 So, I have to be honest, I'm really honored to be here. And I don't say that to just every conference. I care a lot about WN. This is my third DebConf I've ever been to. There's been a lot of them, so I haven't obviously been to that many. It turns out I was at DebConf one, which I just learned today that it was zero base, so it wasn't the first DebConf. Which I should have known, but I didn't for some reason. So I was at the second DebConf, and by accident somewhat, because I was going to Libre Software Reading and just happened to book my flight so that I could be at DebConf as well. And because it was in New York City, where I lived at the time, I gave a regular track talk at DebConf 10 about the GPL v3. And here I'm giving an invited speaker talk, or a keynote, or whatever it is it's called here. And that really means a lot to me. I'm a fan of Debian. I'm a user of Debian. I don't actually consider myself part of the Debian community because other than filing a few bugs over the years, I haven't contributed all that much to Debian. But I've relied on it and used it and been a fan of it for so long that I really love your project. So I really am honored to be invited to speak here. And I really believe that Debian is a very special project for a lot of reasons. First of all, it's thrived for longer than almost any Free Software project in existence in a lot of ways. There are a top 10 list of projects that Debian's certainly on as far as longevity goes, maybe the top five. Its governance is one of the few democratically elected and democratically controlled governance processes in Free Software. Everyone's a fan of talking about this benevolent dictator stuff, which I think is really horrible, actually, and the fact that somebody would call themselves a self-appointed benevolent dictator for life is really disturbing. But you all are democratic. You elect your leadership. You have referendums on major issues that everyone can vote on. That is amazingly rare, impressive, and important for Free Software. The other thing that really impresses me, particularly being somebody from the nonprofit world, is that Debian has been staunchly non-commercial for its entire existence. And of course, I don't mean that Debian can't be used in commercial settings. DFSG Free means that things can be put into commercial products. What I mean is the project itself has always been non-commercial, meaning that the people that work on it are volunteering, and even if their employer is paying them to work on it, they are part of a community, and not doing their work inside Debian as officially part of some commercial activity. Most Free Software projects these days are controlled by some commercial entity or another. Debian is not. So I was at DebConf One, which was really exciting for me. I was a young executive director of Free Software, and Karen Sandler, whom I worked with, I showed her this picture online last night, and I said, look how different I look, and she says I don't look different at all. But speaking as the person who looks at that face in the mirror every morning, ignoring the fact that this wasn't the high pixel quality, it was 2001, there were a lot more lines on my face than there, that is a smooth looking baby face that I had 14 years ago that I do not have anymore. And I was pretty casual back then. I'm actually not in short trousers anymore, which apparently there, it's hard to see, you can see it in some of the other photos I was. I haven't worn, even in this heat, worn short trousers in a very, very long time. And here, what's that? Yeah, you know, it's, BDAL, you know, I figured you would be in front of, actually I was thinking about mentioning you, and now I have to, because you're heckling me. Yeah, BDAL is the one adult in the room who can dress like everybody else, but I can't pull it off, and I respect BDAL that he can, that the tie dye still works for him, and I stopped wearing T-shirts years ago at conferences, and here I am sweating in my long sleeve, halfway between hacker and suit attire. And there I am talking to Martin Miklemair. I'm gonna do questions at the end, Lars, if that's okay. I'm not good with questions, because I get off topic easy. But I left 17 minutes at the end for questions, which BDAL just took three of, but anyway. So there I am talking to Martin Miklemair when I first met him, and so a lot of things have changed since I looked at this photo, obviously, but one thing that hasn't changed, if you look, you see this face this Martin is making, he still makes that face at me every time I talk to him, which sort of says, like, you do not know what you're talking about. And so that hasn't changed, which is good. I'm glad he's laughing in the back there, yeah. So some things have stayed the same. Martin still thinks I'm full of it, and I probably am, so that's okay. I like people to keep me honest. But other than jokes, the thing that really hasn't changed since I first was introduced to the Debian community in person back in 2001, is the ethos of this community is still the same one that I remember, even though a lot of the developers have changed. I talked to somebody who had never even installed Debian when they, at Debcomf1. I talked to somebody who was 12 years old when Debcomf1 happened. I find it impressive that what I call the morality of the hobbyist contributor still lives strongly in Debian. The people in Debian I find that I meet want to do what's right for other people. They're users, they're co-developers, they're co-contributors. And they also volunteer to do that. And as I said before, it doesn't mean that they're not being paid to do their work. And it's the classic free software thing. Lots of people get paid to write free software. What I've seen recently in many free software projects is that companies have used that. I