 I hope you had a good time so far. And our keynote speaker today is Karen Sandler. She'll be talking about companies, free software, and you. Karen is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. And she used to be the executive director of the Kinome Foundation. And she's also working a lot on the outreach program for women and several other programs, I guess. So everybody, please welcome Karen. Thanks so much. I can't even tell you how beyond excited I am to be at DebKonf. I was briefly at the New York DebKonf, and I was so impressed and enthralled by Debian that I kind of ran away. And so all these years later, it's so exciting to be here and being a speaker. So I'm executive director of Conservancy. Raise your hand if you've heard of Conservancy. So that's almost everyone. Hooray. We're a nonprofit charitable fiscal sponsorship organization, so these are all of our member projects. If you're here, you are surely using a few of them. And two of the member projects that are not listed here include the DPL Compliance Project for Linux kernel developers, and also the Debian Copyright Aggregation Project. And I'll talk a little bit about those in a bit. So I'm also a lawyer, which when I admit, I often have to hide behind the podium, let's people throw rotten fruit at me. But I only do pro bono legal work. And I do that as a volunteer for the Free Software Foundation and Gnome and a few other free software organizations. I am really, really into free software and the reason why I'm really into free software, for many reasons, but largely because I'm a cyborg. I actually literally have a big heart. My heart is three times the size of a normal person's heart. And it's fine. I'm mostly asymptomatic. It's not a big deal. But I'm at a very high risk of suddenly dying. The medical term is actually sudden death. And it's 2% to 3% per year compounding that my risk of suddenly dying. And I was diagnosed at age 30. And so it's a very high risk of suddenly dying. But it's all fine because my doctors prescribed a pacemaker defibrillator. And when you go to the doctor's office and they tell you that you need one of these things, the electrophysiologists have these devices in their desk drawers. So the medical device companies give them a stack of them. They're extremely expensive. I got the bill for mine. I think it was something like $75,000 US. And so they have them in their drawer. They slide them over to you because they want you to hold them and to know that they're so small and they're so light and they're not scary. And so they're like, hold this. So I take it and I hold it. And I'm looking at it. And the doctor's looking at me like, right, this is OK, right? And I say, OK, so what does it run? And the guy looked at me and said, run. And I said, oh, yes. And I explained their software in this device. And we had a little back and forth. And he said, well, don't worry about it because I'm going to go get the representative from Atronik who you're so lucky is in the office today. And that guy said, software, run. And this sent me down a path where I started researching the safety of software in these devices. And I was able to luckily make it a part of my job and did a bunch of research. And ultimately, I decided that I had to get this a favor later and get proprietary software literally implanted in my body and screwed into my heart. And that I would advocate for software safety. And when you start looking at your own mortality and your own life, and you realize that you rely on software that you can't see, that you can't review, you can't get anybody else to review it. If there's a problem, you can't patch it. And we're still, societally this is the problem, we're locked into single vendors. If we have a problem with our, if there's a catastrophic failure at one of these medical device companies, then we're out of luck. I can't update my defibrillator, and it is a problem. I have to wait until Metronik, I'm picking on Metronik, but I chose them because I thought they were the best of the bunch. But I have to wait for Metronik to admit that there's a problem for them to make a fix, to deploy that fix. I'm completely powerless. And once you start thinking about your medical devices in your heart, it's not a long walk to get to cars, which a luxury car is like 100 million lines of code. And the software engineering estimates that there's one bug introduced for every 100 lines of code. So even if we're catching the vast majority, medical device recalls have been, have demonstrated that simple things like all Paris testing would have avoided 98% of the software recalls in medical devices. It's all really fascinating, and it's a whole talk in and of itself. But for me, this got me extremely passionate about software freedom, where I previously thought that open source was cool. I have now come along to the view that software freedom is absolutely essential to our lives, to our society, and to our overall framework. And that has put me solidly in the free software space, and I am lucky that I get to work on the charity side. So the software freedom conservancy is a 501c3 that's a reference to the US tax code, extremely geeky, and you get a lot of people in our space who know all about the different tax codes and will rattle off numbers to you. It's like the same people who rattle off sections of the GPL at you, tell you which sections those are. So c3 refers to the US tax code, and it's a charity. And there are analogs in every country most of them have different kinds of charitable organizations versus a trade association, which in the US is a C6. You'll hear people say, it's a C3, it's a C6. C3 charity, C6 trade