 Well, you may not be able to read everything perfectly there. Anyway, the talk I prepared may seem too similar to what Jardar just told you, but I want to give a different point of view. Here it comes. Well, I have to admit that due to technical problems, this is not free software. It's bound to have problems. It's much better quality, but then you couldn't record it on video, so that's the reason we are using this video cable here. Okay, well, not to worry, let's get started. But the problem here is the lack of free hardware. Yeah. Now that we're stopping here, it's not here at the moment, so... Okay, well, so... You may have to... This machine likes to go to sleep. But anyway... After 10 seconds. Anyway, what I want to talk about is why this is more a social movement than a technical one. I mean, the result we see of free software is that we have a technically superior system for technical users, and well, it's time more for all kinds of users. Okay, I want my presentation. Okay, let's start with definitions. So, what is free software? Well, in order to understand that, we need to talk about what software is. Software is knowledge. I mean, any program is just a series of steps you need to take from a known starting point to a known desired ending point. And well, yes, the relations may be too complex, and it's not just one algorithm or one set of algorithms. A program is much more complex, but it can be reduced to a series of algorithms pasted together with some user interaction. So, software is knowledge. It's knowing how to move between a starting and an ending point. Knowledge is information, and information is science. So, what I'm talking here is that software is like science. So, software production has been shifted from being a production of knowledge to becoming a production of a commercial product. And that's what I think has got us to the wrong direction. So, let's first assume that writing software is like writing science, where different groups specialize in thinking in our ways, but anyway. Now, about freedom. Let's talk not only about a software product or a program, but here we're talking about societies. We're talking about even living organisms. Freedom is also determination. If I am a free person, I know that I can leave you here and nobody will come with the police after me. Yes? Well, maybe so. A program that has auto-determination may grow the way it wants to grow. Yes? And it will lead to evolution. Remember what is evolution? Arbitrary changes enter as species, and the best changes survive. So, my program may be forked. I mean, two people may take my program and make it grow in different directions. So, we have in the end two different programs that compete with each other or that collaborate with each other. And that's not bad. Well, maybe one of them will die on the way forward, but maybe both will survive. And well, that's natural selection. Yep. And cross-polinization means we have multiple sources of new information coming into a program. I mean, or into a project or anything. For example, we at Debian, well, we know what we're doing. Trust me, please. Really. But we still, we get information from other projects. I mean, there's not much I may say that I like about Fedora. But we may learn something from them. For example, giving a coherent experience to the end user brings more users in. So, if we want more users in, maybe we want to have a coherent view for them. Yep. Different projects will learn from each other. And of course, science has always been like this. Science has always been free. Yep. 50 years ago, the scientific process, well, it was simple. A scientist or a group of scientists researches on a subject. Which subject will, either something he cares about, if he like say, Socrates has the resources to, I mean, he comes from a good family and has money, or he got it from, I don't know how to translate to English, but they understand the word is similar in many languages. Mesenas, a sponsor, someone, there's someone who's not a scientist, but this is interesting in getting more knowledge processed. Or maybe he's working for an institution, like most people are today in a university. Or maybe for a monarch. Many monarchs sponsored science through time. Yep. And well, he works on this project for a couple of years, then he delivers the project, and he's paid for the time he invested. I mean, he's not just working for free, but if he is, well, it's his right also. But whatever he publishes becomes the property of everybody, the property of mankind. Anybody can now build on what was discovered 3,000 years ago. Yep. Of course, if I want to build over somebody's work, I have to credit him. I have to say, well, thanks for Aristotle for discovering that volumes in water move the liquid out and blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So, well, Isaac Newton said this phrase that is very appropriate to what we're doing now. It's not that I'm a very tall man. It's not that I see further than any of you. It's that I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. And by saying that, well, he become part of the giant as well. So we're growing. But what... Sorry, I have a bit of short throat. Why am I saying that this happened until more or less 50 years ago? Well, first because of corporativism. Big corporations, big companies now have too much power. They have enough power to buy governments, to change laws, to push the direction of mankind. Burning coffee. To