think OpenStack is one of the worst examples of this to really control a project by just hiring a lot of its developers. And they have this kind of pool over the project. And I think a lot of people who work on OpenStack would say they're their employer's employee first and an OpenStack contributor second. I know nobody in Debian who would not say I'm a Debian developer first. And then I happen to be employed as a second issue. Debian is their first priority. Their job is their second. And that culture, that hobbyist culture of my volunteer work matters more to me than what actually pays me for a living is the kind of mentality that I am such a fan of. And I try to live my own work as well. And I like interacting with the community. I find conferences very stressful usually. This one I do not find is stressful other than I'm standing in a room with a huge number of people. But other than that stress, I don't find this that stressful because this is that kind of community that thinks that way. And I think a lot of it has to do with the other structures you set up around yourselves. The idea of having charities that you work with which you have chosen to do a multi-charity situation where you have lots of charities around the world that you can interact with. One of which was founded by a Debian developer initially. And then you reach out to other partnerships with charities as a non-commercial community. That allows you to have an infrastructure that you can rely on that helps you maintain that community. And I'm very glad that you all do that. The other thing I want to mention is it goes back very, very far. I always loved to remind, because I used to work for the FSF, I'm still on the board of directors. I'd like to remind everybody that early in the project, Debian was more or less a good new project for a while. It was part of the FSF. I know that relationship between the Debian community and the FSF has never been perfect and is sometimes rocky and sometimes better. But the FSF saw this in Debian too very early on. That it was something, it was a really important way to begin the whole distribution thing of free software and that that culture was a match with FSF's culture. I know that where the issues are and John's here to talk to you about them, I'm sure, but I think there's a lot of cultural connect between the FSF and Debian. Now, I find myself, I'm a little obsessed with this quote. I guess it's because I saw it in real time. I was subscribed to Comp OS Minox in August of 1991, when it was posted, so I saw it go by in real time. Somehow I've always been obsessed with this quote. And part of it was when I started working for the FSF, I started thinking about this quote and I was like, well, okay, this organization, when I worked there, had seven employees, it still has under 20 employees. That's not big. So I don't think of it as big. And I guess strictly speaking, since the FSF is a very professional organization and sort of take the strict definition of professional, it means you get paid to do this thing, and you do it for a living. Yes, the FSF staff are professionals in all the ways you might use the word professional, but I don't think that's what Linus was going for in this quote. I didn't think he meant those normal things about professional. I think what he was going for is he was trying to create Linux, back when he was humble, because people forget Linus used to be really humble once upon a time. What's that? I don't know, okay. I think some of his early posts were humble, but okay, we can debate that, I suppose. But I think one of the things that Linus understood well was that he wanted to create a project where individuals collaborated together in their own capacity. He wanted a hobbyist kind of culture and was interested in that kind of culture. I think that what he got wrong was not realizing how important charities are to that culture. And I think Debian has always gotten that right. You've always interacted with charities in good ways. I think you keep them at arm's length, which is okay and reasonable, but you've always seen their value and you've always seen the connection between being a non-commercial hobbyist controlled project, very professional, I think, but still hobbyist controlled in the sense of you are volunteers doing the right things for everyone in your community. But at the same time, reaching out to these charities and letting them help you get done what you need to do in the logistical world outside of your project. What I've seen in other projects that Debian has not suffered from is the politics of the projects have bifurcated. There's the technical politics, which are the usual arguments about this technology versus that technology, oh, I don't know, system D versus upstart, something like that. But there's also, and I think in almost every project, still remains under developer control. People who are developers decide technical decisions like that. But the political governance in most other projects has been hijacked, in my view, by various different groups, depending on the project. But it's usually some mix of kind of glory business lawyers or business type people who are in somehow for profit companies or industry control trade associations that have taken over the political governance. The reason they've succeeded in doing this, I think, is because most developers care deeply about the technical politics, but not so much about the other politics. They want to kind of make those decisions once and leave them alone. A lot of my work in Conservancy is trying to help developers make those decisions right once and then be able to leave them alone without having to bite them later. But I think a lot of projects have faced that situation where the non-technical politics of their project are under the control of people who