 Good morning everybody. How was game night last night? So thanks everybody for joining us again for yet another day of scale. In case you're confused about the day, this is the last day. So we'll have Karen start here in just a moment with this morning's keynote, but I did want to take a moment to thank Minio for providing the breakfast and coffee this morning. Do we have anybody from Minio in the room this morning? Maybe? Nope. Okay. Maybe gave a great talk on Minio yesterday in the storage track. So again, today's schedule will have the keynote this morning. The expo hall is open till about 2 o'clock. If you haven't had a chance to pick up your scale shirt, I don't see a lot in the audience. Maybe you all wore it out yesterday. You can pick those up at booth 231 in the exhibit hall. Just come on by with your badge and make sure that you go home with the scale t-shirt. So with that, I'd like to invite Karen on. We've had a little bit of a theme the last couple years of interesting keynote speakers. Last year we had somebody who had been to space. Yesterday we had somebody that had been into Antarctica and was interviewing to go to space. Today we have a Cyborg attorney that's going to come on. Karen's been fantastic this year. She spoke at our legal track on Friday. Was it two panels in a talk, I believe? And now she's going to be keynoting. So we've been keeping her very busy all week this week at scale, but we're excited to have her and she's going to be helping us sort of prioritize where software freedom should fall in our priority list as we think about the causes we care about. So with that, thanks, Karen. Hi, everyone. I'm Karen Sandler. I am the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Let me go to the next slide. Software Freedom Conservancy is a nonprofit that's the home of 43 software projects. Raise your hand if you're using some of our software. A little feedback. I wonder, is there a microphone on? Turn that up. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. I am, as Elon confessed already, I'm a lawyer, which when I admit in these crowds I sometimes hide behind the podium. Please don't throw anything at me. I now only do pro bono legal work, so it's only legal work for good. I am super, super excited to be here at scale. I'm going to confess that scale was my first big free software conference. It was like pretty much my first conference that I ever gave a session talk at. I'm not going to say how many years ago because that might age me, but I was so nervous. I was so nervous as a first-time speaker, and the organizers and the attendees were amazing, and I treasured that memory so much because it was the first time I ever sat in a booth. It was the first time I encountered a lot of free software people and got to know people, and the idea that I'm here on the keynote stage is so exciting to me, and so I have to confess that this has always been a dream, and I think it's a testament to the scale organizers past and present about how it's so hard to organize a conference like this and for their hard work, and so maybe let's all just give them a round of applause because scale is really awesome. And the message that I want everyone to take about that is that if you're thinking that you have something to say, you should propose that as a talk for scale next year, that just because you've never spoken before doesn't mean that it's not for you. You should definitely consider that. Raise your hand if this is your first free and open-source software conference. So like, awesome. Welcome. Great work. And raise your hand if this is your first skill. Cool. And raise your hand if you've been to more than five skills. So cool. So, yes, this is really, really exciting for me in a deeply personal way. I am a free and open-source software activist, and I'll talk a little bit more about that. These are my Twitter handles, so if you're looking at your computer or your device, I know you're talking about how awesome this talk is. Good work. Keep it up. So I'm really super into free and open-source software. It has become a huge part of what I do. And while I always thought that open-source was cool, the issues around software freedom have become really personal to me. And that's in part because I literally have a big heart. I have a heart condition that means that my heart is three times the size of a normal person's heart. It's called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. And it is totally fine. I'm asymptomatic again, but I have a very, very high risk of suddenly dying. The medical term is sudden death, which is alarming. But it was 22% per year compounding and I found out at 31. And so the chances of me dying prematurely were very, very high. And the doctors said, well, don't worry about it. This is not a big deal because we can give you a defibrillator. And they slipped the defibrillator across the desk to me at the electrophysiologist's office because they keep some, they're very expensive. They're like $90,000. I saw my insurance bill when I got mine. People call them their internal bling. But at the doctor's office, they keep them so that patients can hold them and not be so scared about getting a medical device. And so it's small and they hold it and they look at you. And the doctor looked at me and he was like, see, it's not so scary. And of course my question was what is it run? And he said run. And I said, yeah, you know, these devices have software. And I would like to know a little bit more about the software of a programming background. And he said, software? To make a long story short, a lot of back and forth and asking the medical device manufacturers for my source code to my own body, I came up empty handed. And I realized that I had to get the defibrillator. I had to get it because the risk of dying was too great. And so I did and I became a cyborg lawyer with proprietary software literally implanted in my body and screwed into my heart. And I launched a research initiative to determine whether the safety of these medical devices and what I found was just alarming. And we all know that software is vulnerable. We all know it can be exploited. The fact that our software is not free and open means that it can't be reviewed. And in case of emergency, it can't be patched. And my life is in the hands of a single medical device manufacturer. And while I had thought that open source software was really cool and I thought it was useful, suddenly it became really obvious to me that this was a societal issue. And it's a very short walk from medical devices to cars and from cars to voting machines and from voting machines to stock markets and from all of those things to our internet of things where everything is talking to everything else and we don't even know what our most critical software