's so great about free and open source software and the reason why it produces such awesome results is that people are working collaboratively together but working collaboratively also means working collaboratively on a social level as well as a as a as a technical level and having having the ability to to really make sure that that anyone can become a contributor is extremely important and to make sure that power is not too centralized in any one place and this is one of the reasons why CLA's can be so dangerous as they make that balance of power power off so I can tell you that earlier this week I was speaking at a conference called medicine X it's a it's pretty cool conference it's very very Silicon Valley and it's about it's about like it's about patients and doctors and and people throughout the medical field working together they have hilarious buzzwords at this conference and I hope that that even though this talk is recorded that no one from medicine X gets offended but they have like they're like cooperative disruption and everything is like is like buzzword this and buzzword that and they're they're all about their their their hashtags and but but one of the things one of the themes that I heard at this conference is that is that medical professionals the medical industry as a whole doesn't think about their data right I am keenly aware of this because I have my defibrillator I'm keenly aware that I can't access the information that my defibrillator is collecting about myself right every time that that my heart beats my defibrillator is listening to it and it's keeping track of it but I can't I can't access that data at all only the medical device manufacturer has that ability right and I can't if there's something wrong with my heart device I can't really do anything about it I'm powerless to do anything about it when I was recently pregnant and while I was pregnant I was unnecessarily shocked twice by my defibrillator twice because my heart was doing something that normal pregnant women's heart does heart pregnant women often have like kind of a little bit of a palpitation or a racing heartbeat and that happened to me and the solution for this was not to take a look at the software which I would have really like to have done but was instead to prescribe me drugs that slowed my heart rate down seriously so I took drugs to to slow my heart rate down for the sole purpose of not getting shocked I could not walk up a flight of stairs easily because I was so tired from my heart being slowed down so much and it was it was just this crazy thing in my my cardiologist was like well you don't want to get shocked do you when he kept trying to get me to take to suggest me to say we're like no I don't but this is definitely not and now the medical device companies don't want pregnant women to be shocked I promise you their nightmare scenario they would work hard to make sure pregnant women aren't shocked but I'm not the use case that they generally are working for younger women who become pregnant tend not to have defibrillators so it's not a big problem and it's a fleeting problem right like if I my heart rate was slowed down I made it through my pregnancy and now I'm not pregnant anymore and I still have my defibrillator that use case doesn't apply to me anymore it's short-lived right but but the thing that came out from a point of this this conference is that these men the medical device space is nearly a metaphor for how we're building our society generally right my defibrillator is like somebody else's phone you know I I say somebody else's I would say mine but I'm running I'm running replicant on my old my old phone and and I don't use a lot of the services a lot of other people do because I don't I don't trust what's gonna happen with that data and I can't trust the safety of the phone that I can't see the software to so these things are merely a metaphor to how we're building our society now as we have our devices that track us everywhere we go and as we rely on cloud services for our most critical functionality in our data you know these issues become incredibly important and what seems obvious in the case of an implanted medical device meaning boy if that device is sewn into her body and screwed into her heart you really should have some confidence about the technology behind it it's true of all of our devices and all of our data because we don't know how our data is going to be used and we don't know how our software is going to be used down the road and so what next cloud is doing is extremely important because what we don't have right now or what we've what we haven't had in the past are really good alternatives to the systems that are out there we have you know we have our data has never been more fragile and our technology has never been more fragile and we have never been more in control by single companies and so you all here play such a critical role in the balance of power and I really appreciate it so thank you very much we've got plenty of time for questions I think is that true good thank you that's just my everyone's reading my my creative commons CC by SA license so you can take this talking and give it somewhere else please and also Conservancy is a charity and we rely on our supporters so if you have the budget please please become a supporter so ask me who has questions you can ask me anything about you can ask me about licensing you can ask me about diversity work thanks for great talk Karen you explained the viral nature or the snowball effect of the of the GP like the GP licenses I was wondering if you could also instead of using this nature in code could use it in data I use my own email hosting but I communicate a lot with people who have hosted solutions like Gmail could I maybe put some sort of legal lease in the footer of my emails to limit the harvesting that can be done on on my data so I am a lawyer but I am not your lawyer this is not legal advice really careful with data so creative commons did this big initiative when they started doing CC zero like it's sort of they call it the public domain license and a lot of data organizations have been exploring these licensing