 This is John Sullivan. I will do this when I'm supposed to be John Sullivan. Some of this is this is so not gonna work It's gonna be great. How do I? No Well, this is just gonna oh wait. No, there's a right click button. Left click. There, okay, it's gonna be great. We'll figure this out. That'll happen a whole bunch more times. It'll be wonderful. I'm not John Sullivan He can't make it here because it turns out my legs are much more reliable than his plane However, he did tell me to break a leg, but thankfully that didn't happen till right before this. Otherwise we'd been a whole lot of trouble I'm Molly de Blanc. I work at the free software foundation. Oh and by the way If I talk too fast to just yell Molly talk slower Because I have a tendency to talk fast when I get excited and I get really excited about free software So I'm the campaigns manager at the free software foundation. I've been there since June 5th This is my first talk as a representative of the free software foundation So I hope it goes well and that they don't fire me because I'm still in my probationary period However, John Sullivan Has been the director for six years the executive director and he's been with the FSF actually since 2003 He's he's been around a long time and we like him a lot Who here was born after 1985? Any anyone me right? We are the GNU generation Thank you for laughing at that one That was Paul tags joke actually so give him props or props or do You know, we've actually never lived in a world without free software Free software really did come about before 1985, but that's when the free software foundation or the FSF was founded Things were a little bit more formalized at that point And we can really recognize that for some of us in this room at least we've never known a world where free software didn't exist And that's something really cool All right At the FSF and the GNU project we have this goal We want all all computer users to be able to do everything they need using only free software Right, so this isn't we're not saying that it's great if you can run free software our dream our goal Our fantasy for the future is that at some point everything you're doing will be done using free software So John's titled this talk freedom embedded it is not about embedded systems It's about the idea that when we have all these devices and they're not necessarily running free software They're running all sorts of different things. So we want to think about what it means for software to be Free on our computers when we get them on our on our devices It's some titled devices that respect users in their communities because we really want to emphasize in this talk The idea that we're talking about user freedom. We're not necessarily talking about the technology itself We're talking about the people who use the technology We're talking about you your friends your neighbors your family the people who are impacted by these tools that they're using So I'm gonna really quickly go over the four freedoms I am delighted that many of you already know what these are and that this is a little superfluous But it's nice to go over them anyway There are two misconceptions that Bother John About free software and the four freedoms. So just to cover them really quickly Is that when there's a license that meets the free software definition chances are? I'll just keep my hand on this other button That I broke it It'll figure it out Chances are it also meets the open source definition right in the open source definition as you may know is Based on the Debbie and free software guidelines, which were an attempt to describe what it looks like for a piece of software to be free So things that are free Probably are also open and things that are open are probably also free Yes. Oh, are they hitting the mic? I'll just how do I I'll just take them off, but they look so cool No, it's I don't want to be imbalanced style is very important guys Cool the other thing About free software is sometimes people will come up to me or other people Involved in standard-setting organizations and say so I want to make a license That's free but and the butts always nervous right and that's when they say But I don't want the government to be able to use it or I don't want anyone to be able to make money on it And when someone does that what's actually happening is that license isn't free right for something to be free It needs to be able to be used This is number two Maybe it's okay Well, we'll work on That works ah That worked for some reason that time Great so right so the freedom to run the program for any purpose and this includes like you know You're taking a risk when you're making something for you're saying that the government might use it That's someone you don't like might use it and also that it might be used for commercial purposes Regardless of whether you're making any money off of that Next one is the freedom to study the how the program works and changes to do whatever you wish Usually when I talk to people who aren't already involved in free software I talk about two things that I like a lot Which are cooking and knitting So for example, you know, I have a lot of friends who are vegan So let's say I'm cooking something but I want to make sure my vegan friends can still eat it Right, so I replace butter with oil. I replace eggs with applesauce and flax seeds So I'm making these modifications to the recipe and I'm allowed to do that, right? These start with zero so freedom number two is the freedom to distribute copies to help your neighbor So I can share my recipe with whomever I want and not only that I can share my modifications So it's not just that I'm making these changes for my own benefit I'm making these changes and then laying everybody else benefit from those Right, okay, so next thing new topic Let me find the slide for that Okay That's the one I want So a lot of people don't actually know when they're using