associations. We've got companies free software is developed in a wide variety of ways, in a wide variety of organizations. And all of these organizations are working together on a lot of the same goals, but with extremely different motivations. As you look at all these different areas, you can sort of start to contemplate how that might start to play out. And in this talk, I'm sort of focusing on the company element because I think that's, we're sort of at a point of maturity in freedom of answer software where we're able to see what's happened over a longer period of time and start to look forward in how that impacts us. So we'll move forward, oh yeah. So I think it's so awesome that companies have an interest in free software. Raise your hand if you're making money by working in free and open source software. It's like three quarters of the room. I did notice that John Sullivan of the FSF was losing his hand too. And I should raise my hand too because I do take a salary from Consurvency. But the company interest in free and open source software is fantastic because it means we all get to work on the, like making sure that there's great free and open source software that companies use in their products. It works out well for a lot of reasons. And I think that in fact, it's essential that companies be interested in free and open source software because it takes free and open source software to another level. And it means that free software is doing something right if the software is so good that companies are deploying it in their products. And it's now an essential part of the software that companies need to be relevant and to bring their products to market. And it's great that there's money in free and open source software because everyone needs to eat. And on top of that, we can do a lot more when there are people working full time on these issues. And when companies are employing those people to work in free software, there are interesting things that happen. So this works out some of the time. It works out. Where companies employ people to work in free software and great work is done and everybody benefits from it. There's companies have increased software to draw from, companies work together, where they're allies in some ways and competitors in others. And it's very interesting. This is a slide from the Linux Foundation, for sure, I might be, they may have updated it since then. But it sort of says all of the places where Linux is and you can kind of appreciate how much money there is in free software and how relevant Linux is generally with the Linux kernel. But when you start to evaluate, or GNU-Linux, when you start to evaluate the presence of companies in free software, you start to feel the boundaries of where we say, like lawyers say, our interests are aligned. Like when we're talking about people who have different motivations or are interested in different things but who are working together. And so their interests are aligned. And so you can see how the free software community and society's interests are often aligned with companies. But when you start to think about it closely, you start to get to the borders and boundaries of where those interests are, in fact, aligned. And during that introductory panel yesterday about open hardware, we started to touch on it. And Andy was talking about a particular product where the product was effectively bricked because the company who had sold it had turned off the services to it. And BDEL was talking about how in an internet of things, we really need open standards and companies need to, we need to make choices where we can work together so that the efforts that we make individually extend to everyone. And I think that was sort of, starts to really hit it on the head. And I think that was we think critically about the role of free software in society or the role of free software in companies. We hit against this idea very, very quickly. Edward Snowden gave a really amazing keynote Q&A at Libre Planet and there he said, while sometimes corporations are on our side and sometimes stand up for the public interest, we should not have to rely on them. And that's the thing is that companies can do the right thing. They can have societal interests at heart, but it's not their goal, it's not their job, it's not what they're set up for, they're set up to maximize profit. And there are ethical rules in different countries have different rules about things that companies can do. And I don't wanna overly dramatize it because I'm not, I wouldn't, I don't think that anyone can say that companies are evil. There could in extreme cases be some evil people working at a particular company, but these things are much more complex. It's just that companies have the goal of making profit and they're not necessarily looking out for the public interest. And in fact, they often have incentives such that they're not focused on the public interest at all. How raise your hand if you've heard of Volkswagen and the scandal that happened recently, I think that's probably everybody. Okay, raise your hand if you've heard about VMware and the lawsuit against them. So that's like, okay, like three quarters. Okay, so I chose these two companies not because they both begin with the letter V. But so the Volkswagen scandal, which I don't think I need to go into, I think everybody raised their hand, was very interesting because it was a part of technology where if the engineers in house, like they were working with VMware had felt empowered to raise the issue much, much earlier, you would see that actually Volkswagen would have done better profit-wise too. It's a very interesting situation because having this