are not members of the community, not really. And I think that has really happened to Linux. I think that the Linux non-technical politics are out of the hands of the developers. And it's a very sad thing from my point of view. I think the companies control those politics and they don't keep developers out entirely, but they gatekeep from letting certain developers into the politics of what's really going on in the non-technical space. And I've met many Linux developers who feel disenfranchised. It's why Conservancy has a GPL enforcement project for Linux because they've come to us to ask for someone who has a charitable mission to do the right thing for the public good as opposed to whatever the companies are in front of. And I think that's what these charities serve. I think if you look at any of these charities that we have out there, it's Conservancy, Software in the Public Interest, FSF, they do the things for hobbyist developers that are the morally right thing to do, but are sometimes controversial, that developers actually really need, maybe sometimes don't want to spend too much time on because they're more interested in other things, but companies and trade associations don't need them and in fact, they often oppose them. As I said, we're doing at Conservancy the GPL enforcement for Linux because it is not in the business interest of the companies who invest in Linux to see the GPL enforce. In many cases they actually oppose it being enforced at all. Which brings me to copy left generally. My last talk to all of you was at DebConf 10 where I told you about GPL v3 and how wonderful it is and how much I respected Debian's commitment to copy left. Now that's not to say that everything in the archive is copy left, I would guess probably most things in the archive aren't as it turns out, but there are many, many important things in Debian's archive that are copy left and in many Debian meta projects that you all rely on every day as part of your development that you have chosen to copy left. So I see Debian as a strongly connected project to the broader copy left community which I am heavily involved in. Excessively involved in it you might say. The organization I work for is funding a lawsuit here in Germany against VMware for violating the GPL for a very long time and refusing to comply. Christoph Hellwig is the plaintiff, it is in a Berlin court, Phil Yeager is his lawyer and you have to go read the FAQ. I am admittedly not as comfortable with the German legal system as I am with the US. I am used to the US where everything is public. The German legal system doesn't work that way. I respect the cultural difference and therefore we put what we could in the FAQ so you can go read it. So if you were hoping to hear all about the VMware law student's talk, this is the only slide that covers it, sorry to say. You can load your browser in the FAQ I guess. The interesting thing that I can talk about is the aftermath in the politics in the community that I think a lot of people, even people in this room got wrong about what was gonna happen after we sued VMware. I have myself been a little bit surprised that the response by many for-profit companies in the back channels, this has not been in press releases obviously, has been to attempt to eradicate copy left entirely or at the very least stop its enforcement. At this point, for anybody who wants to make a strong commitment like Christoph, like me, to spend a lot of time enforcing GPL, it is an extremely politically treacherous decision. We have people in our GPL enforcement project for Linux at Conservancy who insist on anonymity because they are terrified it will affect their ability to get jobs and other things if they're even heard to be talking to people who do enforcement. I think what's happened is that the people who have always been against copy left subtly and quietly now see there's some chinks in the armor, there are very few people still enforcing the copy left. The only two organizations doing it as a part of a charity or the FSF and Conservancy. It's a time for the sharks to circle and see if they can finish off the rest. That's what I think is happening. Now, this matters to you. I mean, even if you don't care that much about copy left, it matters. And Buntu was violating your copyrights for two years. They had a trademark policy that contradicted the GPL. It's a violation of the GPL. Free Software Foundation and Conservancy worked very, very hard for two years to get it resolved. It's been resolved. The trademark policy as it stands, you can read the statements on both Conservancies and FSF's websites, are in compliance with the GPL. So I'm glad that Canonical Limited eventually did the right thing. However, you've got to read the fine print because what they've done is they've said, well, by using this Trump clause thing to comply, it means that all the non-copy-lefted software from Debian, which of course then ends up in a Buntu, is then proprietorized effectively when it goes into a Buntu. Because all these additional restrictions in terms in the trademark policy that are contradictory to copy left, the Trump clause passes them out for copy left. So you can't have those contradicting copy left, but they happily don't contradict the two clause BSD license or the Apache software license or various other licenses. So a lot is being proprietorized. Now it's totally permissible by the copyright license, but I would encourage everybody in the Debian community to think about how much you like that because your goal is to make everything in Maine to be DFSG free, but when it gets into a Buntu Maine, it automatically, if it's not copy-lefted, falls under this trademark policy that's unfriendly to free software and I would argue DFSG non-free. I think we're facing some really tough challenges. I believe free