 Hi, and welcome to the organizers panel of the legal and policy dev room at FOSDEM. You've stuck with us this long. This is the end of our second afternoon of material and we organizers wanted to come here talk about a few relevant topics of the day and say hello to you and tell you who we are. So shall we introduce ourselves everybody? Some of us have already been on moderating panels, but my name is Karen Sandler. I'm the executive director of the software freedom conservancy. I care about software freedom because I'm a cyborg lawyer and I have a pacemaker defibrillator implanted and I would love to see the service code in my own body. So, Alex. Okay, I'm I'm Alexander Sander. I'm a policy consultant and yeah, therefore, I'm trying to make sure that everybody in the European Union knows about free software and advantages of free software and especially decision makers. And yeah, so that's my job. And I hand over to Bradley. So, I'm Bradley Kuhn from software freedom conservancy and the policy fellow there. I've been helping organize this panel for a while and excited to work with our new team that those of you who have seen our panel in person at FOSDEM in the past. See that we're a little different group here. So Richard. Oh, Max. I just continue. Alright, so my name is Max meal. I work for the free software foundation Europe. I work there in different areas started with policy and meanwhile also more in the legal area where I coordinate a few initiatives like reuse for instance, which we will definitely talk about later. And yeah, I stuck with the FSB for a long time and yeah, I care about free software too, as many of the most or all people here in this panel. And I'm Richard, Richard Fontana. I'm a lawyer at red hat. My, my work involves mostly open source and free software. Related legal matters, and I've been doing that for a long time and I've been involved in some way in helping organize. This step, this step room, excuse me, since pretty much the beginning. So happy to be here again. Yes. And now it's a really good opportunity to say, like, thanks to. Thanks to my fellow corg organizers who have done this all of these years with me and, and thanks to our new organizers for participating with us. This was a really, really challenging and also fun year. As it turned out, thanks to thanks to all of your participation. I want to take a moment to thank Tom marble who had been a co organizer for previous dev rooms who always worked so so hard we keenly missed his absence this year. And I hope he's watching along and know that we really appreciate all of his past work and and have thought about what he would say at every step of the process. I'm sure he's watching right now and we'll be saying something in IRC for those of you following along in the chat. So, I think that leads us perfectly to the first topic to talk about normally on this panel we talk about the what we see our themes that come up in our dev room or, or really important issues of the day. And I think one of the things that is the, the, the most poignant is simply events in the age of COVID and how, and how operating during the pandemic is, is an opportunity for software freedom but also a challenge as proprietary solutions are foisted upon us. Yeah, I've been watching this really carefully this year and, and, and I'm very concerned that the video chat quickly became a center of how people got their work done. And, at least here in the United States and I'm curious to hear from my European colleagues that's happened there. It's so dominated by a single proprietary software company, namely zoom. People in the United States use zoom as a verb to mean video chat. Now, they talk about doing a zoom talking on zoom being on zoom. And it's very frustrating to even tell people that there's an alternative that's available. We're using big blue button to record this panel jitsie is being used by FOSDM to do the, to do the live chat during the conference, and they are excellent free software technologies that we just have had great challenges, at least the beef scene here in the US getting others to pay attention to are you all seeing the same thing in Europe as it been difficult to get people to switch off proprietary video chat platforms. We had those issues as well, especially in the beginning of the pandemic. But I have to say is say that we also see saw a lot of positive examples here, like for instance in the educational sector, big blue button is a known thing. I know a few students right now younger and older, and most of them are aware of using big blue button when I invited them for for associations meeting so at least that's some good news. And we have a lot of activists who spread the word about those alternatives, not only regarding we did chat, but also other collaboration tools that we see. So there's also a pride side of things. Also, maybe to add here what we've seen in the very beginning of the crisis is that many companies use the word or the term free software in order to promote their software, which isn't free software. And they it's more likely a shareware, freeware or whatever. And they had like a subscription for three months or stuff like this. And they really try to get on the market with using the term free software. And this is also what we've seen in the beginning and what we try to challenge with some news articles and press release on that. But yeah, this is also something we should keep in mind for future that, yeah, that the term free software is not connected to these kind of offers. Yeah, and since since the early 2000s, I've encouraged people to just at least been speaking in English to say software freedom instead, because it's less ambiguous. Do you have software freedom is the question to ask people. And it's not just happening, I think with video chat during the pandemic, there's just this whole group of proprietary technologies, many of which replace technologies that were invented in in free software. So if you look at things like Slack and other proprietary technologies, we've had free software chat clients since the beginning of the internet in the early 1990s. And now these companies have found a way to sort of insinuate proprietary technologies that replace standing free software applications in the marketplace. And so it was so so bad that I recently participated in an online conference