scandal and some of the people knew that this was happening and the corporate culture was such that it was more in, they determined it was more in Volkswagen's interests to keep this quiet, hoping they wouldn't be caught. And corporate interests sometimes point in that direction, whereas if they're, okay, we'll get to that in a minute, but VMware is very interesting because, so for people who didn't know and there were about a quarter of you who didn't, one of the things that we do at the Software Freedom Conservancy is that we have a group of kernel developers who hold copyrights in their portions of the Linux kernel and they come together as a group within Conservancy to have us enforce their copyrights. And so we go knocking on companies doors and we say, hey, you've got no source with your product and no offer for source. Can you do something about it? And we have a lot of back and forth about that. We also now have the Debian Copyright Aggregation Project, which does a similar thing for Debian. And VMware was a company that we had tried to get into compliance for four years. And while they had made significant progress towards doing the right thing and having compliance at the end of the day, they put their foot down and said that they basically didn't agree with the derivative works provisions of the GPL as how it related to VMware and they refused to comply. And so Christoph Helwig filed a lawsuit that Conservancy funded in Germany and that's starting to unfold and it'll be interesting to see where that case lies. But all of these things point towards the motivations of companies with their use of software and how that might be different from what the community might want. And one of those ways that that plays out in a very fundamental way is the time scale at which companies are acting are often more concerned with their quarterly results than they are about their long-term results. And so they're gonna be highly motivated to look a little bit more short-term as opposed to, there are some companies that think very strategically about the long-term, but overall corporate culture has become, global corporate culture has become one such that companies are really trying to maximize their quarterly results. And what makes a good short to medium-term decision for a company is often not at all what's good for society or even what's good in the long-term interests of customers because companies don't necessarily care if you'll be a customer of theirs in 10 years. They care more that you'll continue tomorrow and next week and next month, especially in technology where it's very hard to predict where technology might go within the next year or two. There are a lot of ways in which companies don't necessarily have your interest at heart that are not necessarily nefarious. So for example, I have this pacemaker defibrillator. I am not in the standard set of people who get pacemaker defibrillators. Still, I'm young enough that that's still true. And I was recently pregnant and when I've been pregnant, I've been shocked twice inappropriately by my defibrillator because my heart was doing something that a normal pregnant woman's heart does. Pregnant women often have their heart's race and my pulse shot up and I got shocked twice even though I was not in need of a shock. And simply put, I couldn't expect Medtronic to be focused on my use case because for example, when I went to my obstetrician in New York City at a major hospital where the high-risk doctor surely saw thousands, I mean, she was a senior in her career, she's a great doctor. And I said, there were a couple of things that I said to her, if you have patients with defibrillators, you should know that if they get an epidural, it reminds you of getting shocked. You should know this for your future defibrillator patients. And she looked at me and she said, Karen, I don't have defibrillator patients that have babies. I had one other patient in all of my years, like five years ago who had a defibrillator who had a baby in my hospital. And it's just simply the class of people who have defibrillators and the class of people who have babies overlap very little. And so Medtronic as a company doesn't have a strong sample set to work with. They're not focused on the use case. I promise you that Medtronic does not want their pregnant patients being shocked. They have a strong interest in making sure that pregnant women with heart conditions are not inappropriately shocked. But nonetheless, I was shocked because the company simply wasn't focused on my use case. And this can happen in many ways. And it's hard to predict the ways in which you're using software that was written for one purpose, how you might be using it for a use case that wasn't anticipated. And this is true across the board. And my health condition is just sort of a metaphor for all the ways we use software. When you move from one geographic region to another, communities have different needs and they have different cultures and they use software very differently. And then you could have a whole other, we could talk a lot and I hope that we do informally about how improving diversity in our communities helps us deal with that a little bit more by anticipating use cases across cultures and across expectations. So that's sort of one way that there's sort of a mismatch. How many people here think that free to open, free software and open source software are the same thing? Raise your hand if you think, it's not a trick question. Like really whatever you think, like if you think it's the same thing, raise your hand. How many people think they're radically different things? Or different things, okay. So it's