software has been largely co-opted by for-profit companies. That's why I still say free software and not open source because I think open source, I actually agree with RMS about this, is a term that allows companies to take the good parts they want from free software and leave the political stuff that many of us care about and still be able to exploit it for their own purposes. Meanwhile, Debian is a hugely important political part of what's happening because Debian is this really important non-commercial project, probably the largest non-commercial project of its kind that's still extremely relevant in the free software community and your long history and your good governance had insulated you from a lot of these politics that have happened in other projects. What's happened to OpenStack would never happen to Debian because you're too old for it to happen to you. It's just kind of nice that it works out that way. There's some usefulness in being old. But eventually the pressure will catch up to you. Somebody's gonna do it. Canonical just tried it and didn't succeed thanks to the fact that we stopped them but someone else will come along and try to do it next. I think it's just a harbinger of things to come at this point and copy left is gonna matter more and more to Debian as time goes on because it is the thing standing between these kinds of maneuvers and free software. I always see Debian as a key building block of other free software. People build stuff on top of Debian all the time. I find in my work investigating GPL violations plenty of times where it's a Debian system they just took and then gave no source code and moved it into a product or violated the GPL. That means that people who are powerful and corrupt will wanna control it because it's essential and if they could somehow take control of Debian they could control a lot of the software world. I think they can't get control of you because of the way you're organized but that doesn't mean they're not going to try. Now I think that is so successful because Debian has always been about people. The decision to make the Debian developer and I know it's different now but originally it was the Debian developer was the pinnacle of how you became part of this community. You passed your Debian developer stuff which I've never been able to pass because I'm lame but I always believed that that people oriented manner of operating was essential to how that worked. Now since that first DebConf I admit I have not spent much of my time with developers certainly not as much as I would have liked. I spent most of my time around lawyers and business people in the last 13 or 14 years and they would look at Debian or in fact any free software very differently. Most of these people look at it not about the people they see people as basically fungible. Any developer as good as the next right? From a business person's perspective but the assets that sit there things like copyrights that they look at as the output of Debian the value that Debian generates. And there is a certain technical correctness to that until you write something down it doesn't exist kind of thing so the fact that Debian generates copyrights as you all are doing your work packaging packages writing documentation everything that you do that's the record of what you did which is then copyrightable. So there's a certain logic to this lawyer's way of looking at Debian to say oh it's just the assets some trademarks and some copyrights yadda yadda yadda. What I think you all should think about in response to that is say well maybe there's some value to that and maybe we should leverage the assets we have as a way to fight for ourselves fight for a good cause of free software. There's one way to look at copy left is really and this is one I like almost the best is that it's really just a mechanism to leverage assets which lots of us agree shouldn't exist. I'm not a fan of copyright by any means but you take those assets that are forced upon you basically by the system we live in and try to utilize them in some novel way to maximize fairness and goodness and benefit to other people. I read an essay years ago with Richard Stalman about this about how the power to choose a license on software is this inappropriate power that people shouldn't get they get it anyway so the only thing we can do is make a good choice about our licenses to neutralize the power that we should never have been given to start with. I often talk about this is using the tools of the oppressor against the oppressor. And if we're gonna do that that means we have to look at every tool they use with regard to copyright. We've generally just looked at the licensing tool the tool of what license do I put on my software that's how I'll do it. I'll put a copy left license so that I'm defending software freedom by putting a copy left license on my code but I think Debian could go even further and use these tools in additional ways to help defend software freedom. And with that I'd like to announce a thing that Conservancy is doing for Debian. This was officially put into place in April. We waited to announce it until my keynote here because we knew I was going to be keynoting and it is agreement that's been signed between the DPL and the Conservancy to offer the following services to the Debian project all of which are optional to all Debian developers. So as a program begun as under the software freedom Conservancy and we recognize that it's a member of SPI we asked SPI if it was okay if we did this before we did it because we wanted to make sure we weren't offending your other charity organization in the United States and they agreed that this was fine. It permits any Debian developer who would like to to optionally and in a configurable way assign any copyrights in their Debian related works to