where every technology for the speakers was a proprietary technology. The speakers guide was in Google Docs and the the bag wasn't on Slack, but it was on Discord was the speaker chat and the video platform for recording talks was proprietary and the online collaboration, the venue platform for the day of was a was under a semi free software license under a non commercial use only style license. So, so, so even free software conferences are having the challenge and it's kind of it's very impressive that FOSDM but while it's been certainly very difficult to organize as a dev room, remotely this year, one of the things that one of the organizers of FOSDM told me last week was that their goal was to prove to the world that you could run a conference as large as FOSDM as an online event during COVID using only free software. And, and they've, as we've seen, as last two days they have succeeded and we've pulled this off so so it's really impressive and I while while I, well I've had my frustrations of trying to organize this event remotely, it has not been fun and I wish Tom Marvel was back many times and he's been laughing at me every time I talked to him appropriately so because he did all the work in the previous years, I'm really glad that that this has happened so that we can show that these events can be done with all free software. Yeah, I was going to say that that I don't actually feel like this year this past year has been really significantly different and I think that's one of the points you're making Bradley, I, I've watched, you know, the proliferation of non free non open source tools, even in sort of, you know, technical or developer communities that are oriented towards towards free software development for almost as long as I've been involved in kind of doing legal work in this area at least maybe not going back further than that so. So maybe things have accelerated somewhat but I see it more as a continuation of a pattern. I think that's true and I think that, like, I think that what we saw was like highlighting an exacerbation of that trend. And, and seeing that happen in the help space and we had a whole panel that mostly talked about this issue. You know, I think that the, the idea of focusing on software freedom has never been more important because so many of these non free sharing solutions are being complicated and people think that they're, and they're helpful in an immediate emergency like the metronic ventilator that has your, you know that that is a lot allowed for use but doesn't grant the rights to go for it we're planning for this pandemic, and our emergency needs but we're not planning for the next pandemic. And I think Fontana you're absolutely correct that this has been an ongoing problem that's been exacerbated, especially in the developer communities when I think about just to compare it to some of the other panels we had in the compliance panel we didn't talk too much about the compliance tools that we're planning. And the main reason as a moderator I didn't push on that issue so much is because I know many of the most of the tools that people use software tools are non free, a phosology was mentioned on the panel, which is the only phos tool for compliance more or less there's a few others, but, but it's certainly the most popular one all the other tools that are very popular are proprietary. And even the collaboration communities that develop those standards and tools, they're using proprietary software a major compliance tools process, you have to agree to proprietary license and agree not to reverse engineer the mailing list just to join the mailing list of that project. So, so we're really seeing that become more and more that that that people doing false aren't using false tools. And I can't help but mention, get hub which is the most popular false development site is a proprietary software site with tons of proprietary JavaScript that people are using develop us every day. So, so I think I think that's something that that we the pandemic has just made more obvious but you're absolutely right fun time it was there for some time. It's sad because we actually have the tools like we have the alternative tools that work like big blue button. And if we were all to put our weight behind them they would improve. And we would be, it would be this this amazing thing but instead, because we're, we're, we're instead as a society doubling down on these proprietary solutions and we free software contributors are the ones who are locking that in. So what would folks think so what are some other themes that you think have come up over the last, the last year that we ought to address. Is there anything else that was major that happened this year that we should, we should be sure to talk about. In terms of health, what I found kind of really interesting was the discussions about the tracing apps. So, so there's also somehow a light at the end of the tunnel and this discussion around these tracing apps and indoor availability and that we can share data across borders, especially in Europe. That's an issue. And so this helped a lot, especially on the decision maker side. So they now have a better understanding of why open source free software is so important. And yeah, why, especially if it comes to sharing across borders and across languages, it's so important that we have this tracing app in Spain in Germany and in, I don't know, in Austria in a different language, but they are able to talk to each other. And this is only possible because it is free software and we had a huge debate here in Europe around these tracing apps and especially around that it is free software. And so this might help at the end. And also in the health panel, we've seen that there had been loads of hackathons, for example, that the results have been published as free software because it is a good idea to do so. And I think this panel was also very interesting in this regard. If you speak about health apps and the corona tracing apps, it's still quite interesting that the platform for all of this. Well, we have two gatekeepers here with Google and Apple, and it took the free software community quite a few of months to make this possible. Like to have these exposure notifications API all implemented with free software and so people can just install it from, for instance, after or for Android