 Good morning. Welcome to the last day of DevConf. First week of the day. Yes. Next up is John Sullivan. It will be from a free software foundation comparing open source and free software to their dietary equivalents. Thanks. Good morning everybody. First things first, since this is the last morning talk of DevConf 16, can we just take a minute and give a round of applause to the organizers and local team that put us all together. Thank you guys. I'm standing. I don't know what's wrong with these people. It's been a really great experience for me. I've seen a lot of happy faces and happy feet around so I think other people feeling the same way. I'm definitely exhausted but very happily so and thank you also to the organizers for helping to make sure there's been ample vegan food to eat in the cafeteria. That's really helped keep me going. So we're gonna talk today about software and food and I don't mean dog-fooding which is usually the reference that we hear. It kind of sounds gross but about whether you use the software you or your project right. Instead I'm going to talk more about the analogies between dietary choices and software choices and I'm interested in this because I'm interested in free software as a movement and building that movement and in seeing comparisons between that movement and other social movements especially ones that seem to be more successful in terms of numbers and predate the one that we work in. I wanted to talk about this here because I would really love to see more public advocacy work for free software coming out of Debian and I think that would benefit Debian by paving the way for advocacy of the operating system and as well as for the project stated goals and missions and I think we have a lot of people in Debian who are really passionate and knowledgeable and really really good at explaining the importance of free software to the people around them and we definitely have an international community you know we our agents are everywhere because you can see anytime you come to one of these events and I'd be happy to volunteer my help within Debian to those projects and also to help drive any collaborative efforts that we can come up with between the FSS and Debian as organizations. But in general my interest in this started with reading this book called the Buddhist Revolution which is the history of vegetarian activism and honestly it's pretty dense but I've been learning a lot of potentially interesting things about the very long-term social movement that starts with a vegetarian movement in Western culture around 1600 which puts it probably a few centuries older than our movement the percept just celebrated 30th anniversary last October. So I start with this is the title but it's a bit of a ruse because I'm not really gonna talk too much about differences between free software and open source more of a jumping off point but I wouldn't be curious how many people have heard this before or seen anybody say this before anybody at least one that wasn't for me was it okay cuz I didn't come up with this I know that I've seen it somewhere but when I put this talk together I've been unable to find an original source to credit so I didn't come up with it but it gives us a place to start talking about the different motivations people have for participating in both free software and open source. I think that why this analogy sounds kind of clever is because we think of free software is going further than open source and we think a veganism is going further than vegetarianism. One thing I can tell you before we get going here is that the FSF mission is not to promote vegetarianism or veganism. I know that disappoints some of it. I've been vegan myself for about 18 years and three out of the FSF 13 staff are currently vegan and as executive director I do get the hiring but I promise that's not on the required qualification list over the years the numbers fluctuated quite a bit you know there have been times over the 13 years I've been at the FSF that I've been the only vegan on the staff but this is something I said recently the FSF takes no position on either Trump or veganism other than to say both Trump and vegan should use free software. This is overstating things a bit I realized after saying it because we do hold some positions that disagree with some positions that Trump holds for example we like the freedom to use software for encrypting communications became evident during the kerfuffle with Apple and the FBI that Trump does not support using encryption for communications but my point here is that at the FSF I try really hard for us to minimize the scope for disagreement you know we should hold only the positions that are truly necessary for it to hold free software ideals and to achieve our mission because it's the reality that free software has supporters from all across the political spectrum you know from libertarians to communists and that's probably how it should be because we see free software as an essential pre-conditioned essential building block of a modern free society because if we don't have that then otherwise our political speech our ability to associate with each other is filtered monitored controlled by the people who own the technology so even if you're on the Trump campaign trying to push your agenda you really should be using free software because if you're not you're not in control of how that agenda is distributed to people or if you're in communications but if we're going to build an effective movement we we need to not fracture this unity that we have across different political positions on other topics we need to make it as easy as possible for anyone to join the free software movement without challenging any more of their other principles and beliefs then it's absolutely necessary and that's hard to remember there's a lot of things that as an organization we want to use our you know