Conservancy if they would like to. If they don't want to do that it also permits them if they would like to sign an enforcement agreement with Conservancy to ask Conservancy to enforce free software licenses on behalf of that developer and that's an agreement that can be canceled. I'll talk more about that in a minute. And probably of the most interest to a lot of you because it's going to come up the most often is Conservancy will provide licensing support and advice on an ongoing basis for the Debian project and I'll talk more later about how we're gonna do that. And the whole reason this exists is because a key Debian contributor came to us and asked us to do it and we were happy to do it and I'll talk about who that was in a few minutes. But first I felt I have to talk about this because I've spent a lot of years lately in fact the last time I was in Germany I was here to debate Mark Shuttleworth about copyright assignment. So the fact that I've just pitched to you that copyright assignment is now available for Debian developers I'm sure is probably leaving you to wonder a little bit. And it's certainly true that the kinds of problems I'm talking about sometimes come out from the fact that for-profit companies come to free software developers and convince them to assign their copyrights to that company or they ask them to sign some heavyweight contributor license agreement which is the almost legal identical effect to a copyright assignment. And the reason they do that is because they want to usually make proprietary versions of those copyrighted works or otherwise exploit them in some way that the free software license that they would have gotten anyway would not allow them to do. I've against all of that. I'm opposed to using copyright assignment in that way. But then when I think about the original motivations of copy left it always was using tools that we were not totally comfortable with existing at all against themselves. And so why not look at copyright assignment this way? If you only assign your copyright to charities that take a good strong stand for software freedom you'll be able to actually maximize the benefit of your copyrights allowing an organization that's say enforcing the GPL or otherwise trying to do the right things with those copyrights to advance software freedom you can help that work along by doing it. The other point I wanna make is the only reason those nefarious uses of copyright assignment can ever work is because they collect 100% of the copyrights. I think no project should have consolidated copyright at 100% anymore. I think that's an antiquated way of thinking. So I would encourage Debian to have multi copyright held forever which it probably will. There will never be a single copyright holder of Debian I'm sure. Or even if you just took the parts that Debian developers have contributed not all of them are gonna assign to one entity. So even if a few Debian developers assign to Conservancy or many there will still be a nice diverse copyright base which I think creates a healthy community. And when it comes down to it there's a very sad but simply true reason that copyright assignment is important. This is from the Debian history file. We've lost people in our community. We will lose more as time goes on. Most of this community is very young but I'm aging and we're all aging at the same rate more or less and I think you need to think about that question. What happens if something happens to me? What happens to my contributions to the community? What do they do? Where do they go? And I think we should think about that. I've had to talk to developers errors on the phone to get licensing problems fixed. It's one of the most horrible things I've ever had to do on my job and think for yourself about do you want your errors or people who are in charge of your copyrights when you pass having to do that? The other more I guess less sad problem is people forget to take care of things and they put them off especially when they're boring and annoying. So things like copyright enforcement or copy left enforcement tends not to happen. I know from my years and years of experience doing it that there are constantly hundreds and hundreds of violations all the time. All of them are urgent more or less because they're all really hurting users. And I don't know about you but when you have a bug queue where every single bug is critical, none of them are critical, right? Because then it's like, it's over. The project is screwed. That's how GPL enforcement has felt for years and years and years. So while you can think about having your own copyrights as well as my privilege to have my own copyrights and use them it's actually also a burden. Because if you care about the license you chose and people are ignoring it broadly all around the world all the time violating the copy left or even if it's a, I see lots of violations of non copy left licenses too you don't have a mandatory requirement to enforce but if you cared about the license you kind of should be feeling, gee I should take care of that and make sure that the license is respected. And that's why aggregation might be for you. It might be better to aggregate the copyright somewhere where people are trying to do the work of enforcing the copy left licenses. And I don't think you should be ashamed if you wanna be unburdened. I think that if you feel like, look I care about the license I chose but I really want somebody else to handle the copyrights. There are other people who feel this way too. Stefano, Zacharoli was the first to sign up into the aggregation project. Yesterday Zach assigned all of his past and future contributions to Debian to the Software Freedom Conservancy. I can't think of a better endorsement. I'm honored that Zach is gonna trust the organization that I work for with taking care