free software a lot of stuff is free and a lot of machines Devices and actually just like the world we interact with at large has freedom inside of it And we might not know that Android is a good example of this right Android is one of the largest free software projects in the world In terms of users there are over a billion people using it. That's incredible However, see that's that but again the however in this case is that chances are if you're using Android You're also using the Google Play Store Which is proprietary when we're using something that's free We have to be aware especially when it comes to our devices and integral ways that they're working together Is that what we think is free might not necessarily be so? One of our like examples that we keep coming back to about this is we talk about DRM because DRM is easy to talk about and a Lot of people can connect to it one example of this was in 2009 Amazon Famously if you care about these things and follow them Removed copies of 1984 from Kindle e-readers ones that people had purchased People interviewed who had had their copies removed a lot of them were students and not only did they lose the books They lost the notes they had taken about the text This was for copyright reasons, and it was enabled by the fact that there's DRM So it turns out that even though you own something You might not own it or at least there might not be Technological tools in place to keep somebody from taking it from you In the Amazon case what happened after that if they said okay guys we promise we will never do this again Swear to God no, you know But they didn't make any changes in terms of how they interact with your Kindle and how you interact with your e-books from the tech Perspective what this means is that actually last year they then went on and took all the books from other people And this has happened on several occasions that they just happen to make a bunch of things disappear Um Emo Phillips, I don't know who that is if any of you know cool. You can tell me later He made a joke one day a woman came up to me and said didn't I see you on television? I said I don't know you can't see out the other way So it actually turns out that you kind of can see out the other way Visio Is a company that among other things make makes software on televisions I assume most of you have computers in your pockets. I mean I actually took mine out of my pocket. This is my pocket computer It turns out that I also have a computer there And I'm sure there are a bunch of other ones in this room You know our television that's a computer So the software that's being run on it when it's not free when it is still proprietary software You know we're looking at these things we don't control So in Visio's case what this actually turned out to mean was that they had created software that read the pixels on The computer ie the television in your kid in in your home and reported back What was on it like what you were watching so there's a lot of power in Demography in the demographic studies of who's watching things on television What kinds of other things that they're watching how this plays into marketing? I know it's really well studied so like you know, it's it's kind of useful arguably for a company to know Okay, well the people who are watching Game of Thrones are also watching X files reruns But it turns out that they weren't just doing that they were in fact Matching those to IP addresses so it wasn't just like oh, there's this person who does this thing It was oh Molly watches Game of Thrones and X files reruns and while I'm pretty open about both of those things That doesn't necessarily mean I want a company to know that and that that company has the right They have the right on me to sell that information to whomever they want or give it away to whomever they want This could be used in in terms of like what this looks like practically is it can be used for things like Governments learning about your political affiliations It could be used by your health insurance company that wants to know what sorts of things you're doing Are you watching a lot of television? Maybe we should raise your rates because you're probably not that healthy Not to make that correlation. That was one John made So how does this happen right? Key pieces of software are proprietary. You know, we get these cool things looking back on your Your phone if you're running Android is you have this like really neat thing But also a very integral part of how it works is proprietary, you know Amazon has on their Kindles a lot of them are based on Android or GNU Linux in different ways But still DRM technologies and other restrictive technologies that come on them are proprietary Devices are locked down and don't provide builder installation info So sometimes you do have access to the code in something, but that doesn't mean you can actually do anything with your phone I love my phone. It's a one-plus. It's great They're not paying me to say that but I also can't take the battery out of it, which is really annoying And I'm using that as kind of like a different example of the same thing Which is you could have something and you can in theory have access to it because I can pry the back off of it But taking the battery out like doing anything with it is really hard Network connectivity has no granular user control Remember when is this on the next slide? Yes, great. Perfect. Um, actually now I'm gonna go back. Sorry So one of the things that's happening now, I believe it's one of the newer versions of Windows is you're forced to accept Security and other updates whenever they want to have it pushed to your computer, right? What this means in practice is this company now has access to your computer in ways that you can't tell them no So not only do you not know what they're doing? Do you not know what they're putting on your devices? They don't know you don't know when they're doing it