the what visibility we have to speak out against things that concern us as individuals within the organization but I think it's it's really important and really important advocacy principle in general whenever you're trying to introduce somebody to a new idea so we don't have a veganism but I do have to point out the free software really loves animals you only have to look at the logos of lots and lots of free software projects to realize this this is a logo made a drawing made by Matt Lee so years ago at the FSS and almost everything in there is an animal or at least meant to look like an animal so food is a I think a good analogy for computer literacy in general and RMS in article that he wrote many years ago why software should be free talks about this the way that we take our freedom to modify food to prepare our own food for granted and how absurd it is to think that a chef who came up with a recipe could tell us no you're not allowed to put salt on your food only I'm allowed to do that on this food and I'll do it for you if you pay me but not so I get around to it you know that's kind of a proprietary software treats us we don't accept that treatment from food and I'm finding with the episode that a lot of our campaigns and advocacy efforts are really running into a problem which is just lack of basic computer literacy and knowledge in the general population and this isn't because people are incapable or because they're making poor choices it's just we've lost ground in this area and that means you know think about the the basic level of knowledge we all have about food because we all have to eat every day in order to be healthy you know we know that food is prepared by multiple people in a restaurant if you go out to eat that is prepared from a recipe that it usually involves taking different ingredients and combining them often with heat that if somebody makes a mistake and handles some ingredients improperly it can make you sick and you know that if you like the dish at a restaurant you can get a get a recipe and make something comparable at home you can make changes to it we know that food can be served on many different plates okay and still tastes the same and have the same nutritional value and we take all these things for granted but think about the equivalence for software you know how many people actually know that software is constructed by people working together in a language that is human readable and then transformed into something else and then if you had access to that human readable recipe you can make changes to it yourself or you could go and have the same thing from a different place that you can have the same software running on devices that look very differently and this is important because you know how many people actually know that if you wanted to you could run Android on an iPhone right in the general population people think that if you want to switch from Android to iPhone you have to go out and buy a new iPhone you have to buy a new phone or vice versa so this is becoming a real obstacle for us we can't convince people about the importance of source code or the importance of a culture of computers that shares source code among the people who work on it unless people understand what that is so I think we need to start looking for what the most basic elements of are that we are required in order to explain free software and do a better job promoting that kind of education and actually possibly doing some of it so I want to walk through this analogy between free software and vegetarian and veganism specifically as a subset of that food idea see how the Chofurki is made so when we're learning from other movements we can look at things like how they explain their message what imagery they use what reasons people have for participating in the movement what the movement proponents do to get the word out and learn from that we need to start with our definitions I'm going to go through these quickly because I think we all for the most part know here free software ability to run the program share it study it modify it veganism practice that's dating from the use of animal products particularly in diet and I thought this definition is interesting because it also refers to the philosophy that rejects the commodity status of animals besides just the dietary practice the open source definition is longer and more specific in some ways in the free software definition but it ends up pointing really to the same body of software and practice this is the point I want to emphasize because I hear strange things sometimes like people think that only copy left software is free software and permissively licensed software is open source software and that's not true when it comes down to it pretty much the same software licenses for all intents and purposes the same software licenses past the free software definition and the open source definition so when we're talking about what these terms mean and possible differences between them the differences don't come from the actual software itself or their licenses but and vegetarianism is a superset of veganism so some vegetarians may abstain from some animal byproducts but generally we call vegetarians who abstain from all animal products byproducts vegan so it's not just that you don't eat meat you also don't eat eggs or drink milk or cheese things that are made from animals we do have a vegan software license as I discovered while I was preparing the stock so you agree that you are not developing or manufacturing products and wear applicable to their ingredients which involves testing of any sort on animals you agree that you're not just any of the animal testing industry that you're not producing products that have animal byproducts you're not doing GMOs this is a non-free license also not an open source license it's been enforced oh no I haven't it's called the extJS license so that's