 Thank you. So, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm very grateful for your chance. I'm particularly happy that the traffic didn't prevent us all from getting here, so I feel in that sense very lucky. Why would one build a startup around free software? Well, I guess I would begin this way. If you're going to make an automobile company, should you have to begin by inventing a wheel, what justifies the extraordinary importance of free software or open source software in the culture of business in the 21st century is that we have one net. One set of ways to think about that net of the protocols and APIs that make it possible for us to interact with one another. And about 30 years ago, people, mostly my client and friend and comrade Richard Stallman, decided that in a world of software that controls us, we should control it. The fundamental proposition is that users of software have rights. Among the rights they have are the rights to understand, study, improve, fix and share, which really is, after all, what businesses do. They study and understand the market, the products and the things that can be done to improve them, and then they fix, improve and share. Now, obviously, the question who owns and who gets paid, that is also very important. But as we have been learning in the human race since the 17th century, science is better conducted by sharing, though it enables lots of businesses, than it would be by owning. You can imagine what would happen in the business world if mathematics were owned by people. And if you need some math in your business, you have to go and purchase enough math to do whatever it is you're going to do. And then when you run out with math, you have to buy an upgrade and all of you know. And along that seems completely absurd to us. In the first era of software, from the invention of the transistor to the onset of free UNIX that everybody could use, that really was how software worked. You bought enough to complete the task, your customer bought enough or licensed enough to complete the task, and when you ran out, they were there to upgrade. This is not a good environment for the rapid development of small, aggressive businesses with a point to make and customers to serve, which is probably why by the maturity of the old principle, the largest, most deeply funded monopoly in the history of the earth had some 96, 97, 98% of the market for software for small computers that really worked for people. The two largest governments on earth, the United States government and the government of the European Union, attempted to break that monopoly or discipline it or in some fashion bring Microsoft into keeping with the general understanding of how competitive markets ought to work and they failed. The United States government gave up the European Union, soldiered on on the question whether you want to be able to choose the browser that you get with Windows and a whole bunch of entrepreneurial activity based around free software did the job that the governments couldn't do. It's true that a big, rich company, Google, had an awful lot to do with that, but Android's just a piece of free software and the era of Android as a semi-closed, semi-proprietary form of FOSS is over. Big companies and small ones all around the world have figured out that Android is FOSS and you can just change it to maybe do what you want, including maybe have somebody else in the search box or something, maybe even something a little more radical than that. And in the meantime all around the world hardware is developing in very important ways which make the idea of the proprietary development of software more or less can be obsolete. There is no large producer on earth with proprietary software who isn't also largely dependent on FOSS. That Microsoft cloud that stares back at me in every airport I visit around the world, curing cancer, taking care of forest fires and that wonderful stuff it does, can of course not exist without deployments that cover workloads that don't have anything to do with Windows. Microsoft Azure cloud doesn't do a better job of having Linux workloads pretty soon. It will begin to rain over there and let me know what will happen to them. Similarly, my friends at Redwood Shores who make the most wonderful proprietary database on earth or at any rate the one that you all have to pay service charges on, they are also the largest licensor of GPL, the database software in the world. And without MySQL the Oracle plan for its strategic future would be quite different from the one that I see Mr. Ellison now has. In other words the idea that software is really science and it proceeds according to the rules of openness and fair exchange and complete understanding and reproducibility and incremental improvement. The idea that software is a science and the people making, using and improving it have rights has dominated now and Trump not completely but very strongly. The idea that software is a product under shrink wrap and the company that makes it owns all of it through and through from top to bottom and don't even ask how it works. We have in other words graduated to a much more sophisticated and scientific view of how software is made and that more scientific view, that better understanding that we are really engaged in learning and sharing has also transformed the business world. Why in particular does startup culture need faucets so much? To which the answer is that startup culture is always a form of insurgency in business. It's always a form of guerrilla attack on entrenched forces. My friends in capitalism are very fond of saying how much they like competition. But they're lying in their teeth. The capitalism dislikes as much as it dislikes competition and it is always trying to bring it to an end. History is always supposed to end with my incumbency whether I am the IBM that