 Hi folks, I took this picture on February 3rd, 2008. This is my daughter, fresh out of the wrapper, just a few hours after she was born in our sitting room in London. Now she's eight now, and she's very curious, she's very greedy for stories. My wife has taught her that if she yanks on my arm and shouts story arm, I'll tell her a story. So periodically she'll yank it halfway out of my arm and out of my socket and she'll shout story arm and I'll tell her the story in a well best beloved once upon a time. And one of her favorites of course is the story of this day, right? How she became to be born. And my wife waking up in labor and five hours later, the birth and then champagne and chocolates and everyone coming over and I told her this story and told her this story and I'm a novelist. So I vary it. I try to find different ways of telling it, going a little further back, going a little further forward, kind of hill climbing towards optimal attention from my daughter. And through random variation, I found that the story that she wants to hear is not the story of that day. It's the story that starts further back. The story that starts nine months before that date. Not that stuff. That stuff is the same for everybody. We got her a very sensible book about it. I read it to her just like my parents read it to me. The interesting stuff that she wants to hear about is the story of how my wife, Alice and I met and how we fell in love and how we fought and how we made up and how we weathered crises and the glory in our triumphs and decided to make her. That's the unique part, right? That's the part that's never the same for any two people. It's that cascade of coincidences and surprises and lightning strikes that thread together in an improbable series that terminates with an eight-year-old hauling on my arm, shouting story arm, story arm. And so today I thought I would tell you the story of how Linux got here. So this is a weird moment. I can't see my slides, by the way. Are we looking at a canoe? Nope. No, it's still the kid, huh? Let's see. How about now? Ah, there we go. Right, so this is a weird moment. As you just heard, floss to all intents and purposes is one. I mean, people still use Mac tops and they still use WinTops, but for the most part those are just like dumb terminals talking to services running on floss-based VMs with floss-based management software developed with floss-based tools and a floss-based cloud. And when they're not using those they're obsessively checking them with their floss-based Android devices, their BSD-based iOS devices, pull down, pull down, pull down. The White House is a floss strategy. ExxonMobil is a major floss contributor. So floss is everywhere. And in hindsight it's easy to see why. Floss is better in lots of ways. For one thing, it lets you be an engineer without being a lawyer. If you're gonna instantiate a million VMs for like an 11th of a second you don't wanna license all of them, right? But it also is better for reasons that stretch all the way back to the enlightenment and further. So before the enlightenment what we had instead of science was alchemy. Alchemy looks a lot like science except that instead of telling people what you thought you've learned you keep it a secret and subject yourself to the most violent of human frailties, our ability to rationalize and self-deceive. And so this means that every alchemist discovered for himself that drinking mercury was a bad idea and the hardest way possible. And after like 500 years of this they did do something alchemical. They converted the base metal of superstition into the noble business of science through publication and adversarial peer review. Your friends tell you gently about the mistakes you've made. Your enemies tell you you were an idiot for having made them. Anyone who's got a GitHub account knows what this feels like. And this is an amazing thing to live in a world in which Floss has won. It was a literally unimaginable thing as recently as say 15 years ago. Now people make Floss for a lot of reasons. You heard about some of them already this morning. You've got programmers who have these ethical considerations who want to fund their own work. They scratch their itches. And then you have companies that want to track those programmers in a super tight labor market. And they say, come work for us and we'll let you work on Floss. And then you have companies that want to tactically deploy commodity components that undermine their adversaries business models. If you want to compete with Microsoft it doesn't hurt to make office free and a free and open alternative. And companies that want to use but not sell commodity components you're selling cloud services not operating systems but the better you make Linux the better your cloud is. So when you make something open there's this temptation to close it. Someone always ends up coming up with a cool and amazing idea for making money with your code that in hindsight seems totally obvious and you kick yourself or not thinking of it first. And only if you could only revoke that license you could run with it and quit your stupid job where your dumb employer only lets you hack on Floss for 10% of your time. If only you could call back seas on your open licensing you could send a bill to everyone who's using your code and hope that nobody sends you a bill for all that code that you're using. So the biggest miracle of all about Floss is not how widely it's adopted but it's the persistence of that openness. For more than 20 years people and organizations with all sorts of agendas have added incrementally to the code making it better and more flexible and more robust creating this suite of tools and utilities that have now been woven into the fabric of the world around us proliferating so that now we see Floss in light switches and automobiles and heart monitors and nuclear reactors. And the reason they came so far so fast is because open licenses are irrevocable. When you license under Floss you license forever. No one, not your boss not an investor not someone thinking of buying your company and not even you in some future desperate moment can change your mind. Now there's a name for it. This is called a Ulysses pact in economics. It's named for Ulysses in the story of the sirens when Ulysses was sailing into the sea of the sirens. He had his sailors lash him to the mast instead of filling his ears with wax so that he could hear their songs but not be tempted to jump into the sea and drown. When you floss your code you make it pointless for anyone to try and coerce you to defloss it because you can't. So that mighty principle has saved Floss from that same pernicious human frailty our ability to rationalize our own self-serving decisions. Because as human beings our sensory apparatus is really only attuned to relative differences. You may have seen that optical illusion where you have a black panel and a white panel and a gray panel