is. Because we are only as safe as our weakest link. So all of this took me on the path of working for the software freedom conservancy as I mentioned before. I have to confess that I feel like the luckiest lawyer in the world to work at an organization like conservancy where we get to support our member projects. We have a number of programs where we promote and support software freedom. And I found that as time went by, my personal and my professional life completely conflated and merged. And suddenly everything in my personal was working and everything in my work was working. And it was great because I cared so much about software freedom and I knew that I was working on something that mattered and I was working on something that was important and I felt so focused and so excited to be there. And then, you know, a lot of things happened. And I would say that recently I, like many other people, were sending to a little bit of a tailspin, to be honest. Wondering, you know, was I focusing on the right things? Is, you know, I've spent so much time, so much personal anguish defending software freedom, was it really the right thing to do? You know, it took me, I'm going to confess it, it took me kind of months of really deep self reflection to wonder whether I had just not drank the Kool-Aid, you know, and had gone off a cliff on something that maybe it just wasn't that important, you know, like with such big issues going on in the world, why did software freedom matter so much and was I spending my time right? I'm a lawyer, I could do so many things, I have a tech background, tech is involved in so many things and, you know, was I, in fact, spending my time in the right way? And I took that opportunity to kind of sit back and kind of reevaluate what my work and what Conservancy's work was and what we were doing, defining our values and thinking about whether it met the test, you know, whether, and I would tell you that I proposed this talk before I knew what the answer was. So it was a really kind of like a life, like sort of a life-changing moment of like as an activist whether or not I was focusing on the right things. And so I looked at what Conservancy's doing and why, you know, why we're doing what we're doing and one of the primary things that we are doing is defending the integrity of our technology, of our core technology and our core infrastructure. Many of Conservancy's projects are fundamental to the way we develop software and in some ways we are only as free as the tools we use. Certainly our software touches everything that we do and making sure that software freedom is a core part of key technology is a real focus of what Conservancy does. And having free and open source software as an alternative to proprietary software is really critical and all of this goes to sort of thinking about important issues around companies and company involvement in our technology. Right now we're in a situation where a lot of the companies that produce our critical technology are in control of these critical pieces of our communication, of our content production, of everything we do. And where every company is looking for ways that their software can interact with other software and basically commercialize on the way we live our lives. And by having single companies that are the stewards of our technology we could be in trouble because we have no guarantee that our companies will have our societal and our personal interests at heart. And so I have this slide up of the Volkswagen logo, oh we're in LA, raise your hand if you owned a Volkswagen that was part of the emission scandal. Okay, so like six people, seven people, that's so, okay, interesting. Some people wanted to raise their hand that they were Volkswagen owners. So raise your hand if you own a Volkswagen, I'm just curious. Okay, we're almost overlapping the same people. Okay, so raise your hand if you don't know what happened during the Volkswagen emission scandal. So nobody, great. So what happened with the Volkswagen emission scandal is that the software in the cars themselves were lying about what the emissions were of the cars themselves. And it was a scandalous because internally people at Volkswagen knew that this was happening of course because the software was devalued, the cars were developed in a company process and so some people knew that this was happening. And what was interesting about it is that the way that it came out, the profits, so the Volkswagen took a massive hit for what happened. It took a massive hit financially and it took a massive hit in marketing. For a long time all you had to do was say the word Volkswagen and everyone would laugh. They took a massive hit because of this problem but what it stood for me was this indication that there's potentially something wrong with corporate culture. A lot of companies have whistleblower policies and have ways that employees can escalate problems but it is easy to imagine being an engineer at Volkswagen and not knowing what to do. Knowing that there is a real problem with the technology that you helped to develop but not being taken seriously knowing that your boss had an agenda with it knowing that this was built into the overall product and how much money was at stick and feeling like you have no voice. Feeling like there's really something fundamentally wrong. And I think that this is not that unusual unfortunately for some corporate cultures where engineers don't feel like they necessarily have the ability to escalate when there are problems and relying on those companies to be the arbiter of what is ethical and not ethical and what is right and what is not right is potentially problematic. So I went to engineering school at the Cooper Union. Raise your hand if you've heard of the Cooper Union. So like 20 people. It's a tiny school. It's a tiny school and I went there because it was free. It was founded ideologically by Peter Cooper and the idea behind the Cooper Union is that education should be as free as the water. He also insisted on admitting women incidentally which is why the Cooper Union remained independent and didn't join up with Columbia University. So Cooper Union is a tiny school in New York and I went there for engineering school and when I was there at the very beginning we had a course on like engineering failures and we got to see like the video of Gallup and Gritty which is the Tacoma narrow bridge that almost was torn apart by the torsional force of the winds which is fascinating. When we studied a bunch of other engineering failures and there was a professor who actually ran the computer center so I was quite close to him who was familiar with this thing called the order of the engineer in Canada. Is anyone here a member of the order of the engineer? No one. Okay so interesting. So the