Here's this example of some DDoS attacks because devices weren't under the control of users You know and because they also had some proprietary software those pieces of proprietary software We're all actual dangers that allowed that allowed Criminals to get access to your machines and do things to change them There are many many more examples of both technologies and horrible things that have happened You can check those out at gnu.org slash proprietary So what can we do how do we deal with this that we're living in this scary dangerous world? Well, one thing we can do is teach basic computer literacy Looking back at cooking. I hope or assume many of you know how to read a recipe I know how to read a recipe that doesn't necessarily mean you know how to cook or know how to cook anything in particular What it means is you have an idea of how different parts fit together when we talk about computer literacy We're not talking about teaching everyone to code Instead what we're hoping is that people will be able to think about how that your computers work to understand How their computers work and to see how the parts of them fit together Right persuading people to care thankfully luckily many of you care. That's why you're here. I really appreciate that I care That can be really hard making people care about something But when we can do it, it's great and it gets the more involved and it gets them thinking more Right. We can enable people to act on things. This is this is clear labeling clear labeling can mean things like Just making it explicit whether something is coming in an okay way or something is coming in a way that restricts your freedoms right out the door So DRM labeling books as having DRM is one example of this Alternatively labeling things as being DRM free or leads certified or humane Provides that security as well. We can meet demand. I don't know about the rest of you There are lots of things that I really want to do with free software that I can't do This doesn't mean I use proprietary equivalents This just means I don't do them and I'm frustrated and I sit at home and I cry and I don't have an e-reader anymore because mine broke So I read less it's kind of sad So by creating tools that will allow people to meet those demands we're doing a great job We can also grow the movement. It's accomplished by a lot of these other things getting where people involved So one of the things that we do when we talk about labeling is we look at licenses, right? So how do we know if something is under the GPL? This is some information About the GPL if you would like to know more about it. I'm not going to read it I think it is useful to read slides for people who have vision impairment. There's a lot of text here You can read it yourself. It's great. It's a great read Somebody told me that once and I read it and found out that that was true So how do we know something as the has the GPL well, it can be hard to tell which software comes inside of something And what the licenses on that software are because Devices and computers can be very complex machines that have lots of different moving parts So you might know that your phone runs Android, but that doesn't mean you know what else it runs or like what? Android is connected to and what those libraries are even what a library is It can also be dangerous to download free software right there are attempts and work at enforcement Surrounding free software things with people labeling things as free or people labeling things as open source But there is not There aren't the kinds of regulations that come around other sorts of things That people are being labeled that things with things that are being labeled Also when you're downloading a piece of free software Similarly actually when you're downloading any piece of software is you're trusting that the person who made it is Worth your trust that you're trusting that they're going to respect you and that they're not going to do something often to your computer As many of us are probably where that is not always the case and lots of horrible things show up on your computer all the time And it's hard to find all the license notices in something I don't know if you've had this experience, but I'll be told oh, you know We're gonna have this meeting using this teleconferencing tool. I'll be like great. Well, what what license does it use? Is it free and and they won't know so I'll look at the company and then they'll see something somewhere And then I like have to find their github page, but it doesn't have a license file So I have to file a bug requesting that they had a license file or sometimes if I feel really snarky I just like you know commit and say hey, this should have the GPL. They don't usually go for that I recommend it though and add license files if you don't have them on your things But also like and then you're like, okay Well, this part of it has a free software license But I also need this other thing to make it work And there's nothing about their client that they're using on the like do I need to use can I use the desktop client or the Web client so then you write them an email and then you're talking to someone from text before who doesn't know what a license is And you go oh god. I'm now that jerk So those things happen right so there are hardware labeling. This is one way that hardware labels can look Labeling comes in all shapes and forms There I think it's DM out that's the car manufacturer and when you get a car You get this nice thick book of all the licenses that are being used to make it run. I think that's so cool And some of these things are like kind of unhelpful Like you know, you look at the piece of chocolate and says may contain nuts milk eggs or soy because it's processed in a facility That has peanuts This is kind of the same thing. This is from a link says router It's not very helpful Upon request. I also I love this source codes So open source