phones. So, we're, again, in the situation where the software itself is free, but the platform is not so it's quite interesting also for there for publicly funded software to see basically can I really use it and with as much software freedom as possible. And it turns out it's still quite interesting a long way to go. Yeah, certainly when you compare it to the United States, all the new stories were about Google and Apple, we're going to solve the contact tracing problem and all of the apps are proprietary that people are using here so I'm so glad to hear that in Europe. As we heard about in the, when I was listening to the, the DMA talk, I mean, the DMA talk was sort of saying, well, we need to make this law so much better in Europe and I was looking at his slides of stuff that's already in your laws in Europe. And I'm like, I wish we had that much like what you already have in Europe I wish we had here in the US because there are no laws that are that are very friendly to interoperability and free software the way that you already have in Europe so. So kudos to you all who've done policy work in Europe to make that happen over the last 20 years because we unfortunately do not have a system where it's easy for us to get that stuff into our legislation here in the United States. So yeah, and a shout out to Deb and Hong Fux talk for for for bringing the conversation global. We are, we are a global community as free software contributors. And it's, it's important to learn from all of the work being done in different places, especially where it's successful and I agree it's the US is not, is not a great example of that which maybe is a good transition to talk about something that has happened in the last year that we didn't cover in the program. Bradley I don't know if it makes sense to talk about just to fill people in on the DMCA stuff when we talk about how bad things are in the, in the United States, or Richard I don't know if you have any. The start of the front and I have talked about this a lot I mean the startup culture in the US has had some influence on false and not usually particularly good front and do you want to do you want to talk a little bit about what's happened in the last year with with some of the startups have done with regard to licensing. That's been really much in the news the last the last year. Yeah, so I remember we, we actually talked about this in our organizers panel, last year, I think it was last year and not, not the year before. And, and it was a major topic then. So, so we were seeing this trend of, you know, I want to say startups, but it's not, you know, I'm not sure it's, it's limited to what I would call startups but smaller tech companies that have grown up around a sort of vendor controlled free software slash open source project. You know, typically using a certain type of governance model that emphasizes, you know, using a kind of asymmetrical contributor agreement a CLA or whatever. And not really having a very, you know, significant contributor community in part because these these companies tend to be hostile to to outside contributors for various reasons. And then these companies sort of a few years ago started experimenting with licensing models that resembled, you know, sort of free and open source software licenses in some respects. But, but deviated from them in significant ways. And, you know, MongoDB and the server side public license was the first notable example of this and at least in the modern era and that was about three or four years ago now. But we saw a number of other companies moving in this direction. And we talked about that a little bit last year. So very recently, the latest company to do something like this was elastic earlier this month announced that it was going to use the server side public license. So the license that MongoDB had introduced for, for some of its projects. And so, so, you know, this, this is, you know, from my perspective, at least a pretty disturbing development. These companies have, you know, in part been sort of blurring the meaning of, you know, it's really open source, not free software. So they've been, they've been blurring the meaning of open source and sort of trying to, to push on the boundaries of the open source definition. And, and, you know, this, the main feature of these various licenses is sort of, you know, I would say sort of use restrictions. So kind of prohibitions on, on use cases by competitors, essentially, you know, to a large extent these companies are concerned about competition from, you know, cloud providers and that's kind of motivated some of these, these license changes. But, you know, kind of more, more broadly, I think this just sort of is part of a longer theme of, of, you know, tension that's existed, you know, between sort of like free software or open source as a means of kind of building a basis for business success versus the kind of ethical goals that lie behind, you know, free software and, and I would say open source as well. And, and we know year after year we continue to see interesting examples of this and this is sort of the latest, I guess. Interesting. And we had a talk in our, in our dev room this year about this kind of proprietary licensing business model. I think when we were doing the acceptance for the talk for the talks I was sort of most skeptical about that because I didn't want to provide a mouthpiece to the proprietary licensing regime that MongoDB and Elastic and other such companies are putting forward. The really nice thing that I kept an open mind about and I actually think it ended up, I would give that talk the best talk of the year award on our track, because I think it really laid out in a very clear way, how the, the, the cute cutie situation impacted the KDE project and how the KDE project by being a strong existing free software project probably and still to this day I think probably the largest user of cute of anybody in, in any free software space at all was able to leverage their, their community power to assure that cute remain free software and to bind the company and its successors to continue to improve the free software. It's quite a magic trick from my point of view that they were able for so long across so many owners of cute to assure that that that the public version of free software version of cute did not become a, you know, just