the next step is to figure out what it's used I believe program that I was written for it's called extJS but yeah I had to know that existed until I started looking into this analogy but this is not free or open source because it and doesn't pass the Debian free software guidelines either because it restricts what you can use the software for you can't use it to hurt animals well I would hope you wouldn't use software to hurt animals but putting a restriction on that through the copyright license would make it non-free it's in Debian oh no okay well hopefully it's the dual license maybe it also changed licenses I just found this example as publication of license itself maybe it's not in use if it is please file a bug okay good Thunder JPL v3 which is a free software like so I want to go through the reasons why people choose to be a vegetarian or a vegan and I'm gonna present these reasons in the best light but you know don't understand me is advocating all of them or the FCEF is advocating them I think that each of these reasons leads people to different kinds of solutions and I'm gonna go through just the list and then talk about some of them more in depth so people don't eat meat because they think it's better for the environment because raising cattle for example takes water and plants because you have to feed the cattle so you can save resources by eating those things eating and drinking those resources directly instead of eating the animal afterward taste there are I know people who choose to be vegetarian just because they think meat is gross they're not particularly concerned about the ethical aspect or the environment they just don't like it health people think that meat can cause cancer or heart disease things like that so they view a vegetarian diet is being healthier religion we have Buddhist vegetarians in a long history of vegetarianism in India based on religious principles and cultural backgrounds meat industry excesses so it's not a great label but it's the best thing I could come up with to talk about the category of vegetarianism which is not that it necessarily wrong to eat meat but that's the way that meat is raised and the animals are treated specifically is wrong and so you know they would maybe opt for free range chicken or cruelty free meat but would not eat meat at McDonald's for example the free again which is somebody who will only buy things that are vegetarian and not animal products but will happily eat something that's meat or an animal product that's given to them if it wasn't bought solely for them so for example something that was about to go to waste or a group dinner where food was bought for everybody and not specifically for them and then ethics so the belief that that's wrong to kill animals or it's wrong to keep animals confined is a popular reason so we talked about the environmental aspect and how this relates to software so I think that it does I think that even if you're not a programmer you may support free software because you benefit from the kind of software that's produced in a world where software is distributed in terms of respect the freedom of the users who do modify it and the developers so you can think of this as similar to the free press where even though you don't run a magazine or a newspaper you benefit from other people who do run those things having the freedom to speak their mind and share information without censorship if you don't have a free press then you get bad information even if you're not the one putting that information out there originally so I think this is a reason that we don't make enough use of really because it's one that appeals to everybody regardless of whether potentially appeals to everybody regardless whether they directly develop software or not one of the things we run into often is why should I care about the freedom to modify the source code if I'm never actually going to modify the program well because you have a better software environment a better software culture because any problems it makes it harder for people to mistreat users if things like backdoors surveillance mechanisms can be removed and the improved version with those things removed can be shared with everybody regardless of whether that person whether any of those users have the ability to make that change directly themselves I do have to also point out that we have seen direct impacts of proprietary software on the environment the way that Volkswagen for example and now others have been busted using software that lied on emissions test which has potential implications on the environment so maybe we can actually say that proprietary software is the environment but I say don't call it an ecosystem this is one of the points that RMS makes about language and framing that people like to talk about the ecosystem of software and free software and open source and ecosystems are things that sort of our systems that operate amongst themselves and that kind of understates our ability to influence our surroundings by adopting ethical stances making different decisions so it's a reason even if you don't worry as much about the civic term keep that concept in mind that we're talking about a culture but it's a culture of individuals who have agency that can take actions and change things not just a system that operates according to rules. Okay so I think this is a very popular reason for promoting free software that people who want to emphasize mainly that free software is better it works better it runs on more hardware and often people who subscribe primarily to this reason want us to focus less on criticizing proprietary software and the ways they can mistreat users and want us to focus more on making sure that the free software is better and can give a clear reason why a new user should start using it you know programs like Firefox went a long way by being not only free software but by being