software source code is available at cost from links is for at least three years from the product purchase date That's really cool. So this is one way that we think these sort of things should work instead You know, we don't think it should come saying hey, here's some stuff that might be involved with your technology We think it should say hey just so you know when you first get this thing It's really dangerous. You don't know what's gonna happen with it You have to trust some people who you don't know to see if it works and good luck Here's one example of friendlier labeling. So it's not only are we not looking at a lot of text on something We're looking at something. That's cute and easily recognizable This is from the this is the leaping bunny program from coalition for consumer information Information on cosmetics. What this means is that your stuff was not tested on animals and then it is animal friendly We were inspired by this. So this is what we came up with Wow, I'm going through this very quickly great We came up with this idea for the respect your freedom certification What we wanted to do with respect your freedoms was Come up with something similar to the leaping body something people could look at devices and say hey Like this is free software and not only is this free software. This is running on completely free software Kind of as a side note, there is this thing called H node H You know our YF is we call respect your freedoms our YF our YF is different than hardware compatibility database That is not what it is each node However, does provide a hardware compatibility database and commentary on what sorts of thing like what what different devices have different technologies What you can do with them what you can't do with them So that's a different program. It's totally worth looking into it's H node dot org And it's great. Oh, yeah, it's in the top left great So what are the RYF criteria? Cool, nothing changed. What are the RYF criteria? The first thing is that you know, it's running a hundred percent free software So everything that you're obviously interacting with is free We have an exception for secondary embedded processors like this. Oh, right. Sorry There's an exception for secondary embedded processors like firmware on a hard drive We want users to be able to upgrade and control the software at as many levels as possible If and when the freedom becomes available for use in a secondary processor We accept we expect certified products will adopt it within a reasonable period of time We expect that users will be able to install modified software So it's not just that we can download things from the app store, but we'll be able to You know install something that our friend changed and then send to us on however people are sending are people still using floppy disks Thank you Confolation that you'll be able to maintain software That there'll be installation guidelines that it's not like you're installing this thing and they're like good good luck Have your enjoy yourself in the future That they'll be they'll be doing some work to help you with that. There'll be no spying or back doors. I feel like I hope that's obvious So we actually say you can support encumbered formats, but you also have to be able to support unencumbered formats So you can have proprietary file formats and proprietary file extensions as long as there are also free ones involved Patents need to be licensed to all users. I'm not a patent expert. We will have someone here Later today or tomorrow who is and you can talk to Deb Nicholson if you want more details about how patents interact with software and how Patents interact with you as a user and what that means for you as a hacker or somebody who wants to modify the software you're using Documentation must be free free documentation refers to documentation under some Creative Commons licenses and similar things There's the GNU documentation license. It's things that ensure the four freedoms, but when you're looking at text rather than software We you can't have misleading endorsements, so you can't say oh, you know This is our way of certified, but it's also made especially from Macs unless you know Apple is also adding a certification to that You also have to cooperate with FSF and GNU communication We use a lot of specific language at the free software foundation because we think it's important to make different kinds of linguistic distinctions One of the clearest examples of this is we say GNU Linux rather than Linux. We say free software We infrequently say free and open-source software So we say free software. There are a number of other terms We have a website if you want to read all about them So we request that people use terms like GNU Linux instead of just Linux This is our first certified product. I'm gonna read this cuz John wrote it. It's great. Yes It's called the Lulzbot, but it's no joke. We were very serious about certifying it So the Lulzbot is a 3d printer made by a left objects It's pretty cool. We have a bunch of them in the office So if you ever are in Boston, you should come visit the FSF and you can make something with one of them Or just look at the line of like nine of them sitting there. It's very impressive For us it was kind of convenient when they sent Their device to be certified the first one You can't really see this but somewhere in that there's an ryf mark which had been used In a photo from a magazine, which was great like immediate publicity This is a thing that the founder of a left object said it is Long but I have some time so I'm going to read it to you Aleph objects ink is honored to have the first hardware product with the FSF's respect your freedom Certification mark and we're proud to sell a 3d printer that delivers freedom to each and every user Aleph objects ink was founded with the idea that people should be free to use learn from and improve the machines They use in and share their