a, you know, un-maintained kind of afterthought release. And that's something that I think was unique to KDE. I disagree a little bit with Cornelius's conclusion that we could do this for any of these projects because I think it was almost a artifact of its time that open source was not something that someone went to market around. I don't think any cute could go to other customers in the late 1990s and convince them to buy, to buy based on it being open source whereas MongoDB and Elastic are seeing that. The other thing that's really disturbing about the Elastic move different than the MongoDB move is they move from a free software license to this SS public license, which is is not a FOS license. And it's played into this view of copy left versus anti copy left because MongoDB tried so hard to convince people the SS public license was the future of copy left as they put it when they began marketing it. And here we have Elastic switching from the non copy left Apache license to a, to SS public license. And so I found it very difficult as an activist and a policy person to explain the nuance of well actually the SS public license isn't a copy left license. And if it were, if there were a copy left license they switched to, it might have helped them fight Amazon in the way that they wanted to. But what they did instead is they switched to this non free license to fight Amazon. So, and I have I'm curious how that's playing out in from our European colleagues in Europe and if folks are folks are able to see that nuance in a way they haven't been able to hear in the US. I'm not so sure whether there's a big difference between the European view and the US review definitely troubles also us as well at the FSFE that this happens. Definitely. So, I think the difference here between the the KD cute model that Cornelius presented and elastic as well cute and and Katie they wanted to cooperate and they were mature enough in the sense of like, let's let's cooperate with each other. So they had this agreement and it has been fulfilled also by the successors basically. So we see here a successful fruitful cooperation, while as Richard already said, CLA is as a asymmetric way of contribution and so well this has been basically laid out that this could happen and I think I think a big topic will be how to how like the free software contributors want to interact with companies, or with organizations that might take their contributions away and make them basically proprietary. So this is a discussion to lead and I think it's not bound to the US or to Europe in specific. But yeah, I found this maturity discussion quite interesting, a shared theme among like Cornelius talk, but also in the compliance panel that you moderated Bradley, which I found definitely interesting and also I will quote David from Huawei. When he says that, well, you can really see whether a company is mature enough, if their false compliance is actually mature process on a good process that they have. And I quite like this that companies thing from the beginning on in free software terms and this as a thought less after product basically. And to be honest, I missed a little bit the mention of reuse here, because I think this is a perfect example how communities and projects can fix clarify their their licensing and their copyright from the start on. And this is the thing that can be created or worked with by organizations and individual developers, no matter which size they have or no matter the project size. And I would love to see this more that people care from the very start on, like the York to project that they are actually with every release, combined with the software but also that they have properly declared the licensing and copyright of their project because I think we waste too much energy into fixing problems after they have been created with tools like for Solitude with our which are great and which we need, but we should put more effort into fixing those issues before they have been created. Yeah, and there and I guess we could tell our audience that there was an excellent talk submitted on reuse, and our F stuff Europe colleagues were surprised to learn that we had a, we had long ago created this rule that unless it's a substitution talk because of of somebody not showing up. We've always made it that anybody any organization that's kind of represented on the organizers panel can only have one talk from the organization in any given year and fast and so, so we did have to turn away so some excellent talks from your colleagues at F stuff Europe under that rule so so we're so we're sorry that you were unpleasantly surprised by. Of course, I wasn't really surprised that that's fine for me and I love that my colleague because also they had had his chance to speak in the in the strike and if people are interested I gave a similar talk in the open chain deaf room so just a pointer. So, so, so in the interest of a talk we weren't able to give Karen so so so conservancy had some work this year that I guess we could cover here that we would have would have submitted to talk about if not it's not for that rule. Regarding our DMCA work do you want to talk a little bit about that that happened this year here in the US. Sure, sure, I was looking to transition to it a little bit before when we were talking about how much worse the laws are in the United States compared to elsewhere in the world. So it seemed like a very easy time to transition to the digital millennium copyright act in the United States which provides prohibitions on circumventing technological protection measures. In order to to even do lawful uses of of the technology and so there's a process every three years where folks are invited to propose exemptions to that rule and conservancy and others have been involved on behalf of free software. Throughout we, we, you know, many of your organizations, protest the existence of the law to begin with, and then engaging in the three year cycle allows us to propose exemptions and so conservancy in the past applied for and and one an exemption for smart TVs. And, and I personally participated in one for medical devices. And, and this year, conservancy applied for a number of of new exemptions ones to allow us to to get around to basically allow us to circumvent so that we can see what software is running in a device so we can