possibilities and some things that you think would be a very good idea to protect yourself down the road like our things that make will make it impossible to effectively use data so the best analogy to it in the free software space is is to put a restriction it's akin to putting a restriction like a restriction like my this software cannot be used for military use if you put that in your software then I earn your license then your your software suddenly becomes non-free right you could put restrictions that seem like they're a really good idea for all kinds of reasons but if you restrict how the software can be used then you're basically restricting the software in unexpected ways and it becomes non-free and with data putting licenses around data so I'm sort of talking more generally than in your specific case right now putting restrictions around data means that sometimes that data becomes almost impossible to use so a lot of the early data licenses require sort of attribution or other kinds of notification to go along with them and you need to have notifications to travel along with your data if you're trying to restrict its use in some way right and if you're compiling data from enough sources that that data is useful then you have to maintain all of those license notices and it becomes a complete legal nightmare so you have to be really careful with how you license the data because otherwise you might basically undermine the very usefulness for which you sought it to make now I also try not to host my I don't host my email in a in a commercial cloud environment I'm actually didn't like a vote my email with a group of friends I recommend people do email co-ops where you get together with a few really like of your really closest most trusted people and and then you split your your you split the time and maintaining the mail server so that no one has to do it anyway that's sort of besides point but but I think that your email that you send is protected in a number of ways so and what you're not really looking for is a way to put something in your footer of your email that restricts it but what you're looking for is a way to monitor terms of service so like how many people read terms of service before they click I agree probably everybody read some of it like actually how only like four or five people said they even read the terms of service that's amazing I thought most people like skim it so you didn't raise your you asked this question so it's so interesting to me because people get so like upset about the about some of these things and think about doing things like putting footers in their emails but they're not reading the terms of service now I don't blame you for not reading them because you can't as it turns out there's like a whole there was a study done recently or somebody did like took the like the average computer you the internet average internet user and took a look at like Facebook and Twitter and all that if you read everything all the terms of service because I try to read them all and when you read them you see that they then say these terms of service incorporate by reference this statement and that statement and this statement and suddenly you've got like 40 pages that you have to read before you can even get started and if you use a bank online if you do basically if you do anything at all you have terms of service and you can't so I think that this is it's just a crazy world that we have all adopted and in the US at least I can't speak elsewhere because I'm just a lawyer in the US but in the US these agreements are completely enforceable which if you had told me that when I was in law school I would have said no way like there's no way that judges would find those things enforceable because like no one can read them all and ordinary people are agreeing to it it's all fine print it doesn't make any sense but but what we need to do is as a society is we need to focus on these terms of service we need to figure out ways to simplify them and make everybody understand them and also demand that our data is protected and trying to create new licenses or or or add restrictive language in an email footer is to me not really the right way to handle it because it only takes care of a very small piece of the problem while inadvertently creating others that was a little bit long-winded who else has a question anything at all yeah I don't mean to kill people and asking questions just there's so much that I know you you have to that you're such an interesting community is there any movement of the medical industry to go to open source or to open their construction not even software probably but I mean hardware is more or less open a little bit but software is very proprietary I know so so I worked in medical research I'm working here at Berlin by the way at the gravity sometime and also at the German cancer research Institute and the data was super proprietary and also the software it was public financed but no one released it because of time constraints but the industry adopted the data and sometimes it's often so it's crazy to me the US is any yeah it's crazy to me that publicly funded software could not be released publicly yeah it's really kind of insane to me but in terms of movement in the is there any movement in the medical industry in the United States or elsewhere I think I think we're starting to see a little bit the short answer is no absolutely not the big manufacturers are not moving on it and I think that one of the reasons why the large medical device manufacturers are not moving is kind of counterintuitive I think that is actually the reason why they're not moving it is mostly because they're afraid of the patent risk that if they publish their software they'll be subject to patent trolls who will basically scour the code for things that look like their patent could read on it and then they would be subject to all these frivolous lawsuits that's the most sensible explanation for for the attitude of the medical device industry because medical devices are like the perfect example of something that works with free and open source software right like I'm not going to just buy my defibrillator