improvements and innovations with collaborative communities i.e. the four freedoms The spirit and philosophy of the free software movement is embodying in our Lulzbot 3d printer All of our printers ship with hardware designs software and documentation all under free licenses You get it all source code design documents and specifications Everything needed to control tinker fix and improve upon every aspect of the printer Here's some more products. We've certified think-pending when I believe they're a sponsor here unless John's notes are outdated They've done some pretty cool things one of the things that they've done is they've taken a IBM think-pads and refurbished them so that when you get them out of the box They're running entirely free software Something I don't think I really emphasized earlier and the way it deserved to be was that when you're getting something That's our way of certified. Oh wow, it's 10 minutes. It's not an hour. Okay. Yeah, I'll When you're getting something our way of certified out of the box what that really means is that every aspect of it is running free software Not only is the company making a promise to you because companies make promises all the time That they don't keep see Amazon mentioned a while ago But it means that we at the FSF we with our very strict and high standards are also saying that we believe We believe in this product and we think it's doing a good job Here's some other stuff think Penguin as a wireless broadband router. See that's a cool ryf label Here are some statistics of some specific things techno ethical Had created a bunch of products not too long ago. They're 16 of them The office was a disaster because we had stuff everywhere While we looked at them everything that's certified is certified piece by piece. We take it apart We put it back together. We look at every part of how it works Our licensing team is amazing and you should thank them all for the work. They do I love objects through your printers Think Penguin mini free Vikings And one to the big greedy It's more software is the X 200s modified So if you want to read more about the certifications that's online It's at you dot FSF org slash 28 X you can also put around our web page for that I know you're all gonna copy that done and look it up as soon as you this talk ends Also purism, you know, they're here. They're sponsored. You should talk to them if you have more questions about this There they make laptops that respect your rights. They are not our YF certified But they are trying really hard to do a good job. They're very dedicated to the for freedoms and we respect that They did crowdfunding to Get a lot of their work started And they raised almost double their goal of two hundred fifty thousand dollars. It's very impressive Novena is another company that builds itself as a like a goal Like a company that has this goal of supporting those sorts of ideals and involvements And again, if you look you notice that they like went significantly above their crowdfunding goal And then there's Libra boot as another example of something cool I'm gonna read another John note here because it was great Wow, I am so far ahead than his notes are Thank you for your patience you guys are great I Can't find them. Oh, yeah Libra boot came into being in order for the maintainer to be able to make and sell laptops that meet our criteria It replaces the computer's proprietary boot firmware with free software, but it's and this is really important to me People sometimes criticize the FSF for pushing too hard for not compromising enough But people want us to promote laptops that are more free that some people want us to promote laptops that are more free than most laptops but we have examples like this where our standards helped Inspire what we wanted to see right so the people working on Libra boot wanted to meet this qualification They wanted to create something that we thought would be great, too So what do we need we need new laptops refurbished laptops are great Reduce reuse recycle But it would also be really cool if people could go and purchase an entirely new laptop That's fresh off the however they make them the belt That is completely free. You know that respects who they are Tablets everyone's into tablets these days Mobile communicators cell phones or equivalents e-readers. Please. Please. Please make me an e-reader. I would really like it It'd make me happy and then there are all kinds of new hardware that we're coming up with there are medical devices That's a big deal We have wearables. We have virtual reality We have these things coming out that are integrating into our lives in more and more intense ways One of the things I say when I talk about free software is that someday people are going to be up to a dating Twitter with their eyes And I actually don't think that that that is far off And it would be pretty scary if that was being done proprietary also a car You get a car you get a car? Okay? We're getting self-driving cars and electric cars right and it would be really great if we could trust all those things But with cars especially, you know, there are these structural barriers There are these Institutional policies that have been created that keep people from being able to do these things all on their own, right? So they're they're like requirements of hardware jails jails There have to be ways that people can't access technology according to the FCC and other government organizations There's a lack of free software GPU firmware A lack of support for certain chipsets by free distros So like if you've had the experience of installing Debbie in and then suddenly your wireless car doesn't work And you have a really hard time figuring that out dot dot dot extrapolate from there Intel management engine and AMD's equivalent. There are a lot of problems with that We've been doing some writing Alison Randall's nodding so you can talk to her about it later or