of his copyrights, taking care of copy left on his behalf. And he gave me this quote, which I'll just let you read. Do you wanna read it out loud, Zach? I don't know. Please know he says. I'm not gonna make him come to the mic and read it. And he's not the only person. Paul Tag chose the kind of optional like choose what you wanna assign. He assigned a few things from what he's worked on in Debian to Conservancy. I forget what it was, but he can tell you if you wanna ask him. He listed them off to me at lunch just a few minutes ago and they've already left my brain, I apologize. I read them too and they left my brain too. I didn't get much sleep on the plane that I mentioned that. And he also provided a quote that he wanted to share with you about how he feels about this new initiative that we're doing. And there are others who are talking about signing. And I was really glad that Clint just agreed at lunch that he does, he hasn't done it yet, but he plans to. And he's actually like me, he's very anti-CLA, anti-copyright assignment agreement. But I think the distinction between assigning to a charity and assigning to a company is different. And so I think there is a lot of value there. But I also wanna talk about the other things we're doing other than that. I'm really excited about this program. I know I don't sound excited because I feel like the problems at solving are very grave, so I sound like I'm very like, this is urgent in my voice because I think it's urgent that we deal with the problems that this program seeks to address. But we've created a bunch of different interesting ways to do it. Conservancy already had this problem before where people were like, well, I care about the GPL, but I don't wanna assign copyright to anyone. Is there another way we can get enforcement done? Is there another way we can make sure copyright is upheld? And for the Samba project, for our Busybox project, for the GPL Compliance project for Linux developers, we already have these things called enforcement agreements. And what it is is an agreement between the individual and the organization that the organization will act as their enforcement agent to go out there and ensure that the copy left is complied, the copy left license of the project is complied with. And there are cancelable agreements, so if you decide that Conservancy's gone crazy and is doing the wrong things, you cancel them with 30 days notice and then Conservancy's no longer your enforcement agent. I will have these printed out, I haven't got them printed out yet, but I will have them printed out at DubConf if you wanna look them over and sign them and we can email them to you as well. But before I go to questions, I also wanna talk about this part of it because I actually think this was one of the major requests that the DPL had for us about what, it's actually the previous DPL Lucas that we negotiated all this with. There was a really big concern that Debian doesn't have access to licensing policy advice on a regular basis in a committed way with an agreement. So we agreed, we actually, we had a lot of debate inside Conservancy about this because we're a small organization, we only have three people on staff, but we felt Debian was important enough. We agreed four hours a month, sorry, no rule over minutes, that doesn't add up, but four hours a month we can take questions from the Debian community about licensing and so forth. Obviously we want these to be funneled through the leadership, so we don't just, we're not gonna answer Debian legal is what I mean. But I'm on it, but I only post when I really get trolled bad. But if there were questions officially coming from Debian that about licensing policy, those sorts of things, Conservancy can answer that. And so that's gonna be part of the service that we're gonna be offering Debian. And so I'm really excited about our ability to do that and it's gonna be work for us, but you're probably gonna want a minute sign, but I can't read it. 10, okay, okay, I have 26 on my butt, okay, that's fine, I'll be done soon. And Karen Sandler and I, who both work for Conservancy, we're two of the experts in free software licensing, so I'm really glad to be able to give something back to Debian because I was worried I was gonna get emotional on this slide. I tried to become a Debian developer a long time ago. I never had time to actually work on anything. And I haven't always used Debian. This is my distribution history, but I've spent more time using Debian than anything else. And I really like using Debian. And I wanna thank everybody for all the work that you've done. I wake up every morning and I unlock my screen and I see the swirl. And I don't have to think about my operating system all day. And those of you that are software developers know that when you make software that your user can use and not think about, that's a true success of software development. Debian just works for me every day. And I'm not really a phone, but I have a phone, but I mostly, I'm gonna laptop in a keyboard, I can type on and that laptop is running Debian. And I couldn't do my work without everything you do. I feel like you're all my friends who are just making sure that I have everything I need to get my job done. And the idea that we can do this project and give something back, which I know some of you are gonna want and some of you won't. But I'm so glad to finally have something that I can get back to Debian and do some work to help Debian. And if there's anything else you want that I know how to do, or my colleagues at Conservancy know how to do, ask us. Cause I want us to be able to do more for you because you've done so much for free software and for me personally too. Thank you. So I think you can line up here for questions and there's gonna be like questions popping up on the screen from