push the development of mankind into something that just generates more money for them. Now, we have laws such as the patent law or the copyright law, which were originally created to help the lonely inventor be able to stand up to the big corporations and not have a big disadvantage with them. But they have been twisted and perverted and well, now both laws are against the lonely inventor and work for the big companies. We have a transition of the patented process to absurd. Patented process is, well, a patent is a legal monopoly given to the inventor of something. I mean, if I make up a way of drinking coffee without burning my throat, okay, then I can sell it to you. But, of course, it will probably be some kind of apparatus. Some mechanical artifact that covers my throat and gets it down to my stomach. So I will wear it, but I wouldn't know this. But, of course, I have only limited resources. I have two hands and no money. If you have a big company, then you will start mass-producing them and drag me out of business. I can get a patent. The patent allows me to charge you if I want to give you permission to use it. But in the beginning it was a good idea, maybe 400 years ago, but it has become stupid. For example, the USPTO 59060411 granted to Peri-Hartman and other people say that it granted them in the year 2000 a patent to buy over a communications network. Well, first, I have bought over communications networks, I mean, over internet specifically, since 1996 or 1997. So this patent should not have been awarded as its prior art. All other people have done that. Second, it's too broad. Maybe in 1980 or something, I bought a pizza over the phone. That's a communications network. Maybe I took a bus to the store and bought something there. I used the communications network as well there. John Keough was awarded in 2001, if I'm not wrong, a patent for a circular device and apparatus for the facilitation of transport. In Australia, you must pay him if you want to use a wheel. In Mexico, we have a popular dish called cochinita pibil. It's very good. I would like to suggest you to try it. But since 1993, the process for making cochinita pibil is patented as well. And well, it's not that they're granting the patents to the first inventor who comes around and gives it, but we now have companies who devote all the time, that only exist to manage a portfolio of patents so they can charge others. And there are companies that only hire lawyers. I happen to have some lawyer friends, but other than that, we often regard them as the lowest life form. And we have so many patents nowadays that it's impossible to research them all while working on a project. We have millions of them. And I can assure you any project breaks many patents. Well, I'm more or less skipping the explanation here. Copyright has become eternal. I mean copyright was originally for 28 years. Now it's for the natural life term of the person plus 70 years. So we cannot just use somebody else's ideas even after he's dead. And we know all talk about intellectual property. Well, that's a very strange idea that brings together three concepts that have very little to do with each other. So I suggest you don't use the term intellectual property. Know what you're talking about because I don't think there can be any intellectual property. I mean, knowledge doesn't have an owner. Okay, so that leads us to the world today. What happens here? Well, science is health hostage. On one side, well, we are all very happy here because we won a battle, but there's still a lot of work going on in many, many other countries because there's an international discussion regarding if you can patent not an industrial process, but a mathematical one or you can patent even an idea. Not even an algorithm, just an idea that's on the air. In Europe, less than one week ago in the whole community, well, union, no. It's been approved that patents will not be effective for non-industrial related ideas. I don't have the details yet. Someone else will surely explain soon. For example, we have a very important case. You'll remember some years ago there was a lot of talk about the race to get to the human genome sequencing. We now have the human genoma fully sequenced and the leader behind the main effort was John Solston from Sander Center. But he was not, of course, the only one doing that. He was competing with other teams that wanted to have it differently. So one of the other teams was Celera Genomics. Celera Genomics wanted to patent the human genome. So if they had it their way and tomorrow I want to have a child, I will have to pay them because I'm using very intellectual property. Yes? But the thing is, if I patent the result of my research and someone else just translates it into code, well, I am not getting a patent. He is. Because patents are only for tangible works. Someone said that code is tangible. I still don't know why. But you can patent a program already made. You cannot patent something that's expressed in terms of, well, mathematical language. Well, I'm skipping here a little bit. This I already talked about. Okay. So let's get started on our talk. What is free software? Free software is the software that keeps freedom. It's software that keeps knowledge characteristics. That lets us claim back knowledge. That lets us continue working, continue developing humanity as we did up to 50 years ago. And well, many of us are in this movement not because we want a superior