know if there's if there's a GPL violation. And so basically circumvention being used in order to hide copyright infringement. So, it's sort of a novel argument for the Library of Congress in the United States and I'm looking forward to see how that plays out. We've also applied for one for routers which connects back to our router freedom talk that we had earlier in the dev room. And we had Bradley help me out. What was our, we are the only organization that was was unwisely enough to file three exemption requests. And we followed one for, for, you know, a small expansion of the privacy restrictions that are in there's a privacy allowance already in the law here in the US but one of our filings. Looks for, you know, kind of a small, a small expansion of that privacy exemption that already exists, which is, which, which that wouldn't sort of if it's not granted it's not as big of a deal because the privacy exemption in the law is still pretty was already pretty broad which is which is fortunate. But what we're trying to sit, you know, just try to move that edge edge that a little bit forward in our in our exemption request. And with the highlighting that that if we have controlled over our software, we're going to use it to protect our privacy. And then I personally was also involved in an expansion of the medical devices one too. And so I'm excited about that process. You know, it's not as it's, it's granular, but by moving the needle each time we start to see real freedom. And I think that because I think that what happens in the United States on these issues does have something of a reverberating effect globally. So it's good for people to stay up to date. Yeah, and as part of that process I this year I did some I spent two days kind of after we filed those I went digging, trying to figure out why the DMCA is such a horrible law here in the US. And it's very, it's very interesting history that it is it is worldwide affecting because it's because it's based on a WTO act, the World Copyright Act, I believe it's called WCT. And it turns out the US kind of unsurprisingly implemented use the existence of this to bring in lots of things that media companies which of course many of which are based here in the US wanted as far as restrictions go. So our law here in the US goes much further than say the UCD does in Europe, but it's really a worldwide problem and the amazing thing is is that this, this all started back in the early 90s. And so and then the DMCA is passed in the late 90s. So this is this is some 22 years of bad policy that we've had. And, and many people who are probably watching our deaf room like weren't even we're children when all this policy went into place and so we've looked to educate more about why these policies exist and how bad they are things like the MCA because most people have grown up with these standards and the chilling effects that they create have become a regular part of life, not just for free software but for also. And this regarded just a note that was also quite interesting that the DMCA case about around YouTube DL had also an effect on European hostels, for instance, so we had a few cases here at least which I know personally in Germany, where their mirrors of the software also had to be taken down and this is quite interesting that you might have bad regulation in the US but it has definitely an effect on on Europe as well as well as the other way around. Yeah, I just noticed that we had still one talk which we didn't speak about yet, which is the give open source of text break talk and perhaps Alex you want to talk about this a little bit. Since you you saw this I know. Yes, yes, I attended this. It was also quite interesting. I mean, it's also a general question. How can we finance free software projects and it's not about a text break. Maybe it's a it's a general and a fundamental question how we can get money into this one solution can be due to these text things they have in in France like you spent $10,000 and you get 66%. And I think it was like this back from the state if you if it's like for the for the whole community and stuff like this. So we have something similar in Germany. So, but I think it's a it's a general thing. So in Europe, for example, we have to rise in 2020 a big research program. This has billions of dollars and I think a lot of more or more money could go into free software projects as well. We have this open tech funds and stuff like this and discussions around funding in general. And this is something we should also think about and share some ideas and best practices now also think it's on the government side to fund free software projects. They use free software and they should also fund it and it's also good for our whole society and therefore there should be funds available in order to support these funds. As we've seen now in the Corona crisis, it would be good to have some solutions in place before. And yeah, so here, yeah, state money could could be a game changer in the future and we should make sure that there are funds available in order to make sure that there are good free software solutions in place for father crisis and but also for the normal situation as well. Yeah, there have been really interesting proposals in the United States over the years to provide tax breaks that would have real impact on the software freedom contributors in the United States things like things that were proposals that were designed to to benefit artists that would would provide benefit for free software developers so in the United States if you make a donation of your code to a charity. You can deduct the cost the only the cost so if you're an artist for example you can deduct the cost of the painting like the canvas and the paints but you can't deduct your time and so even if you're a world famous painter and you could you know anyone who could sell your painting for millions of dollars, you can only take a tax deduction of your materials. And so there have been proposals in the United States that that have been to change that but none of those bills have passed. And so it's just interesting to to hear about, you know, possibilities elsewhere and to possibly revive some of those conversations in the United States to. Hopefully, so this is obviously we said the pre recorded part of our session, given that we're at the end of the FOSM