actually better than the browsers that they were competing with at the time and and both features that users cared about. So it leads you down the path of criticizing less and also down the path of investing more of resources in developing programs and improving the program. So as a vegan this has been one of the main ways that I've been an advocate rather than overtly talking to people much about the reasons I have focused more on learning to cook vegan food that tastes good doesn't all have to taste like stale quinoa and at the FSF we certainly brag about when free software is better and want to use that as an entry point but we also think it's important that people avoid proprietary software even when it's better at some things and if you know Mako Hill who's on the FSF board and also a long-time Debian developer has a great talk about this you can find called when free software isn't better and I think it makes some important points here but nonetheless we have to acknowledge us as an important and popular reason why people do get interested in free software and it's not just the actual advocating vegetarianism and software it's not just the actual taste it's kind of the structure and the assumptions that frame our understanding of these things so one thing I hear a lot when people are asking me about veganism is you know why do you have all these meat replacement products why do you have tofu hot dogs and chicken nuggets partly you know I think they really are for people who miss meat but I think they also come from a need to replicate the meal structures that we have so you have a protein and a vegetable and a starch and that's what a lot of people around the world have grown up with so we face this as an obstacle in free software because when people think or argue that proprietary software is better in some cases there's no objective measurement of that it's not objectively better but it is in more in line with people's experiences what they learn how to use and what they're comfortable with so you know the Windows desktop is not better than the Genome desktop it's just the people who have more familiarity growing up with learning in school what the Windows desktop looks like you know what that meal looks like so if you if you care a lot about meeting people you know at the location of those expectations and trying to make the software just work better for them then it leads you to things like the GIMP you know the project that made GIMP look just like Photoshop right so GIMP has I know professional artists using GIMP GIMP works as well as Photoshop if you spend time learning it but the interface was very different and so there was a project that just took the GIMP code and put the Photoshop interface on top of it and that's the kind of you know advocacy approach that this reason leads you towards I think this can be taken to extremes I learned recently that there is a veggie burger that bleeds when you cut into it this is the new thing made with beet juice to give that nice red color it also sizzles when you cook it so it's done some engineering work to try to make this very similar to the feeling of cooking a hamburger any guesses who's behind this no no but sort of our friend Bill Gates the company is called I believe Beyond Heat and it's backed by many people including Bill Gates and this kind of you know it's funny to me because and that's because we support free software and he doesn't but it goes back to that original point that you know our principles need to be focused on free software I might be kind of happy about Bill Gates doing this if it helps promote vegetarianism as a vegetarian but I am you know not happy about any of things he's done with as it relates to free software and the GPL so we have to stay focused on what we're actually trying to accomplish I was trying to think of analogies between like what is the equivalent of making a veggie burger bleed in free software things I came up with were you know there's occasional efforts to implement some kind of DRM in free software which never made any sense to me because the user can modify it can't really restrict them there's projects like Ganesh and Moonlight that serves originally mainly to make code designed for proprietary systems plugins proprietary plugins run on a free operating system you know maybe some of the pressure we experienced to make our desktop look like the Mac maybe maybe the best example is things like wine and labor office having to establish bug-for-bug compatibility with Microsoft they're sort of like making your veggie burger bleed help I think of the analogy here for free software is being free software being better in specific areas that are go beyond just like working well you know which is more into the taste category but in this we're talking about things that are in the security and privacy genre and this is a bit different also from the taste reason because it with this reason we still do focus on criticizing the shortcomings of proprietary software pointing out how it can be bad for you is a QE component of making the argument for health about how free software can be good for you and this is a reason that the episode does spend some time focusing on we have for example our email self-defense guide at email self defense that fsef.org is aimed at helping people get started using GPG for encryption for their email and we do in other places we have an ongoing campaign against bulk surveillance which emphasizes that free software is really important for protecting your privacy and personal security but similar to you know what vegetarian advocates say about diet and health free software can't guarantee your health right you can't guarantee your privacy and security we know lots of examples of security problems and free software but it's the best baseline to start from people have standing vegetarianism just because you eat vegetables isn't