operating system or because we are technofreaks. We are also. But we want freedom. We want mankind to continue advancing even after we're gone. And this is the only way to claim it is back. Now, being a critic, I know Geltar already said this, but free software is the software that's assuring us freedom of use for any conceivable use. Freedom of learning. The only way I can learn how a program is implemented is by looking at its code and understanding each of its parts. Freedom of improvement. If a program works wrongly, well, I can make it better. Freedom of redistribution. I mean, I can share my knowledge with my friends. Okay, this is completely covered by him. Actually, could you go back to the slide? Of course. I think I can go back to the slide. Okay. Yeah, to tie this into your theme of science and the way scientific knowledge is disseminated, we can even think of these freedoms as like being freedom to observe, freedom to learn, freedom to experiment, and then the last point, freedom to teach. Yes, very important. Because we don't redistribute just to repeat. Okay, repeat. Well, I was going to let you tell the people, but you're the leader. Oh. Anybody? Yeah, because it wasn't a video recorder. Well, here's Brandon. Okay, I was just going to make the observation to tie these points in. I mean, we often talk about the four freedoms. For those who aren't familiar, these freedoms are from the essay by Richard Stallone of the Free Software Foundation titled something like The Four Freedoms of Free Software. And we often speak in terms of these exact verbs. You know, use, learn, improve, and redistribute. But in Gunnar's theme of scientific knowledge and research and dissemination of learning, I think there's another way to look at it. These are the same activities, but we can think of them as observing, that's usage, experimenting, improvement, and freedom of redistribution would be teaching, which is the counterpart of learning. You learn from reading the source code, but if you can't share your work, you're not able to provide the knowledge that you've acquired in a form that is easy for another person to pick up and adapt. So I think there's an educational angle in here with the scientific part. Sorry, I talked way too long. No, of course you. Now, going a bit further down, Brandon's path. Well, yes. We're quite strict on what we consider free software. We demand this for freedoms from everything we are including in the VN. For example, well, I haven't seen if the new Solaris license, I'm not just familiar with it, but I've read through Java's license or things like that. Son has a quite ambivalent position regarding free software. They say they like free software, but it's not exactly free. So that's exactly what they don't allow us. They have this thing called a son community source license. It says, well, once you're a member of the community, I mean, once you accept our license, you can learn and share and improve and modify and redistribute to anybody who has also assigned to be part of the community. So we cannot just go to an open forum and teach. Okay, this was covered by Intel Air. Okay, well, free software, actually most of us live off free software. What we do is free software, that's it, and we charge for it. There's nothing wrong with that. It's the most natural thing to do because as I told you before, the scientific process is that the researcher works on something, then gets paid and publishes. So, well, I also care for my time. My time is also valuable. So if I am developing something, I expect to be paid for it. Even I can even just get paid for telling oh, the solution for you is to use postfix. That's 100 euros. See? Okay, now a couple of last points. As a developer why do I want to not only to ask, but to really prefer for my development to a client to be free software? Well, first of all I know this is a country much more legal and much more organized than where I live in. But this will make even more sense here. First of all, I want the ability to use the code I've written before in my new developments. That will save me the development time that will reduce cost for the client because instead of working for six months really doing what I already did, I'll only work two months adapting it to the current needs. And if you're not developing software explicitly free then you don't have the right to use what you gave to one client to another one. Peer review. I can legally give any of you a copy of my code and tell you well, please can you help me solve this problem? Because I can share this code with anyone. And the way we all work is by having peer review. By having other people look at our stuff. Usually even peer review means that someone will say what you're doing is already implemented in this project. The ability to collaborate with our past works in larger projects. Well, first of all I want to collaborate in larger projects because I want to help the project and help the world have a wider knowledge of itself. But on the other side I am also a selfish person. So if I contribute to an important project I will get recognition. By having more recognition I will be invited to contribute in larger projects which will give me more recognition. And that will become well maybe a DPL. And well it also encourages good programming practices. You know the three main virtues of a programmer. A great programmer is impatient, lazy and hubris. I mean, he thinks he's the best. This was said