from any new player in the market right I want a company that's been manufacturing my defibrillator for a long time right I want someone who has good support for doctors right I want someone who's a precision manufacturer I want quality like quality goods or it's all these things that work with free and open source software all of the successful business models we've seen in the past that focused around support around hardware are things that are totally true of the the medical device space but but what I am starting to see is that now lawyers in the field are starting to understand and internalize the fact that security professionals have all agreed that free and open source software is better over time and performs better under security checks when you know obviously free and open source software can also be terrible but as a development methodology and the code bases that are actually in use and invested and have the same kind of support that proprietary software does free and open source software does better over time does a lot better security wise and I think that that as I started making the case more in a medical device lawyers and and executives that in fact what are they going to say in court when somebody says you knew that free software you knew that open source software was safer and yet you continue to develop your software in a proprietary way and they're starting to kind of realize that the fact that the security professionals have had this strong conclusion might also indicate that their liability might be in fact lessened if they if they entertain a free and open perspective or approach while at the same time a lot of patients have taken matters into their own hands there's a movement called we're not waiting which is people who have diabetes who and if you're if you have type 1 diabetes meaning you're a young person who has it genetically as opposed to it's type 2 which is a life stuff if you have if you're a kid especially and you have diabetes having precise insulin control makes a big difference in your outlook of life overall making sure that you don't have too much or too little insulin means that you have a lot less damage over time and this is why implanted insulin pumps are so good however if you can't control it for your exercise level and your particular experience then that delivery that insulin delivery becomes clumsy it's sort of like how my unexpected situation of being pregnant with my defibrillator becomes almost your every day and a lot of these people are quite technical and parents of kids with diabetes have seen how if they had more control over the insulin pump they'd be able to help their children live longer and healthier lives and so the we're not waiting movement and the night scout project have basically caused they basically reverse engineered the insulin pumps so that they can do more precise delivery because all this time trying to advocate and lobby the medical devices companies to change has been slow going and hasn't yielded much results but because they've been having success and there's like a you know with artificial pancreas it's like it's really cool because they've had six of some success companies now cannot ignore it and they see that people are using these freed open-source software projects to improve their own medical care so I think we're on the verge of seeing a lot of change but we haven't quite yet could you maybe expand on how the use of CLA's is endangering the balance of power especially due to like recent events and the relevant developments yeah so I mean with CLA's with so I you know I CLA's are all a little bit different this is like it really depends what a CLA says so some CLA's are different than others and some CLA's are are by individual you're assigning to grant your granting rights to an individual company and some CLA's like the one that the Apache Software Foundation has you're assigning rights to a foundation and it's a little bit different depending on on who's a who is receiving that grant of rights and what they promise that they're going to do or not going to do so there's copyright license agreements and then there's copyright assignment agreements copyright assignment agreements you assign your copyrights to another entity and some companies ask for this some merely ask for a license of rights now in effect those two things can really be the same because if you license to a company the right to sub license your work then it's effectively like an assignment agreement they have the company has all the rights and what happens is that there's a then a complete imbalance of power because what anybody can do who downloads the source the source code what what anyone can do is different than what that company can do and you're always you're always at risk that the company that you have assigned your code to will license your code and this is the most extreme circumstance but we'll license it under a proprietary software license and that future versions of your software that you wrote that you contributed to will be done under a proprietary software license as well and then you won't be able to build on it it takes away all of the fairness that comes with free and open-source software now as long as the company is publishing the software as they go under a free license to some extent at any point in time you can continue you can use this you can you can use the the software and build on it but it creates an inherent inequity and so Richard Fontana I believe it was Richard coined the phrase inbound equals outbound and basically saying that what license you give to others should be the license that they're you know like that there should be and an equity and so making sure that everyone's able to play on the same field means that that eliminating CLA's is or or severely limiting them is very important because otherwise there's a limitation on who can do what in the community well I'll be here all day did you have a question also no okay I'll be all day if you have any more questions and I think we're getting to the end of the time anyway if you have any more questions feel free to come talk to me thank you so much for everything you do