schedule by now, probably all the online stuff should hopefully be working without any glitches so we're going to hopefully join you all in the online chat. And after this and be able to take questions from those of you that have watched our entire dev room here for the virtual legal and policy panel and from my point of view I'd be glad to be back in Brussels next year. So hopefully all the vaccines work and and COVID coronavirus is the same as the flu by the time we by the time FOSM rolls around again, we can only hope. Yeah, I want to once again thank the FOSM organizers, it's so much work to put on a conference like this and they just did so much more work to make sure that nobody had to use proprietary software and that's so awesome and I'm sorry we're not in person where we can't stand up and applaud them and also thank them in the hallway. And yeah, so, you know, I just wanted to mention that and then also we're also happy in the past we've had this time to hear about feedback from you all in terms of what you'd like to see in the future and play, you know, ways that we can improve the legal and policy Dev room and so we'd like to address questions first and then feedback but if for some reason we don't have the live Q&A, feel free to contact us and give us that feedback. Bradley, do you want to tell them all what they should do in the room? I, we don't know all the details at the time of recording, but there's probably stuff on the FOSM website and show you how to talk to us next as we wrap up here. I was joking. I was joking. I was you normally say clean the room. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. People don't have to pick up there. If there's any trash you left behind, it's in your own house, your own home right now. So, yeah, usually we have to clean up the venue. Clean up your house now. Yeah, everybody go clean your house and make sure that it's ready immediately the next group when they come in on Monday. All right. Well, thanks everybody. Thanks for watching. Thanks to my co organizers for another FOSM. Thank you. We'll do Q&A now. You should get started. Wow. Well, we have made it to the end of FOSM 2021. This is the last session of our legal and policy dev room. I want to thank the audience for sticking with us and being here for this whole day. We've still got some time though. So we organizers are here to answer all the questions that you might have. And, and yeah, so I'm going to just start going through the questions in the channel again by how they were upvoted. So we'll start with the first one, which is from Krishna, which is what did you miss most about the physical FOSM and what was the positive aspect of the online event for you personally. So, so I missed waffles and I made the waffle recipe as recommended. I was told by my co panelists that I should not bring the batter out to show it on camera. I did not have time to make the waffle before but as soon as this is over. I'm going to make the FOSM waffles, which they won't be as good. Yeah, I don't miss that I that my feet don't hurt. Great. Awesome. I missed the hallway experience. Definitely. So the chatter. But I have to say, I have to admit, I'm really impressed by how this has been pulled off by by FOSM, how the experience came across the talks and discussions afterwards. So really good work. Yeah, I think also all these social parts and the social events beside the FOSM itself. This is what I'm missing. I'm missing Brussels and yeah, but Max just said, great. Thank you to the organizers of this virtual FOSM here. It went very, very well. It was quite a lot of fun. And yeah, thanks a lot. It made so much fun. And I want to put a really fine point on the fact that we were talking a lot in our prerecord about the questions of conferences requiring proprietary software like zoom. This conference was done with 100% free software. I hope you all had a good experience but from our point of view it was completely seamless. I mean, it's not it's course it's not as good as a live event. But this is the best online conference I've attended and I think it's completely unreasonable for anybody to argue they have to use proprietary software to run online events. Now, there was one piece of proprietary software and all this one capture that you had to get through to make the cat. If you made the account on chat dot FOSM dot org, but, you know, for that little, you know, 100 lines of code to be the only proprietary software involved in all of this, please support FOSM. They I helped them launch the the t shirt and I was the first person to buy a sweatshirt because I happened to be on IRC at like two in the morning Europe time when they launched it. So I bought a sweatshirt I crashed the database but I'm getting my sweatshirt anyway, but I encourage you all to go buy the t shirts and sweatshirts and support FOSM there are mostly volunteers doing this to make this happen and it's been amazing. I echo that they did an incredible job. I miss seeing them all in person I miss seeing all of you in person. It's not the same, although I am surprised that it was so engaging and so all consuming that it was just like a real FOSM or I didn't have a chance to eat or drink anything. But but and I also miss the chocolate. In addition to you. So Richard, what about you. For me Brussels is a totally magical place this time of year despite the weather which is slightly better typically than than the weather where I'm at now in the Northeast US, but it's it just has a special place in my heart I've been going to FOSM for so many years now. But the, you know the online conference is really impressive I have to say I'm really happy to see how well that's worked out. The first question that was voted is a follow up to this one I think which is to panelists from the US. How does it feel that at the end of the sessions and follow up discussions you still have several hours before it is getting dark. The question is the other way around I got up at 430 both days. The first day, none of my alarms work and Karen had to call me. The alarms didn't work. But yeah it's really it's really the waking up that's the issue not the not the rest of the day it doesn't doesn't help that much. It's very weird to have a whole like to have FOSM and then have like a day with my family. That is super strange and really lovely. And, and also, you know, again