the other room or something I'm supposed to look for. I think that's how it's supposed to work. So you're supposed to line up I think. So for the questions, please go to the microphone in the middle. No doubt there'll be a, I want to sign up for your enforcement thing. Also, can I leave my copyright to you and my will? Yes, Karen has actually been working on that question for 10 years. It's actually much harder than you think. And she could explain to you all the reasons why. I was on the phone with her, I knew I was gonna get this question so I was on the phone with her on one of my, I think my layover or something asking her and she starts listing off all these legal problems with doing it. And I had like slept like two hours in the last 14 or something or 25, something like that. And so I was not really following all the stuff. There's things like it has to be evaluated and your errors can fight over the valuation and all the, it's crazy and it's different in every jurisdiction. She's got a couple of different ideas of the estate planning copyright thing. We don't have a solution for it yet. One of the reasons we didn't announce the project back when the DPL signed the agreement in April was because we were looking at that problem and we don't have a solution for it still but we decided to proceed with the agreements we have. We've got a regular copyright assignment agreement both an EU one that's been vetted by EU council so that copyright assignments from a European person to a US entity is complicated and weird but we've got a vetted EU agreement by a European lawyer that we believe will work. We've got a US one. We've got the enforcement agreement which I think is one you were interested in. So we have those three now. I agree with you we need that. The whole free software community needs that and I think we're committed to working on a solution. I don't have a timeframe because the problems are so complicated. That's the best I can tell you now. It's not a great answer but we have thought about it and we've worked on it for a long time. Is that that help? Okay, thank you. Maybe I'll talk to my own lawyer. Well actually if you learn anything share it with us, right? If they find a solution, maybe one that just works in your jurisdiction will have one for your jurisdiction, right? If your lawyer finds one. Certainly if you want to fund legal help that will pass information to us, that would be wonderful. I will look into that. Thank you. My question is could you just say a bit more about the enforcement option which you just passed by so far because it's also quite interesting? Yeah, so we've done a lot of these agreements and the agreements we just finalized them this week because various reasons. It's deadline. We got up to the deadline. But the enforcement option, the basic way that it works is you sign an agreement that simply appoints conservancy as your agent to go and do certain activities which include contacting violators of the license, negotiating with them to agreements. It doesn't go as far as litigation so it specifically says that litigation would have to be a separate agreement. We never want to be litigating on behalf of somebody willy nilly. We'd want to go back to the person and talk to them. So basically everything up to but not including litigation. 30 days cancel so that if you decide, wait I don't like what you're doing, cancel in 30 days. So I will talk to Neil I guess and figure out where the best place to post these agreements are and how to handle. If there, I don't know, we weren't sure how much interest was gonna be. You know, I know people, I know a lot of people do want this. I know some people don't. So if there's a ton of interest we'll figure out a more streamlined way to get it done. If there's a little bit of interest I can just talk to each of you individually about what your needs are and we can treat everybody like a special snowflake. That's fine. That would be a very debbing way to do things, right? So once we copyright sign over to you what can we do to, if you go bad or if you die and your successor doesn't really follow up with the spirit of the original thought of signing copyright to you and so on. How do you reduce or how do you keep your own attack surface in check so you are not being taken over and all things going down the drain in one go? Yeah, I mean, that's the typical criticism that copyright assignment gets. This is why I make the distinction between assigning copyright to a charity and assigning to a corporate entity that can be sold. Charity can't be sold. In fact, in the United States, I mean, I'd like the Charity Law. I know there's Charity Laws in every country. The Charity Laws in the US are kind of neat because they call it from the tax code in the US the 501C3 black hole. And the reason they call it that is because once something's in one of these charities it can never go to a non-charity. And the IRS in the United States requires that charities always act for the public's benefit. So I've always argued that, for example, if a charity went rogue, did the wrong thing, and this is true for the FCEF as it would be for Conservancy under this program, people can file a class action lawsuit as copyright assign or saying I assigned under the belief I was signing to an organization that was gonna act in the public benefit and I believe it's not using my copyrights in the public benefit. Now that would be a long drawn out protracted process to solve the problem. I agree completely the implication of your question, which is that ultimately copyright assignment is a trust agreement that's relatively permanent. So you're basically trusting that entity to do the right thing forever. And you don't know who's gonna be elected on the board of directors and all that sort of thing. That's why we wanna offer multiple