in between. When you cover the black panel it seems lighter and when you cover the white panel it seems darker. You start out wanting to do some good and then you make a little compromise. And then another circumstance arises and you compare the new compromise that you're thinking about making not to where you were when you started but to where you are now and every compromise seems little compared to the one that came before it. One compromise leads to another and then the next thing you know you're suing to make APIs copyrightable or you're signing your name to a patent on one-click purchasing or you're filing the headers off some GPL library and praying no one pulls strings on your binary or you're back during your code for the NSA. Ulysses PACs are our strongest, most idealistic way to protect ourselves from our weakest selves in the future and they're how Floss won. But it's not just Floss that ended up everywhere it's also DRM. Floss is won because it's everywhere and so has DRM and this is also unimaginable from the perspective of 15 years ago back when DRM was on the ropes and music was getting rid of it. DRM is roared back and that's thanks to a spectacularly bad law section 12.1 of the DMCA that makes it illegal to remove DRM even for legal reasons. This is a law that's been spread all around the world by the US trade representative here in Canada it's Bill C-11 introduced in 2011 and it makes it a felony to bypass DRM even if you're not breaking any other law even if you're doing something that the law otherwise allows and this crucially allows companies to convert their commercial preferences to legal obligations. So VCRs for Netflix are no more and no less illegal or legal than a VCR for your TV but Netflix has added DRM and to make a VCR that works with Netflix you have to remove the DRM and removing DRM is illegal. So by doing this Netflix has arranged things so that their commercial preference that you not make a VCR becomes a legal obligation. What company wouldn't take a government up on a sweet offer like that? So now DRM is metastasized just like Floss. DRM is in tractors and cars and medical implants and coffee makers. It's the IOT's handmade and after all when you're living on the razor thin margins of hardware you want to make your money from the ecosystem of your software and DRM lets you control who can add software and who can add features. It also lets you gather data in a way that customers can't override so that if later on you figure out how to make money by flogging the personal information of the people who are dumb enough to buy your stuff that data is sure to be in there. So this is a disaster. We now have DRM in... Whoops, there's the slide, right? We now have DRM in things like light sockets. Phillips last year deactivated the ability to use their light sockets with third-party light bulbs. We have it in thermostats. We have it everywhere. This is the IOT rectal thermometer that debuted at iOS. We have DRM up the ass. So thank you. This is a perfect storm of terrible because not only does this law allow companies to decide who can innovate with their products in legal ways, it also allows companies to decide who can embarrass them by revealing flaws in their products because if you find a security defect in a DRM-enabled product and you reveal it, someone might use that information to bypass the DRM and so in America, they've actually imprisoned a security researcher for coming forward with revelations about defects and products that people were relying on and they've also threatened and sued many other researchers so you have these data-hungry, unauditable devices that are in our bodies and that our bodies are inside of. So let me go back to Ed there. That's why he was in there. So as we now know, surveillance has proliferated through the internet turning it into history's most powerful spying platform. The people who built the net, the people who believe that it would be a force for good, they made the decisions that took them from don't be evil to surveillance capitalism, one tiny compromise at a time and those people were no better than you and they were probably better than me. When you go on a diet, if you're smart, you throw away your Oreos. Not because you're weak but because being strong means recognizing that in the future you may have a weak moment. Now, we had the GPL and the licenses like it that kept our stuff open but we had no principle like the GPL for our network services that prevented us from compromising our way into the internet of creepy, disobedient, vuln-ridden things on fire up our ass. Nothing in our terms of membership or services or licenses or our professional ethics, nothing that said that you couldn't use the floss we made to take away the right to use floss. The World Wide Web Consortium has been backdoored and arm twisted into making what they call an open DRM that can't be implemented in open software and will turn every browser into an unauditable technology that no one is allowed to report security vulnerabilities unless the vendor decides that that's okay with them too. At EFF, we've asked the W3C to make all of their members promise never to invoke the DMCA in laws like it against security researchers and people adding accessibility features and people adding otherwise lawful features and if you're a security researcher and you wanna sign on to those principles send me an email, cori at EFF.org tell me what your professional affiliation is and what country you're in. So that proposal that companies shouldn't use these dumb laws that's something that I'm hoping that we can broaden out into a kind of Magna Carta something that we can reuse and lots of other places something that can be our GPL for locking the net open. And that Magna Carta has two foundational principles that principles as key is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or for the Canadians in the audience peace, order and good governance or the separation of church and state. And the first principle is this principle number one when a computer receives conflicting instructions from its owner and a remote party the owner always wins. Systems should always be designed so that their owners can override remote policy because once you create the capacity for remote parties to override the owner of a device you set the stage for terrible things to come you create a force multiplier for every power imbalance in our world. Principle number two disclosing true facts about the security of systems that we rely upon should never be illegal. We must never ever give corporations or the state the power to silence people who know true things about the systems that we entrust with our lives our safety and our privacy. These are the foundational principles that we can use to lock the web open. Computers always obey their owners true facts about computer security are always legal to disclose. And I charge you to be hardliners on these