you can read our website Here are some future plans of ours We're discussing levels. Sometimes people ask us why there aren't levels Why aren't you saying this is more free and this is less free? and it's because We think it's important that when we say this is our our wife certified It actually is freedom respecting from the parts you see to the parts you don't and all the ways it works So we don't want to compromise that We have 11 pending Applicant companies with products to review. It's really exciting. Some people have sent us stuff Some people haven't the office is really cluttered We're at the bottleneck. It is our fault. That's kind of cool And it would also be great if people funded development, right? So crowdfunding is kind of we're looking back at this as the example Development is expensive, right? one of the things that came out of Purism's work is they They did a survey of people who'd purchased their product and a lot of them actually said that our wife certification was meaningful to them So participating with projects and by telling them these things it does impact the decisions they're making There have been a number of successful crowdfunding campaigns that we have written about and other people have written about So you should look at more into that if you are interested in it We think it'd be great and we hope to help directly fund more free software Development and reverse engineering the FSF is working on putting together a reverse engineering award So if that's a thing you're interested in you can check out our website or talk to me or email us to get some more information on that And then those are the sorts of things that are really necessary for us to understand how these weird closed technologies work So we can build better ones Yeah There here's a statement from RMS that I'm also going to read I might read a little quickly For free designs to give us hardware freedom. We need future fabrication technology We can envision a future in which our personal fabricators can make chips and our robots can assemble and solder them together with Transformers switches keys displays fans and so on in that future We will all be able to make our own computers and fabricators and robots and we will be able to take advantage of modified designs made by those Who know hardware the argument for rejecting non-free software will then apply to non-free hardware designs, too That's a bit why we think Standards for hardware freedom are important and actually just hardware freedom is important in general some conclusions We think things are possible. We think there's a bright beautiful future coming ahead of us And then if we work hard and work together we can make it happen Labels help people care right it reminds them that this is something that they should care about it Makes them aware of this thing and it puts it in their face And then it helps them make good choices and it helps them raise awareness So so if when you go to the store seeing that humane like humanely certified rays like stamp on your eggs Like that actually matters on these are things we need now more than ever the world is a scary place And it's only getting scarier In terms of surveillance in terms of privacy in terms of DDoS attacks in terms of Everything that involves with how that's involved with how deeply technology and computers are penetrating our lives in every way And how insecure and scary they are But market demand is not enough because proprietary software is subsidized right so You may or may not have thought of this but You know there's the in the u.s. There's the digital millennium copyright act That is something that us taxpayers are funding to exist our funding to be perpetuated You know in the u.s. We are paying for courts to deal with those cases the government is helping these sorts of technologies persist Right in the EU you're seeing the link tax. I think that's article five or nine or three. I think it's a prime number You can read more about that later But that's another thing where there's like a lot of time and energy and money from people in the EU being gone into like Further restricting the ways people use technology in the internet that kind of sucks and is taking advantage of us So you should support us in the work we do There are a lot of ways you can do it because our wife is great And you all care about our wife now and you want to see the best completely freedom respecting devices everywhere And you're gonna next laptop you're gonna buy is gonna come out the door with Libre boot. It's gonna be great So one of the things you can do is buy those ryf devices right You can join the fsf you can always join the fsf. It's great I hope many of you are fsf members because it allows me to do things like come here and eat I like both of those things We're funded 80% of our funding comes from support and donations by members that's huge It's something we're very proud of on that We like really get to work for our members because we're supported by them and we're not like beholden to companies We need volunteers to help review our wife applications if you care about these things and have any knowledge of them Or you want to learn more please contact us you can email us at info at fsf.org We'll triage those emails to the licensing team and the people who are working on this stuff There are only 13 of us on staff total so the ryf team is actually just two people One of whom is doing the majority of the work We really need volunteers to help out with that You can also talk to Alison Randall about what it would be like to volunteer on our yf certification You can subscribe to our free software supported, which is available in French. It is also available in Spanish I Can't read either, but I trust our translation team You can ask your employer to support us and you can learn reverse engineering because reverse in the engineering is really cool Okay, that's what I've got. Thank