first employed me in the late 1970s or the VM where it is about to create her tomorrow. Incumbency is always what startup culture is designed to interfere with. And the major problem, the one that the incumbent, whatever the incumbent his loves best, is the steep curve you have to climb in order to compete with the competition. The competition where it calls barriers to entry. The purpose of FOS then is to lower barriers to entry if possible to an actual latitudinal flatness. Everybody can learn, can understand, can study, can fix, improve, innovate, reuse and share. There isn't therefore a better way of organizing the technology for startup culture than to universalize demand for free and open source software and let the best program win. But we don't do that work mostly. We advise startups because we're lawyers and we like helping people make money so they will give us money. But our practice primarily concentrates itself, which is in mine, at least in North America. It primarily concentrates itself on the care and the feeding of what are, from my point of view, invisible software companies. Software companies have enormous reach of power and technical dare that have no external presence in the world. They don't own real estate, they don't have patents, they rarely but not never have trademarks. They go out into the world for the purpose of making and distributing software. My friends at the Red Hat Corporation have an extraordinarily good business and they do it very well and I have nothing bad to say against them. But my clients at Debian produce a perfectly coordinated, integrated, well configured, used on any hardware in the world collection of 33,000 and some odd packages, which dwarfs the contents of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and which runs on a broader variety of hardware intended to serve a broader variety of purposes than anybody's commercially integrated FOS, let alone anybody's proprietary software will ever do. The technical work obviously doesn't involve lawyers, we're not integrating, but sometimes in our spare time we do a little bit of that. What we're doing is trying to figure out how the legal and structural activities of a software company that big can be reduced to the point where no money has to be paid for them, no enterprise or headquarters, a central has to be created. And where the statesmanship and diplomacy necessary, and there is quite a good deal of it, can be performed by Rishi sitting at her desk in New York or flying off to see businessmen somewhere without the kind of entourage and the kind of heavy weight that none of our lovely professionally organized organizations that so generously support SFLC can throw at anything. We have to participate in standards organizations where we can't afford to pay people salaries to sit quietly with their hands bowed for months waiting for the other guy to speak first. We have to deal with patent defense without having a bunch of patents of our own to throw back, which is one without our close alliance with Keith and the OIN, we'd be in trouble. Our activity as lawyers and as business diplomats is really about handling the residual part of making software in the thinnest possible sense that for which most of our competing profit making organizations must devote a lot of their resources. And the great, if I may be permitted to say so myself, the great innovation that I've been working on for the past 25 years is really how to take all the lard out of the headquarters functions of these invisible software companies. Only enough this really does put us in a pretty good position to buy startups, which are after all of a different kind, free software projects like our own in many senses. What they require is the ability to exist in that world of complexity that is business. Finance, intellectual property portfolio management, the use of patent and trademark and copyright licensing systems in order to provide safety to do and the ability to distribute and we are insurgents. We're not as much insurgents as we were back when Mr. Gates and Mr. Bowman called us a cancer on American society when that's what they're calling you, you really aren't insurgent, there's nothing you really have to plead guilty to at least some form of insurgency. And now in a funny way we aren't incumbents too, not maybe at Debbie and not maybe at the Apache Software Foundation, certainly not a rich installments free software foundation, incumbents is hard to say even as FSF approaches its 30th birthday. But our relationships with the IT industry in the world and with governments and other parties who consume large amounts of software, our relationships have reached maturity. People understand who we are, they understand we understand who they are and when we sit down at the table, whether it's a CTO or a CEO or a partner in a major law firm working on behalf of enterprise IT companies, nobody has to be told, now what is this free software stuff again? How does all this work? They may not understand the licenses, we spend a fair amount of time explaining to the GPL to well educated lawyers who have never had to twist their head around in the funny way that FOSLA assumes to them when they first encounter it. But they're growing more and more remorseful but they don't understand. They're growing more and more aware that this is something which probably is important to their businesses and they should understand it. And so whether we are working for a deeply principle focused freedom activist organization that also makes a C compiler, or whether we are working for a startup that has a good idea about how to discharge Facebook if only it had a little money, or whether we are working as, for example, I have been working for the last 18 months with Martin Fink, the CTO of Hewlett Packard, to discuss how software will change when hardware changes