interesting. So more people thought they were very different things than thought they were the same, but there were a lot of people who were undecided. And I can tell you that maybe like five years ago, maybe more, I was on a real advocating bent to convince people that it really didn't matter what we called free software and open source software. It didn't matter what we called it as long as we were talking about freedom. And if you look, the definition, the four freedoms and the open source definition line up pretty well. There are a few very historic situations where there are licenses that are approved by OSI but not considered free by the, not on the free software foundations list. But generally what they're talking about in principle are the same thing. And so I think that from a legal perspective, we could use the terms interchangeably. But with the perspective now that I've had of watching companies in our space a little bit more, I'm actually feel a little bad about the glossing over that I had done because the motivations that are represented by the terms free. So even if it's not a legal description of licenses, the motivations that people assign when they talk about free software versus when they talk about open source software are very interesting and very different. Has anybody here seen the Silicon Valley? Some people have apparently. Okay, so like everyone who's seen the TV show Silicon Valley was laughing very loudly. So not very many people in here. There's this TV show in the United States called Silicon Valley. It's hilarious. It's about the startup culture in Silicon Valley in California. And there's this company called Hooli which is like an analog to Google. And it's just a big, but it's like an amalgamation of different companies. And in the first season of the show everywhere they go in Silicon Valley, people are talking about making the world better through whatever startup idea they had. And there were posters everywhere making the world better through blah-dee-blah-dee-blah-dee-blah. But actually they weren't making the world, trying to make the world better. They were just using that language. And when I first saw that on TV, my jaw dropped. I was like, wait, that is our rhetoric. And we've been using that in software freedom to talk about making the world better. And it's been completely co-opted by companies who are also active in our space who may also be to some extent making the world better, but co-opting that message so strongly that it's now a joke. Like it's now a completely, it's such a joke that everywhere in this show there's like for the entire season it was somebody, but we are raising our series A, but the important thing is we're making the world better. And it's interesting to sort of like take a hard look at, and it actually threw me through a loop because I thought, wait, am I trying to make the world better through software freedom really? Or have I completely lost the plot? Because this is my, this is what I've been saying and is that true? And I think I sort of have come out at the other end of saying, well actually, this is residual from a very good job that the free software community has been doing of making companies feel welcome and making them feel empowered and good about the choices they make by investing in free software and that there's a lot of good things that are related to this that we can continue to increase, but we have to be very wary of what our motivations are and who's selling us what so that we know how we can interact with them and what we should do for his partnerships. And I can tell you that undertaking GPL enforcement, completely eye-opening to see what companies do and how they really think about free software because when you ask them to comply and they're out of compliance, when you ask them to really release their proprietary kernel models, the answer is you get or not about making the world better. It probably is you. And so, you know, we need companies. We need to work with them. Free software won't be relevant. We won't win, I mean win whatever that means. We won't be relevant. We won't really make the world better if we don't also have companies participating and contributing and companies have a lot to add with their own perspective, but we need to do it on our own terms and we need to sort of as a community take more ownership of that and be more of a participant in that culture. So, I'm naturally an optimist. By nature, I'm a very like, I really think the best of people and I think the best of companies. I think the best of the world. I, you know, I've been accused of being a bit of a Pollyanna at times. However, as a lawyer, there's nothing about being trained to be a lawyer except being trained to be a pessimist and expect absolutely the worst of everyone and you have to expect that situations will go bad and you have to expect that even though you're working positively with a company today that tomorrow that relationship might go south and it might be because the people who are in ownership or running the company have had incentives to change their goals but it could also just simply be that the company has been acquired or that leadership has changed completely. You can't expect that a company that is a good actor today will be a good actor tomorrow. Again, not to say you should be unreasonably suspicious but you need to plan for the worst case scenarios no matter what and this is why we have lawyers and this is why we have legal regimes. And what it's really about is it's about power and it's about a power balance and what's one of the things that's really cool about Free and Open Source software is that we have some legal regimes