you. I Really appreciate you all bearing with me Because this was John's talk and I'm glad that you showed up anyway. I know I'm not as cool as John Sullivan, but I have better hair So Is there time for questions? Okay, yeah, now I can finally walk across the stage. Thank God Can you elaborate on ask your employer to support us how that would work is there some official thing they can do Yes, so things that are currently going on is we do have sponsorships There are different way sponsorships look one of them is one of our the big things we do each year So we have the Libra planet conference in March We don't have dates yet for planning. We just started but all of you should come You should all submit talks for the call for proposals and it's super fun and super awesome And they're totally stylish t-shirts almost as cool as the debcom ones So like we do take sponsorships for debcom, but actually the FSF also takes sponsorships flat out That's where a significant amount of that 20% that doesn't come from supporters and donors comes from Some of it also comes from grants, but the majority of it does come from like Organizational support. We do take donations in terms of like technology at or We take time if your company wants to volunteer someone's time to us We appreciate things like that if you want to if your company wants to like donate actual equipment As long as it's good equipment and not like here are the servers. We are going to throw out. Do you guys want them? We also like things like that Does anyone else? Thank you for asking all the so When companies send you these things to evaluate for respect your freedom Are they just sending it like that and you have to figure it out or are they sending tons of internal documentation about every chip set? Or what's the usual process? I only know so much about that Allison knows more so you should ask Allison. I Love it. You can actually look at the requirements on the website But there are a set of requirements for the information that they have to send including the full corresponding source code And any special instructions for booting it and so it is a standardized process And a lot of what we're looking for I mean a lot of the companies are sending in the exact same hardware So that helps we could just verify that it is definitely running Libre boot It is you know like verify that the source they do have the full corresponding source code and instructions and all of that So it's it's it's basically just a lot of tick box policy checks But yeah, it's it's a fairly standard procedure. It's not very difficult to follow I think the way the the thing that catches people up the most often is not necessarily the hardware But there's some requirements around like your store adequately discussing free software or software freedom and Things like that that sometimes confuses people a little bit But but that that gets straightened out pretty quickly and pretty people are always eager to to make the changes necessary And kind of adding to that when we're looking for volunteers to participate in those processes It's not just we're looking for people to come into the office and take apart computers and say okay This is the chipset that this is actually has put on the board We're actually also just looking at people to like make sure that everything is on the application and that it's complete And that's a lot of overhead someone else Can ask other questions about how cool the FSF is Hey, you talked about How proprietary software is subsidized by say the governments in the EU etc It's the FSF doing anything in that direction to So to prevent that to any advocacy in that area sort of politically as they were Okay So there are a few things I Think this is actually a great topic that I would love to talk with anyone more about if they're interested in the future So one of the things is that actually like the US government is is really just funding the development of a lot of proprietary Software in terms of things that they're making for themselves things that they're paying contractors to make one of the first big attempts at Kind of trying to work like trying to fix this Side note about the US here in the United States Everything produced by the US government ie funded with taxpayer money is supposed to belong to the people in practice This isn't the case. This is why for example when many Europeans give talks about space or use photos from space They use ones from NASA because those are public domain as opposed to the ones from ISA which are not So there's this this federal open-source code policy, which is a Good step. It's it's by no means perfect But it is a good first step in working on these things and we participated in that process I want to time comes time for review of it We're going to be pushing for a much higher levels of contribution much higher turnover in terms of when things are made To when things are released We've done some work as well as other great organizations have done work with the Believe it or not the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice within the United States that have been to make this very US centric We would love to be doing more work abroad We're based in the US if you would like to help us expand our reach and just like learn more about things that are happening in other Places, please talk with me about that So they so like the DoD has actually been doing this really great job of creating more things and sharing them Especially focused on the things that they will believe will help people the most So yeah, so we're doing work on that side Also, you know when we do general work about DRM when we do stuff about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act When we do things that are just related to net neutrality We're also then putting our energy and efforts into like fighting the sorts of institutional things that exist Okay, so thanks Molly. Cool. Thanks everyone