principles. If they're not calling you fanatics and Puritans about this you're not trying hard enough. If you aren't totally uncompromising in these principles you're setting the stage for long-term harms that are worse than any short-term benefit you'll gain through a series of seemingly small compromises. If you computerize the world and don't safeguard the user of computers from coercive control history will not remember you as the heroes of progress but as the handmaidens of tyranny. Now in July the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit against the US government to invalidate section 12.01 of the DMCA. We represent two clients one is a guy named Bunny Wang you may know as the guy who broke the DRM on the Xbox the other is Matt Green an eminent security researcher from Johns Hopkins and Bunny has made a VCR for HDCP for DRM video and we're suing to make that technology legal and Matthew Green has a series of grants from the National Science Foundation to investigate a bunch of technologies that he'll have to remove the DRM to get at including industrial grade encryption devices used to secure crypto keys for processing credit cards for the security of medical records for medical devices for toll collection systems for industrial firewalls VPN technologies wireless communication systems for cars and more we need to investigate all the things it's an urgent matter. Now when Electronic Frontier Foundation wins its lawsuit we're gonna take down all the DRM protecting laws in the world like Canada's Bill C-11 along with it. Why would Canada keep Bill C-11 on the books when America the country that can coerce it into passing the law isn't following it themselves? Once the DMCA is off the books in America it won't Canadians will continue to jailbreak whether or not Bill C-11 is on the books they'll only pay American companies to do it. When the government passed Bill C-11 in 2011 they showed that if the Americans jumped off the CN Tower of Canada would too but suicide packs are mutual if America doesn't jump why should Canada? Now that our lawsuit is in play the law is indeterminate the world around you is full of computers that have been designed to disobey and control their owners to secure monopoly rents for their manufacturers. But risk takers and entrepreneurs have been slavering to break DRM. If DRM costs a customer $10 over its life you can sell them a tool to break that DRM for $5. As Jeff Bezos once said to the publishers in a moment of alarming candor your margin is my opportunity. Even before we've won our lawsuit we are changing the risk calculus for entrepreneurs in their backers giving them a purely selfish reason to help us secure an open future. It's part of a project called Apollo 1201 a 10 year mission to kill all the DRM within a decade and make the world safe for free Libre open source software because there is no future for free Libre open source software in a world of DRM because all the benefits of open systems are incompatible with systems that treat their owners as attackers. Overwhelmingly the things that we make are impermanent. What they give rise to next are the result of the decisions that we make today. There's a kind of semi apocryphal story that historians tell about the relationship of Roman roads to the future. The first Roman roads were based on the wheel base of the first Roman chariots which were based in turn on the state of Roman metallurgy which determined how long they could make an axle. Now those Roman roads form the basis for modern European roads which form the basis for modern cars. Modern cars set the parameters for how wide a railway carriage had to be if it was gonna be able to transfer a freight load from a truck to a railway carriage. Railway carriages set the maximum width for the shuttles disposable fuel tanks because they had to be transported by rail. The state of Roman metallurgy prefigured the parameters of the space shuttle. If you make a legacy of technology and skills and norms that embrace openness and freedom and transparency, you will make a commitment to care not just about the people who are alive today but all the people who will come after you. Now, I'm a science fiction writer so people often ask me whether I'm optimistic or pessimistic about the future but when you think about it, it doesn't really matter. If you were optimistic about the future and you thought that someday we would get the technology right and lock the web open, you should get up every morning and do everything you can to make sure that that happens because if it doesn't, the stakes are very high. And if you were pessimistic and you thought that we would probably end up sinking into tyranny because our entertainment technology put DRM that allowed for surveillance in all of our code that we would be Hux lead into the full Orwell, you should get up every morning and do everything you can to make sure that future doesn't come to pass because the stakes are so high. Rather than optimism or pessimism, I will brief today for hope. Hope is why when your ship sinks in the middle of the sea, you tread water not because you're likely to be picked up but because everyone who has ever picked up treaded water until someone arrived. It gives you freedom of action to do something else. It is the necessary but insufficient precondition for survival. So how can you express that hope? EFF is a member-supported organization but it's not the only one. All over the world now and in another move that would have been inconceivable 15 years ago, member-supported organizations advocating for software freedom have popped up. In Canada, there's groups like OpenMedia.ca and Creative Commons Canada. There's the Free Software Foundation, of course, Public Knowledge, and many others. What I do every month and what I think you might want to do is I sit down every month and I add up how much money I am spending on companies that are trying to make the future that I don't want to live in because you can't be pure no matter how hard you try. Even if you, like me, are running a free and open-source operating system, you're probably using hardware made by a company that ships spyware on its hard drives or does some other terrible thing because at the end of the day, corporations are transhuman, immortal, and immoral organizations that treat us as their inconvenient gut flora and they're always doing something that we don't like. So every vegan eventually meets a breatherian, every vegetarian eventually meets a vegan. You will never be pure. And so what I do every month is I add up how much money I'm spending on companies destroying the future I want to make and I give it to organizations who are trying to make the future better than that. So that is the story of where we came from. That is the story of how we can make our best beloved, our children, have a better world than the one that we have today and this is the story of where we can all go next. Thank you.