makes me miss everybody more, but it's snowing here. So it's like very, very brightly light outside and it reminds me of the year where it we had this massive snowstorm at FOSM. Richard, what about you. Oh, so, so much. Yeah, so I mean part of the experience is actually the jet lag and I, you know, I'm not experiencing any of that now. I got a full night's sleep and that's just like it's it's not quite the same thing, but but I can remember what it was like and kind of sort of cherish that. If you move to the West Coast, I basically have the jet lag, right. Well, it was great that the FOSM organizers could could allow it would allow us to do two afternoon sessions, rather than a full day session it really made it a lot a lot more manageable for those of us in other time zones. I didn't want to get up at 130. All right, so what's going to be the next hot topic we're going to discuss next year. Let's start with the Europeans since they didn't get a chance to answer the previous question. It's hard. I mean, we kicked the session off with the European source with the open source strategy by the European Commission and as they just started this. I would love to follow up on this and to see what they've done in the then last year. But also we have seen on the DMA and the router freedom and there are so many issues we are working on and yeah so it's it's hard to predict what's the most important one. There's so many and we've seen a lot and most of them will be there, I guess, also next year. Yeah, I think these are the policy topics on the legal side also really hard to predict. I guess really we share the same issues there. Perhaps another uprise another project that goes to SSPL. Perhaps also that developers think about CLA's this asymmetric relationship with the companies that are going into. Perhaps you will see some discussion there. I hope so. But otherwise, yeah, I think in the chat that was mentioned the Google versus Oracle could be a topic. Maybe depends on the outcome. Yeah, and on the general side, the learnings from the corona crisis and so we also discussed it here in the pre-recorded talk a bit and I'm pretty sure that will keep us busy for this year as well. Bradley, did you want to add anything since I cut you. Yeah, I think I think that what decides our content is a lot of times what submissions we get from all of you and we encourage people to submit talks. And then the CFP opens, you know, watch the FOSTA mailing list, which is where it's posted first. We'll try to promote it as many places as we can, but we can only do as well as the talk submissions that we get. And we we're committed to making this the place where you can give a talk about an advanced topic like you saw. I love that many of the speakers had to apologize when they did something basic like during the AGPL talk. They had to say, we're going to explain it minified JavaScript is we know that's too basic but we do want to make sure we cover it and so we want to see more advanced talks to meet them. Yeah, and let us know if you have a suggestions for topics that should be covered, even if you don't want to do the presentation. Sometimes if we feel like there's a really important topic that's not being covered, we'll put together a panel to address it. So, you know, just let us give us give us feedback it's it's very welcome. So, to get to the next question. How to make companies stop using the term free software for non free software programs. So, as I just said, we tried to challenge this with blog posts and press releases and also collected in a wiki alternatives. And I think this is what we should also continue like creating awareness, trying to prevent people by or get these products and run into a window lock in and creating awareness on social networks like commenting. If they, if they treat about it for example then just post another tweet and say this is not free software. And so yeah prevent people from from running into this window lock in and create awareness I think. Yeah, I find that inundating people with questions is good like, you know, the constant this isn't free software can sometimes where depending on who, you know who the recipient is but it's always a good idea. And sometimes just saying, you know, like asking about whether the software provides the freedoms that we expect free software to provide Richard go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I think, in a way that the question is ambiguous because it could be referring like specifically to the phrase free software, or kind of in a broader sense that kind of free software. In the sense of free software and open source because some people view more people use the term open source in the in the world to mean approximately the same thing and a lot of the abuse we see of, of the that set of two terms occurs on the open source because there's, there's actually so I think there's so little awareness of the free software terminology and I think that the term free software in the in the English sense of gratis software is, is maybe not as common today maybe it's just my own my own work perception, but I think this is basically a linguistic problem and and the the the only way you're going to solve it is, is through kind of a concerted effort to make people aware of what software freedom applicants see as as the meaning of free software. Yeah, I mean the term software freedom was coined a long, long ago, I've been encouraging people to switch to it as the generic term for what we do since the early 2000s. Many others have done the same. I just say, you know, say software freedom and the other phrase I've been using a lot lately is user rights rights of the users and if you focus on those phrases, I think the ambiguities of the linguistic problem melt away. The next question from JWF is what role does individual consumer awareness about privacy and open source since the pandemic began. Is there opportunity and outreach and advocacy that could be better leveraged in light of the increasing dependence and reliance on digital solutions since coven 19. It's a tough question. Yeah, I was going to say like I think that, you know, to some extent, there's been like where we've been on this path for, for people to understand these issues more and more and more every year. Like I've, you know, I remember 510 years ago at my family functions. They