going to make you healthy you also have to do things like exercise or climb lots of steps every day so I think they're very similar in that way and it's kind of like the environment reason we can see examples of how proprietary software directly impacts people's health you know Karen samlers talk earlier this week about proprietary software running on her medical heart device and a lot of other people's devices and inappropriate things that that software has done show that proprietary software actually does directly impact people's health too in addition to being an analogy religion that's all I'm gonna say about this one you can guess where I stand on this question I think well actually there are the new Linux distributions I think people might have seen that are produced by religious who's winning them I see a lot of people who put both hands up we didn't ask about Ed but you know but there are good new Linux distributions that are are put out by groups with religious missions to I know there's all the way from Christianity to Satanism I've seen examples of groups publishing distributions because that gives them the freedom to present their mission in the context of an operating system so it's pretty cool in that way they can't control what windows looks like but they can put some of their religious materials into a Debian derivative distribution for example and ensure that people so just religion can be a reason for participating in free software as well the industry excesses reason I think of this I think this is pretty common made more common than you would think that people who care about free software but are quite willing to use some proprietary software as long as they view it as insignificant so the the problem with the main problem with proprietary software from this perspective is that it mistreats people that mistreatment can be solved either through regulation or through actually freeing the source code and distributing it as free software so some of this may be in the Apple versus FBI stuff because it's also disturbing comments from people saying that this made them happy because now they didn't have to worry as much about switching away from their iPhone to a more free software friendly platform because Apple as a company was taking a positive stance protecting the security and encryption of people using iPhone and that's yeah today tomorrow who knows but not a reason that we agree with at the FSF but a reason that's out there and we want to you know include people that come at it from this angle in the coalitions that we try to build free again also I think pretty common in free software that don't buy free don't buy proprietary software don't contribute directly to it but if it is in front of you and you can use it it's it wasn't bought for you we have the category of people who illegally copy proprietary software and use some free software and you know those viewpoints can be consistent if you have a general distaste for copyright law in general but it's also consistent with avoiding paying money to support proprietary software development I think this is a bit tricky we went to people to you know the FSF isn't advocating ignoring copyright licenses and so we can have much broader reform in that area because we rely on the power of copy left to protect us not only from copyright restrictions but also to protect users from patents eulahs things like that so just doing away with copyright law is not a tactic that's going to work for free software until we get broader reform in those other areas that are used to restrict users ethics I think we're going to go through a few aspects of this but there are many ethical arguments for free software I'm not going to try to cover all of them this is one of the most compelling ones to me it was from article by Evan Mogulin in 2003 called free software and the death of proprietary culture the important part being that if you could feed everyone on earth at the cost of baking one loaf and pressing a button what will be the moral case for charging more for breads and some people could afford to pay and this speaks to the food analogy and the fact that we can infinitely copy software at zero marginal cost what is the moral case for denying that right to copy and share in order to help the people around you and of course we're talking here not about not charging money for some service related to the software or even for the act of giving it to somebody that's allowed because they can go try to find that from somebody else for less or for no cost but the free software argument of why is should there be a legal moral restriction prohibiting that act in the first place there's also the political statement aspect of this the support for when you use free software you're making a political statement against the restrictions that are imposed by companies like Microsoft and that's kind of the social signaling ethical aspect that that makes it matter about what software we use personally even though if we're using something personally that's not the same thing as giving a piece of software to somebody under terms that attempt to restrict that person but at the same time if we use software that has those restrictions ourselves then we kind of send that signal that ethical statement that using that kind of software and therefore distributing that soft kind of software is okay and you know this I think led to this is you know the roots of the difference between the original difference between open source and free software so just a quote from RMS in his article about this that's going over the history that's open source was coined as a way to advocate for free software without raising the ethical reasons in order to get greater appeal in the business world nowadays things I think are a lot more complicated so the open source initiatives front page talks about software freedom in those terms now people