that are sometimes in place to help keep that balance of power and the GPL is a fundamental mechanism for keeping that balance of power with companies. Keeping that balance of power with each other and also keeping that balance of power in check with developers and with society in general. So this is just a copy heart logo with the GPL. But as you may have noticed, some people have sort of like in the last five to 10 years lax permissive licensing has really taken hold. And it's been a real, I mean, if you see some real vigorous nonning in the audience and I think a lot of that has to do with not the original emphasis on lax permissive licensing, not the original freedom emphasis from the VSD community is that cultural insistence on a pure kind of freedom that where folks thought that the GPL was too restrictive and then the only way of having true freedom was to have the ability to proprietorize it and that as a concept of freedom, I think that it's actually shifted and it's not the reason why in the last 10 years the lax permissive licensing has become so popular. It's become so popular because companies have been messaging so strongly that the only way you can get your software adopted is by using a lax permissive license. And people have bought this so wholeheartedly. It's so fascinating to me because we had so much success with Linux under the GPL and there are certain accomplishments, like the technology gets to a place with the GPL that you wouldn't necessarily be able to get to otherwise and Linus Torvalds, for example, has publicly said that the biggest contribution he made was not any technological contribution but instead the licensed choice behind the Linux kernel. And so we have a real, we're really out of balance on this because we've gone very strongly as a society towards non-copy-lefted software and this has upset sort of the balance of what we can expect from companies and I thought it was very interesting. This is Martin Fink of Hewlett Packard Enterprises at the last Linux Con Europe. He gave a talk and he said we need to change the default back to copy-left from permissive licensing and he gave a lot of really interesting business-minded reasons why it's good for business that this is the case. He said that what happens is if you choose a non-copy-left license you have to introduce all of this governance and infrastructure to make sure that companies play fairly with one another and it's expensive and it's artificial and it sometimes breaks down. But from our perspective I think that from a community project, from a community perspective I think his message of change the default has a whole additional power to it and I thought hearing somebody who is coming from such a corporate perspective echo within a corporate construct what I think that we need to do more as a society and community was I think extremely powerful and so if somebody tries to tell you that if you're starting a new project that you will only find success and popularity by using a permissive license it's simply not true and it's again trading those long-term versus short-term goals maybe you'll get some companies to adopt it a little bit sooner but down the road your project is potentially going to be forked by another company and you won't be able to see any of those changes and you'll be completely locked out of the relevant part of your software. So this is something to think about and enforcement basically without enforcement there is no copy left effectively. You could choose a license until you're blue in the face but if there's not anyone who's going to enforce it at the end of the day you may as well have never made that choice to begin with. Nobody is going to take you seriously if there are no consequences to not following the rules. But having centralized power can really really frustrate that balance so if you have one company that so if it's for example a strong copy left license if it's an AGPL or in a GPL program but all the copyrights are owned by a single company then you have a power balance and the fact that the software is under a copy left license helps but it doesn't get you all the way to that great balance and in many ways Debian really has the best of both worlds because with Debian it's such a big project and there are copyrights that are so diversely held no one could aggregate those copyrights even if they try but we don't necessarily want to because having a project that's held diversely is extremely powerful and helpful. It keeps these power balances much more in check but at the same time Debian has set up the copyright aggregation program with Conservancy and so we will aggregate copyrights for people who are interested in doing so and that way we can help if there is a violation it's easier to pursue it because if you have a diversely held project and there's a violation who's going to be the one to knock on the company's door they're not going to take any one developer seriously enough because it's such a small amount of code so if we aggregate it together it means that not only do we empower a single steward that's going to be helpful but it also enables someone with a single voice to be able to sort of speak for enforcement to make sure that the right thing is done for the project. We also, to respect the diversely held copyrights we also now take enforcement agreements so that if people don't want to have their copyrights enforced we can do enforcement agreements in addition to just plain old copyright stewardship and so it's sort of in many ways it's the best of both worlds. I mean I think that a lot of the things that Debian has done has made it such a unique community. I think that the way