by Larry Wall, the author of Bell. If I am lazy well I don't like writing the things over and over. I want to be able just to copy a block of code from one place to another and it should work. Then if I am a good programmer I will isolate my functions so I can just copy them over. But then again looking through thousands of lines of code searching for the right function is also a pain. I am also quite impatient. So I take the work to organize my code in such a way that I can easily find what I'm looking for. So I can be impatient. And then the most important point for free software is that I want you all to believe I am great. So I will write clean code, I will come into the lines, I will write clean information, I will indent everything as if I were not writing a spell. I mean I will make the code so easy to read you will all think I am a good coder. And by doing that I will be a good coder. Or what at least better. Okay now if I am hiring someone to work for me because not everybody is a programmer. Why do I want it to be free software? If I am just the client. Well, first of all it guarantees the system can be maintained. I mean if someone hires me to write a code for them. And then I decide to stay in Finland because the weather is very nice here. Well, someone else can take over my code. They don't depend on me. It will reduce costs because because many programs are already solved as I told you just search and many of the programs you are going to solve are already taken care of. Okay, I also depend on a single provider. This is the creation of development groups and systems integration. This means maybe now I have a small company but five years from now this may grow a lot. And I may be hiring 10 people. Maybe the 10 people I hire for system developing are not experienced developers but by having them be able to read the software that was written for me I will be able to make them into a group and start having interesting results. And of course that gives recognition and publicity to my company. Just well, I don't have the list of sponsors here but sponsoring something like this even if it's just like having people come over to them gives recognition to a company and that's something that they say that matters in the real world. Okay, so just as conclusions free software is a radical departure from the knowledge production systems we have grown used to in the last decades. It's nothing new, it leads us back to development as it has always been before this. It challenges the relation between knowledge producers and knowledge consumers as we are all the same now. And finally, even if you don't want to free software will get you. So, well, I think we're a bit short in time so I don't know if I should display this but I can be reached at gmail.dbm.org and if you can read more or less I will put the slides in that address somewhere during the next couple of years. So you're lazy but we're impatient. But you're hubris will win out and you'll put the slides out. Okay, so you can take maybe one or two questions. Okay, so I can take maybe one or two questions. I suppose depending on the length of them. Is there any question? Come on, I can take one or two. Okay. I have another comment I don't want to dominate these things so if somebody has questions, please take one. Well, if no one asks a question grab the wheel. I do that at work too. One thing that I noticed or that just occurred to me on one of your last slides was the fact of basically open sourcing consulting work I think it has I think there's a bit of a double-edged sword to it but the good edge is that in a way I think it encourages what I'm going to boldly call virtuous behavior. In other words, by open sourcing the work that we do for a given consulting client it keeps us from being lazy in a bad way and just trying to fit all solutions or keep fitting every different pattern in the same hole. So we don't keep reusing the same tool and instead we properly customize for each client because while we can use the same fundamentals in practice most consulting jobs are highly specific in nature. At least that's my experience of progeny and if we open source the stuff that we do it encourages re-use in the good ways but it also probably keeps us from or I think it keeps us from falling into a trap of being bulky or resistant to the customer's needs because we really just want to reuse this thing that we had five years ago that's a black box, we'll tell the customer oh it can't be done, just pay me my $50,000 for this undocumented source code and it's important for progress as you talk about it's important for scientific progress to keep thinking keep working, keep attacking problems and coming up with new things instead of just extracting economic rent on old things. Yeah, I don't know if everybody about to hear it but yes I agree with what he says we have to be lazy but in a good way we have to take care of our code we have to be able one very important characteristic of pre software is that it doesn't matter if five people implement the same thing in a different way and four people's work of months gets thrown away we have to be ready to throw our code away if there's a better solution or if our code has grown old and full of quirks and un-maintainable it's very important to be able to recognize that and not only for pre software just for programming in general so well I'm leaving because Aigar seems to be getting mad at me he's not speaking a good talk