say the word open source term open source but they mean the same thing as free software but we also still have people who are saying open source in order to not talk about ideals and in order to signal that they are fine with a world that has both free software and proprietary software in it so it's not really as simple as what was intended to be originally but it's still very complicated and so at the FCEP we still ask people to say free software in order to make it clear that they care about the ethical issues and not just the practical aspects of software or distribution mechanism it's not the ethical issues I think that free software is still the best term for some of the other reasons that were mentioned earlier as well but if you're going to try to act on these things for ethical reasons you run into a lot of challenges and it's hard to know where to draw the line sometimes the same thing with vegetarianism agriculture kills insects and animals walking kills insects which are animals so thinking about some similar challenges that we face in free software I was thinking about things like proprietary JavaScript you know that you are just trying to use a completely free operating system and a free browser and interact on the network and you are still being served bits of proprietary software without you even knowing it they're being run locally on your computer which does not inform you that this is happening this reminds me of the act of kind of walking around and accidentally stepping out and doing things when you're really trying hard not to or you might think of interacting with proprietary software when it's not exactly on your own computer but you know using an ATM machine checking out at a grocery store you know these places where it's in the environment you're still interacting with it even though you're trying very hard to not support it from an ethical standpoint so we know the mission of the FSEF and the Guinea Project because we subscribe to the ethical reasons for free software is to achieve a perfect world where there is no such thing as proprietary software that all users should be able to do everything they want to do on any computer of any size using only free software but we want to work with people who want free software for other reasons to and so I think part of the challenge here and part of why I find this interesting at all is because what initiatives can we design that appeal to the greatest number of those reasons that we went over you know what we need numbers in order to accomplish a successful movement what can we do to bring everybody together and for us we want to do that so we have an opportunity to talk more about the ethical reasons for free software but also because the larger the movement the more conducive the social environment is to free software the easier it is to be a free software advocate which is so what kinds of initiatives work towards all of the reasons that we talked about well I think labeling is one really important initiative that helps towards achieving a bigger and more effective movement no matter what reasons or background you're coming from so this logo is from the leaping bunny program by coalition for consumer information on cosmetics and this is a way that you can look at a product and know that it was not tested on animals which is something that's important to a lot of vegan and the point here is that if people want to make individual choices for any of the reasons that we talked about they need to know the information that's necessary to make that choice right and so what this logo does is comes from a trusted place and signals that something is good for people with these beliefs to purchase and it doesn't require them to do a bunch of research in order to know what to buy and there's different kinds of labeling for food and there are similar challenges here because if you're talking about let's say you go to a restaurant on the menu you says clearly a vegan or vegetarian that really helps means you don't have to ask a bunch of questions or know a lot about how the food's prepared but think about what we expected users when we're promoting free software like you should use a free program or how do I know what what a program out if a program is free or not you have to look at the license well where's the license well it's in the source code or it might pop up when you start the program and don't confusing well don't confuse it with all those other programs that say that free software but they're not actually free software and this is true by the way for open source to plenty of programs advertising themselves as open source which aren't open source so we have to find a way to get the information to users so that once they're inspired to care they have the ability to actually act on that and the knowledge to act on that so what kinds of labels could we have in free software well this is one example this product may contain material license to you under the GNU general public license or other open source software this is from the box containing a links this router and this reminds me I don't know about you but looks to me like a warning label and it's nice that they added the label about the GPL after we sued them but it's not really what we're going for here right we want a label that encourages free software not one that presents it as a warning about something that a product may contain so the F step has this respects your freedom label verification mark which you can read the criteria of that fsf.org slash ryf and it's aiming for this goal of making it easy once someone is inspired to care about free software to support businesses and buy devices products that respect their freedom and for whatever reason they care whether they think that free software will be better more secure ethical thing to do better for the culture this gives them a signal that this is a good product