that there are so many developers that are so independent in the way you come together and elect a single DPL is a amazing and unusual thing and I think it's the reason why the Debian community has weathered the time so well even though many companies are building on Debian for their products the Debian community stays so strong it's so independent and it's so interesting and it's so unique. Another thing that I think we all need to pay attention to that can help tip that balance is with our employment agreements. How many people here have an employment agreement in place for what they're working on now? Wow, that's so low. It's like only like a quarter of the people in here. I bet many of you actually have employment agreements that you don't realize that you have. I don't pay one, I'm exempt from life. I don't pay one, I'm exempt from life. So I'll move a little bit faster on this which is to say that when you take a new job at a company you will be generally asked to sign an employment agreement and those employment agreements have been getting stronger and stronger and stronger over time and they often ask for the world. They basically tell you that everything that or agree that everything that you do either not just within the context of your job but at all during the time that you're employed is owned by your company. It's a good thing for you to get in Germany. Yeah, so their different jurisdictions have some have some checks and balances but the lines on that aren't necessarily as clear as you think that they are. So it's really, it's all very, very fascinating stuff but in any case making sure that you have an agreement with your employer about working on free software is important and making sure that you negotiate that and ask for more is essential. So we at Conservancy are working on a project where we're publishing standard contract language so you can say I would like provisions one, three and five when you negotiate with an employer and they can say oh we never take five but maybe we take one and three occasionally and we're working with some companies so that they can, they'll review it and they'll say we may never take these provisions like we may never let individuals hold their copyrights but if we do the language looks like this but asking companies if you can hold your own copyrights some people do negotiate it and some of those I admit are rockstar developers but some are not and if we all ask for it if everybody who is like a lot of the talented developers that a company seeks to hire ask to keep their copyrights or asks for the freedom to work on free and open source software that's outside of their job if we all ask for it then some companies will start to bend because they'll see it as a feature for recruiting talent and together we can make a huge difference in the culture of the space and the bargaining power. Some people are advocating for like unionized free software development which is a very interesting notion but I think that it's sort of from a plain old normal way I think it would be very interesting if we all started to ask about keeping our own copyrights and other provisions so we're working to enable people to do that. Support the charitable nonprofits you know think about it's very self-serving so I know people are laughing or Keith is laughing but it's not just the conservancy it's the SPIs right? It's all of the, it's and now B-Tales nodding. It's supporting the charitable structures around free and open source software because they are what are going to enable us to keep the interests of the community and the interests of society at heart and the free software foundation, SPI, conservancy we're organizations that have a mission to support free and open source software for freedom and so keeping the charitable organization strong is really essential and conservancy in the last last year shifted it's business model so we're now individually funded primarily rather than company funded and we've found that it's enabled us to be focused more on the programs that are important to community and important to society and if we were funded by companies if we were trade association we could never do that in the same way and it's not that trade associations don't do good work and it's not that they can't also be doing things in the public good it's just it's not their focus and so I would say really like you're all so awesome for being at DubConf and for being involved in the Debian community and Debian is so unique and so focused on freedom so stay focused on freedom is the most amazing thing and together we can make the world better and not in an ironic hilarious way so I'm happy to announce that due to a generous donation by an anonymous donor anybody at DubConf who signs up as a conservancy supporter will be matched so it's a really good time if you're I don't wanna give a sales pitch but it's a good time because somebody who's here who cares passionately about software freedom is going to give this to match that donation anyway so does anybody have any questions do we have time for questions? Thanks Karen for that talk. Thank you very much. We started a bit late so we have time for a few questions. Okay so my question goes. Hi Mo. Is it on? Is it on? Is it on? Is it on? Yeah it's on. My question goes more like being pulled by what Abba said. You mentioned a lot of work from the software freedom conservancy and well benefits regarding the work that you are doing but in a community such as ours does do you have or do you work with similar groups not focusing in the US because I mean yeah the rules are different everywhere and I'm sure it would be very hard for you personally to litigate