all thought that I was, you know, I saw their eyes glaze over whenever I talked about how vulnerable our technology was and they were very nice to me because they're a really nice family. But, but they had no idea what I was talking about whereas that's changed over the last five to 10 years. And, and people seem to really understand that we are vulnerable based on the technology that we choose. And it's small steps that we're, we're getting there and I think that the, the COVID crisis has cut both ways, like I think on some ways, people are really open to new solutions a lot of people, for example, we're using zoom who didn't use zoom before so it was like an introduction of proprietary and unfortunately to them, but if we, for the folks I got to first, who hadn't been using video chat, they did start using jitzy or big blue button more and so there have been a lot of opportunities. It's, you know, it's, it's, it's hit or miss we have to really stay focused on on making it about the next pandemic or the next crisis, rather than about now, because we have to acknowledge that people are doing the best they can, and that everyone is like in a really stressful situation. Yeah, I also thought a little bit about it. I also see this the split between groups of people, like some who are really aware of these these issues and receptive. And others are not. I'm not so sure. I saw a lot of discussions recently about those logos, like we, I think in Europe or only in Germany, I'm not sure. The blue angel logo so where they mark sustainable products and a colleague of mine is working to get free software for sustainable software basically as a requirement. Not sure whether this helps like these simple symbols, how people can see that something is good, even if they do not fully understand why it's good they trust in the logo or in the. And the picture basically and not sure whether that's, that's a solution. Yeah, I think, I think that one of the things that I recommend. So, so my, my, my spouse, who didn't regularly use zoom of course is using it every day now for her work for a small nonprofit. I really encourage people go to their community organizations and volunteer to set them up with things like big blue button and jits and other technologies. This is a place where like direct local volunteer work can actually help you can't see them in person because it's socially distanced, but you can call them on the phone and talk to them about it. And possibly help them get set up with alternative technologies to the proprietary ones they need during the pandemic. Okay, so the next question is where is copy left conf this year. Karen Karen should be pre announced. I mean, I think we may as well. Okay, so, so one of the things we were waiting to see how Fossum went, because if Fossum can organize an online event like this, we figured we, we could probably draft off of their technology. We are going to focus on trying to do it not all at one time. I am not a big fan of asking people to get up at weird times to go to conferences so we're going to try to do it as a seminar series on copy left over over the, you know, the later part of this year. So that's what copy left 2021 will be like, and we'll announce details on SF conservancy.org when we have them, which we do not right now. It's really fun to like be there all day talking about issues that we care about like copy left when we're in person, but virtual conferences are just exhausting. So we're going to probably the sessions will probably be like an hour at a time over a few weeks. And now a question that may take all the rest of our Q&A time which is, how is the SSPL not copy left. Well, I mean, so the quote I've been using it's a quote it's a common quote in various places I don't know who sourced it, but I keep saying every every tool can be used as a weapon if you hold it wrong. But whether or not the SS public license is a copy left is sort of not that interesting a point maybe it is maybe it isn't. But even if it is, it's an abusive manipulation of what copy left was supposed to do. If you design a license that specifically makes it impossible to comply with the license because you have to ask the don't forget SS public license requires that every single piece of software involved in the stack on your device, whether it's a derivative work or not has to be under the SS public license. And no one can actually do that in the real world. We I have yet to see someone who is licensing the SS public license, licensing outbound on it, who won't take it as my colleague on the panel here Richard Fontana said years ago inbound equals outbound is the right way to design contribution mechanisms, and that's not what the SS public license being used for. So I just think it's, it's not even worth spending as much time as we've already spent I mean, it's, it's in one sense, it's, it's an interesting issue of language, you know definition, but but but then, you know, once you decide where you stand on it is, if a copy left license is defined as a free software license, or, you know, whatever a Libre license or open source license that has the features of copy left. Then if you accept the view which I think is a consensus view now that SSPL is not a free software and open source license and that answers the question that it, it can't be a copy left license. But beyond that, I don't, I'm not sure it's really a very interesting question that it's really the, the, the, the policy issues about why the license isn't a free software license is, is the important question to think about. Okay, so we are now at the end of our Q&A session, we're going to go into the, the, what's the hallway track, but the live room where you can all join us and just see if you'd like or interact with us via text that the room link will be provided in the channel. But I want to take this opportunity to thank everybody and to say clean your room. No, I mean, to say thank you for for joining and also leave it to my panelists to say anything else they might want to say. Thank you. Thanks to foster organizers. Thanks for attending. It was great. And hope to see you next year in person. I can only second Alex that has been great. Thanks to my co-panelists here and to this co-organizers has been a really good experience, but yeah, we notice time zones matter. I hope we can do this in Brussels live.