fundamentally. Everybody understands why we have a seat at the table. This is good. It doesn't mean that they always want to give us a seat at the table because incumbents like tables that people can pay to sit at. And there is no part of the legal system around software which is more like that than the patent system, where paying for a right to have an opinion about things is a pretty serious part of the landscape. The open invention network and the relation between defensive patent pooling and FOS is therefore absolutely individual. We've been living in the middle of a patent war, simulated primarily by the handset part of the IT market, but by no means limited to it. We've been living in the middle of a patent war for the last five to seven years, which has consumed tens of billions of dollars. It has wasted, I should say, tens of billions of dollars on litigation and on raising the price of patent armaments and many other elements that were pure debt weight loss to the economics of the IT industry. They contributed nothing to the growth of inventing. They contributed nothing to the... But they made bounce backs rolling somebody's property. We can't, we can't invent freely. We can't do what we do as insurgents, whether we are non-profit, non-commercial, free software makers or startups. We can't do what we need to do if the patent system allows the weight of money to strangle inventing. And therefore we, Keith, I, others have been around the world pressing hard with whatever tools were available to create a safe space for all this inventing, all this science that has gone on. Here too, I suppose we could say that we have reached maturity in a sense when Keith's predecessor at OIN was building the organization first. He was building it by going around and buying patents that Microsoft might otherwise buy. And I watched Keith come in and inherit that system and then begin to revolutionize it. To provide in the same way that we provided, and our clients provided, new and inventive solutions to the problem. How to make the social frictionless inventing that startup culture needs, that our non-profit clients need. And that the biggest of enterprise IT firms are in the room also now. How to make that frictionless inventing safe for everybody. It's a testament to the importance of what we do, the way we do it. That OIN has been remarkably successful not only in getting people to take licenses, but in getting very large companies to put a very large amount of money to create safety for everybody else. I too live at SFLC at any rate on the generosity of companies that understand why paying for other people's lawyers in this very unusual political economy of ours is really in their profit interest. Mission are maintained non-profit tax exempt organizations both in India and the United States. But a lot of the people who make it possible for us to do our work don't take this off on their taxes as charity. It's a business expense. It's a business expense because preventing one school lawsuit or one vast patent mess or one any serious problem every couple of years is well worth everything that they pay for it. And they understand as businesses like IBM and Nokia may at rest in peace learn at the end of the 20th century that free software is really best thought about from economic terms within an enterprise like that as a renewable resource. They began to understand that software wasn't a commodity raw material we bought by the time and put in the products and then you had another ton to buy. Free software was really a renewable resource like forest goods or fisheries and what they wanted was management of those resources so that nobody pulled too much from the scene nobody burnt down the forests that they needed and nobody got ahead of them up in there playing some tricks or other with the catch up or with the lumber tank. And so they began to understand that what they needed was people who knew how to take care of these that laid golden eggs. And there are people who know how to take care of these that laid golden eggs and I'm a law teacher and I'm a day job and so I could also produce more people who know how to take care of these that laid golden eggs. And that's an ecosystem. It's not just one there's many bumps and there's months when we have chicken and there's months when we have feathers to eat but by and large what happened was that a system of software making which assumed that every tub stood on its own bottom and every bite you sold you beg, borrow or stole from someone else was replaced by a system which said software is a science we all share and teaching young brains how to do it is how we grow. Now we live in a world in which some very large things have been created. One kid surveils a billion people by a simple process of being the man in the middle attack on everything they say to one another. This is not good technology. There's nothing nice about it. It's a really crappy way to do social sharing and very soon it will be replaced and everybody will remember Facebook as one of those things that was really big. But nonetheless what it has done is to show people how the nature of human life is changing and how many opportunities there are to bring people together in ways that they find absolutely useful in their lives. FOSS connects people in the 21st century the way copper filaments connected people in the 20th. Software is the 21st century economic life what coal and steel and rare earth metals were at the end of the 20th century. They are how the human race technologically holds itself together. The lawyers who do that work like the businessmen and the IP managers who do the work of making all that connection possible and keeping the free nature of that inventing. We had no analogs in the 20th century industrial society. The 20th century industrial society built strong U and M form