here or whatever. Yes I am a US lawyer admitted to practice in the state of New York and not anywhere else. This is not legal advice and I am not your lawyer. However free software is global. You can't simply have a US focus and work in free software. So we're focused on a lot of different restrictions. Obviously we're focused in places that a lot of us are. So we have like our programs where we have enforcement agreements and assignment agreements like for the Linux kernel and for Debian. We obviously work with lawyers in those places too so we have a European agreement for assignment. Now we are a US entity so it means that to the extent that we're taking copyrights from developers we're gonna hold them in the US because we are in the US but we have function abroad. We function everywhere and we for example don't have any South African lawyers we've been working with but whenever there's a place where someone is very interested in and there's enough of an interest that it would be worth the expenditure we look to experts from those places and I think that you simply can't just think about the US. However I think these, it's interesting is that for better or for worse a lot of the countries have followed the US in a lot of policy and often that's for worse. In many places the patents regimes have followed the US and I think a lot of the charitable structures as well. And so most of the, and for example the Food and Drug Administration's review in the US over my medical advice. I used to when I gave a talk, the medical advice was talk I would do a lot of research into the local places Food and Drug Administration and review processes but every place I went to it was the same. They didn't review the software, they didn't. So most of the big ideological issues are the same from place to place and for the details we work with partners. Phil? When you were talking about retaining copyright. A company I was working for was doing some work for the phone manufacturer in 2000 and the idea of retaining copyright really wasn't happening. So as a thought back position we suggested to them that if we were modifying existing projects around copying ethical licenses obviously we'd have to comply with those licenses and we'd like to retain copyright in that instance and they went for that. And then once you've got an agreement like that it's not so difficult to persuade someone to upload a project that hasn't got very much in it under a license and then fork it. Early is really important. Making these decisions early is so essential. And you can never turn back the clock and you'll never have as much power as the day that a company is trying to recruit you. Once they have decided to hire you before they have actually entered to agree with you before you've come on staff they never want to hire you as much as in that moment because they've gone through the whole search. They've decided you're the one for them the process is over. They just want to get the paperwork done and that's the time. And if you think even though you may think that it'll blow up the deal you can always blame me. You're like a lawyer told me I need to do these things and then they'll say well we never do that and you can gauge the interest and if you're nice about it and not adversarial about it then it's fine. David has a question. I have a question from IRC. So Jeffan writes from Nehiko I assume. Karen what do you think about the latest Oracle and Google law fight about GAVA and the GPL? I'm recording an outcast Free as in Freedom about the whole issue. It would take a long time to discuss it. So more to come on that. Is there any more questions? So echoing the thing about employment agreements I mean my experience in the UK I'm sure it's similar elsewhere is companies will try will just try things on. There'll be a whole load of things in most employment agreements that are strictly not enforceable and probably illegal in many jurisdictions but they'll put them in anyway. It's just a case of talking through it. They're negotiations, they're not fixed terms. Every employment contract is different. It's entirely up to you to talk about it. I work for a company that self identifies as an IP company. So I just scribbled out the thing saying that they own everything I do and it caused no hassle. It's not a problem. Yeah, people think that because they're given a contract and it looks very official that it's fixed and there's no chance to edit it but that's almost never true. There are some companies who would rather walk away from employing you than editing their employment agreement but they're the exception rather than the rule and so because a lot of companies will negotiate it there's a lot of room there and if it becomes more standard if more developers ask more employees ask for edits to the employment contracts and especially if they all ask for it in the same way then it's generally true in contract negotiations that when you negotiate with someone you ask for way more than you want because you want to be able to come down so often it's built into these contracts provisions that companies know they're willing to move from and if you ask them to move on something else they'll say, well we can't move on that but we have this other provision we could give you and so chances are you're not getting the best deal that's already available to you if you haven't asked. Okay, so I think we should move on now because it's getting out of time. Karen will be around at EPCOM until Thursday I think so talk to her if you have any more questions or comments and we are reconvening about ten minutes for the billion people and even more phones by Ketina Krishnan. Thank you.