to support and one that will work for them so we've certified routers laptops 3d printers the aleph objects table out front has you know promotes their certification from the fsf which is awesome we've certified many products from them and this laptop running Libre boot was something that was certified it means it runs all free software and only requires free software it is it is a bit of a US centric mark which we could improve on I think but we do have the words available in some other languages and we could look for more symbols that would be universal it's not quite as easy as the bunny though like you know everybody knows the bunny you don't want to hurt the bunny but what's the equivalent kind of international mark for freedom we would love to improve on that the guillotine and one really exciting thing so for a long time so all the products that we'd certified this label is really only appearing on the website for purchasing the product or sometimes on materials that were included inside the box on paper but recently we certified this router from think penguin it's a mini VPN Wi-Fi router and they actually put the mark on the product right next to the you know FCC and other certifications so I think that's really awesome to see and really exciting for the growth of the program and then other than this labeling and these kinds of initiatives I wanted to highlight you know what I started with which is the importance of computer literacy and education gets to want to program you frustrate them for a day teach them how to program you frustrate them for a lifetime but you know we I think it's something both in the world of the ups up in the world of Debbie and we have an interest in just doing what we can in our communities to promote basic computer literacy I know that Luke here so Luke was yeah you are so you're talking about teaching and San Francisco public schools and I think that's awesome and that's kind of thing that we need more happening of you can do this on a volunteer basis in a lot of places or the F.S.F. we're talking about how we might want to organize some of these efforts to teach people the basics of computers and then of course during that course bring up you know the importance of having access to the source code as an educational resource and that way people leave with both a little bit of information about how computers work and a little bit of information about the ideologies that are involved with producing software so at the F.S.F. and for me personally the ethical reasons to use and distribute free software are the most important but in the meantime we we need to be the biggest movement that we can be and we need to look for the biggest wins across all of these different reasons that people have for participating in the movement and we have a movement that is centered on behavior you know the choices that we make to use or not use different kinds of programs and the terms under which we distribute programs that we may write ourselves and we should look for actions that mobilize communities and build bridges across all the reasons people have for doing you know they have they take the same action they have same behavior but the reasons for doing so are different so I think the analogy itself at the beginning you know sounds fun but doesn't really hold up it leads us to some interesting places to think about and there's a lot more to do to look at the relative success of the vegetarian movement compared to us and how we might copy some of it but you know people have a lot of reasons for participating in both free software and open source and we want to appeal to as many of those people as we can even when we think our own reason is the best reason so I encourage people to save free software in order to flag that their interest is in this as a movement but I also encourage people to look for ways to build bridges across the different reasons and different terms that people use so thank you some time for questions and conversation hi I'm I try to distance myself from fsf purely because of our mass behavior and that's the only behavior that I ever saw from that person because I'm relatively new to this open source and free software what is the plan for succession of ffs fsf post rms okay so two things in there one is that no one person is going to be the right person to appeal to everybody rms continues to build on his speaking engagements around the world to bring new people into free software but certainly the way that he approaches it we can see it doesn't work for everyone so but keep in mind that it is working for a lot of people and it is still helping to build the movement especially you know he had a speech in Mexico where he had 7,000 people turn up and the organizers told me they were going to have 7,000 people on his no way we'll send you 500 t-shirts that'll be plenty but I was wrong so but yes we need many more voices we need a lot of voices and so at the fsf we you know we have a board of directors that has many free software luminaries on it and we have I think we're pretty well positioned to continue the vision that rms started going forward if he decides to retire but even in the meantime you know we're trying to grow as an organization we've expanded by 50% in the last five years now it's only five people because that's growth from 8 to 13 on staff but it's been sustainable and I think we have a lot more going to do and that will add more voices out there more people that people can connect to of course we're a community we have a small staff and a large huge base of volunteers and supporters and a lot of the important activism doesn't come from us at all it comes from figuring out how we as an organization can raise the profile of people in their local communities doing advocacy work to people they know that's one of the things that we need to be a lot better at I think cool thank you John Sullivan