firms in which everybody worked for it. The IBM I went to work for in 1979 had 368,000 wonderful employees and it kept itself to itself pretty much with respect to everything it invented and employed. There will never be another organization like that. Because everybody understands that we're in it together to a significant extent what made that happen? The form of human social interconnection we call the internet which made everybody interdependent on everybody else. So we have moved to a world of industrial interdependence in which small and large are indistinguishable functionally for the most of the time. When Richard Stallman and I set out to make GPL3 we knew we were going to need to have a very large public discussion process because you can't change something at the bottom of so many people's businesses without checking with them. And the primary goal that I had in the development of the process for changing the license was that we could create a social process in which individual developers had as much right to talk and not heard just as loudly as the largest terms in the world. Well I segmented all of that and I created a committee carefully known as Committee B in which all the big patent holders sat. Which was rarely negotiated in the kinds of patent piece that we could negotiate within the terms of one rule of software license. By no means could this ever have substituted for the sort of broad defensive coverage of freedom to invent that all I am presented. But we wanted to make a single point which is there's a common. So you're in it. If you're helping to build software in it you can't swing your patent claims around here. And we were able to get the basic working agreement of 35 of the 36 largest patent holders in the IT industry. I'm not even thinking about Microsoft. It was Mr. Jobs who was unable to come along. But doing that work which I spent about 14 months on in 2006 and 2007 very much helped me to understand just how deeply the principles of interdependence were going to run. Now in India we're about to see another layer. Government acquisition policy here is open to acceptance of 21st century realities. I don't know that that means that acceptance is certain or that it will be perfect. But as the current government of India and the deity move towards a decision that every E-governance project that it buys should use funds we will be moving to a new stage of understanding about what that interdependence means. Because the very nature of the relationship between citizens will come to be mediated by selective people can invent, understand, fix, modify and improve. And an enormous ecosystem will grow up around doing exactly that. A kind of public-private partnership and the improvement of government and its services which is far more useful than most of the forms of public-private partnership that came to be talked about in the developed world at the end of the 20th century. Everybody and I do mean everybody has a stake and a success in that policy. Many of my very warmest friends around the world with big companies with small names are at the moment in a commissioned rejection. They're working against us on this policy as once upon a time they suddenly didn't need fossil. They'll come to a different outcome that I am confident. Because the biggest market for both the making and consuming of software in the world will be here. Because the science done here will dominate global software making and because it will define how the internet works it will define global society. And once again you can't develop the largest society on earth by reinventing the wheel. Government is going to understand that only the sharing of knowledge and the sharing of the forms of inventing that young minds can do and only by that will the kind of largest society on earth develop itself freely and take its place in the forefront of digital humanity. That's what's at stake in digital India. It can't mean anything other than we use fossil here every way we can. We make the best of everything we have, we invent on top of it, we bring it to the net and therefore we bring it to the world. That's digital India in paragraph as far as I can see. And anybody who says oh no there's another way to do it that way is not ready yet. Is it ready for digital India? So what I think I would say here in this room to people know this way better than I do is that fossil turned out to be about developing human brains. It turned out to be about using human intelligence in software better. Because if you were an engineer studying Windows it was like studying a car with a hood welded shut. Because you couldn't really look inside because you really couldn't understand because you really couldn't learn that well. And research universities and the engineering colleges and the various research institutes of the world became the greatest manufacturers of fossil. Now that's not true anymore. Businesses large, medium and small are the greatest manufacturers of fossil. And the communities that Michie and I represent are their downtown. They take everything. They use it from there. I don't know any place on earth where if you say analytics to a businessman nowadays he or she doesn't chirp right up. Yes, analytics. We need analytics. What are analytics? Our Apache Software Foundation clients know the answer to that question. Analytics are Hadoop, Hive, Pig and a bunch of other things that they make and everybody else puts under some other label and sells out into the world. My ambition is to hope that there will come a time not very long from now when basic data science is taught in Indian secondary school. Because it's simple math and you can teach it to people and the software is free and all the big data sets are public and you can play with them. And a nation of a hundred million data scientists. Rolls the board. Thank you very much.