options because we know that that trust is very hard to get to and some people trust the organization. I've assigned some of my copyrights to the FCEF because I trust the FCEF. And that was before I was on the board of directors of the FCEF, so it was a time when I actually had to trust it. So I think that if you don't trust our organization, you don't trust the FCEF, you shouldn't assign copyrights to them. And that's my personal position. That's why we do the enforcement agreements. We had these same conversations with people in the busy box project. I mean, it's funny, Eric Anderson, who I've done enforcement work with since the early 2000s, he's done enforcement work with me across three different entities and has kept his own copyrights because he always wanted to do his own enforcement. So it's always been an enforcement agreement as opposed to an assignment. I would expect that's gonna be the more popular option. It was actually, to be, I'm gonna, sorry, Zach. It was Zach who insisted we have copyright inside it, right? I wanna be clear about that. I mean, I'm right about that. I mean, Zach really felt as an option that it had to be an option on the table. I actually argued that maybe nobody would want it. I said, well, everybody hates copyright assignment, right? I mean, that's been my position through this whole conversation internally. And Zach really thought it should be an option because there are people, and Zach's argument was, I mean, that burden thing is more or less Zach's. I mean, it's basically your argument is that it's a burden to have copyrights. You have to keep track and you have to care about the license of violations. And so that burden argument, I think, is compelling. If you really don't want the burden, you're just like, I just wanna make sure somebody's taking care of this because I'm never gonna pay attention to it myself. I think that's when you would want it. Otherwise, you probably just want the enforcement agreement. I like the enforcement agreements. We have these mailing lists internally of everybody who signed one, that we talk about every violation matter. So it's kind of a community of itself, a private one, but a community nonetheless. So I should take the next question. Somebody's telling me to take the next question. Hi. How to compare sort of freedom and controversy with GPL violations? Well, the easy comparison is GPL violations doesn't exist anymore and Conservancy does. Harold was basically the primary force behind GPL violations.org. You'll notice the website's been gone for six months now and he hasn't been working on enforcement himself for, I think, two years, maybe three at this point. Enforcement, see, the thing is, I get two reactions about enforcement. People either think it's really cool or they think I'm totally evil for doing it. But if they think it's really cool, they're like, oh, you do enforcement, you go in there and get the compliance like I'm some sort of Marvel superhero or something. But it's nothing like that. It's sitting on conference calls with people who do not understand the license, did not know GPL software was in their product and explained to them in gory detail the same questions over and over again, which you can't just send them an FAQ because they just ignore it. So you have to sit there and handhold them all the way through the process and try to get their source code to compile, which it doesn't, over and over again until it finally builds and then you say, okay, it builds now so it's just made it, it's finally compliant with the GPL. And doing that is not enjoyable. And so Harold's got sick of doing that. He wants to be a developer, not a GPL enforcer for a living. And so that's why it doesn't exist anymore. I really respect Harold's work. Actually, Harold is the person that convinced me we should sue people. I used to think we should never sue anybody over GPL. And Harold's the one that convinced me that if you don't sue, there's basically no consequence. All you have to do is violate the GPL, wait for somebody to contact you, and then you come into compliance. So why would anybody come into compliance if they're nefarious from the beginning? They just say, well, when somebody calls me, I'll come into compliance, otherwise I'll just violate. The threat of a lawsuit and having that threat be real is the only way to get people to comply voluntarily because they fear a lawsuit. And Harold is the one that taught all of us that. And so his work is so seminal and essential, but it's also over. So does that answer your question? Yes. Yeah, you're welcome. One more question. There's only one person lying, that's perfect. So if someone assigns you the copyright. Not me personally. Well, your group, your conservancy. What's the common workflow? Is there a workflow at all needed to change the copyrights of that person and all the projects the person was, or is involved? You mean literally changing copyright notices, Eugene? Yep. You really don't have to. I don't know of any jurisdiction where you're legally required to change a copyright notice after assignment. You certainly can change it. The copyright notice is inaccurate, but there are thousands and thousands of inaccurate copyright notices all over every free software project. Certainly, I know the US the best. Certainly in the US, there's no real problem or issue with enforcing over copyrights. What we would do in a lawsuit, if it came to that, for example, we just produce your copyright assignment agreement and say, well, those copyrights that you're seeing with your name on it are under this agreement, and then it would be done. That would be the only issue. Thanks. All right. So we're done. I can't read the signs. I don't know whether it's my bad eyes or the reflection, but it probably says get off the stage. Okay, get off the stage.