order of the engineer is a society for engineers and so what I put up is the oath that I took when I joined the order of the engineer and you can tell if someone is a member of the order of the engineer because they get you get a pinky ring. A pinky ring made out of steel that you put on your dominant hand and the idea is that you remember it because you have a ring on the hand that you use to work and so it touches everything you do and the idea is that as an engineer we have special knowledge. We have special skills. We understand things that ordinary people don't but on top of that the work that we do touches so many lives. The work we do impacts so many people and so in our what I swore in the order of the engineer was to practice integrity and fair dealing tolerance and respect and I pledged that my skill had the obligation to serve humanity and this was you to join the order of the engineer in the U.S. you have to graduate from an accredited engineering school or power sit for the PE exam so there's sort of like a threshold here in order to do it and it really struck me because connecting technical skill and the technical profession with ethical obligations is something I had never heard of before and it was something that was extremely important to me. The order of the engineer is famous in Canada because everybody gets it's much more why it's very very widespread there and at the technical schools the night before you get sworn in everybody conducts these crazy pranks so if the cow is going to go up on the roof it's the night before you're sworn into the order of the engineer because once you're sworn in you're ethically bound to not conduct any of these pranks anymore so it's really like a fun tradition in Canada it's connected with all of these really wacky seriously like technologically motivated pranks because the idea is that when you get serious when you graduate when you start your career when you engage in your technical profession that you need to keep these ethics in mind because you're in a special class and you have a special responsibility and I think that this is so important and it interfaces so interestingly with free and open source software while I think about it and technology looking at the Volkswagen case I think it's not particularly unusual and the idea of having companies as the custodians of our particular technology is crazy it's you know we wonder about who is minding the store right? This is a cat guarding a fish store there are also some chickens there incidentally and it's one of those things where we need to think about what we rely on and what recourse we have when we have a problem with free and open source software if we have a problem we can patch it right we have the software we have access to the software it's really important incidentally as a piece of software freedom and copy left works to get towards this that we are able to build our own software actually on the devices that we own because over over time we are going to have problems and if we don't have the ability to fix our software actually from a security point of view and this is important part of software freedom this is an important thing we do that is societal and special to our knowledge set and distinct another thing that became clear to me as I thought about the current political climate about software freedom and about the things that mattered to me so much about my work was transparency so transparency is just part and parcel of in parcel of software freedom, right? We do as much work as we can in the open. Our source code is available for use and reuse. We're happy for people to modify it. We're happy to discuss it. We have a fascinating culture of having open criticism of our work so that we can improve together. And the idea that nothing is perfect and we should talk about it incessantly is really cool. And we also have a culture where it really matters what's true and what's not true. Like it really matters what the facts are and it really matters what the details are, right? We have a, it really matters in our software what our details are and it really matters in our culture that we are transparent and that we are forthcoming with important information about what we're doing. Conservancy is for a non-profit organization radical about transparency. We, unlike some other important political figures, disclose our tax documents. So this is a copy of Conservancy's Form 990. Non-profit organizations in the United States have to file 990s if they're charities or if they're trade associations. And there is a lot of information in 990s. A lot of organizations try to fight this by not publishing their 990s until they're very, very old. There is some delay for most organizations to file their 990 after the end of the fiscal year that's normal. But if in order for it to go through the ordinary course to get published through like a guide star takes, can take over a year. And so organizations like Conservancy post our 990 as soon as they're filed so that everyone can see what money we took in. You can- I'm sorry. Bradley is apologizing because he published our Form 990 four hours after we filed it. But you can see how much the key officers make. So you can check out our salaries. And I highly recommend it because it really tells you a lot about what we do about our, if we have any conflicts, because you know where money is coming from is very important to how someone might act and where their allegiance might be, what might influence their behavior. And so organizations that are forthcoming about their details, their information and their facts are very important. And I encourage you to check out 990s of all of the organizations in our space, the trade associations and the nonprofits and compare them. If you donate to a nonprofit, see where the money is going. See if they've got a reserve. See if they're, I don't know, a scrappy organization with no reserve but constantly struggling to make their bills to pay their self. Or if they've got like a huge reserve that they can't possibly use in the near future, right? On an important crisis. And this is not, there's no criticisms in that. There are a lot of organizations that are very well funded that use the money well. And I'm happy for it. But when you look for wanting to make an immediate impact with your money, it's good to see what the money will probably be used on. And you can see a lot of that from our documents. We publish form agreements like our enforcement templates for our coalition for GPL compliance. And I would say that not only is that important for you to see what we do, but it really puts a flag in the sand as to what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. And I think that the software freedom community has influenced other areas because we are so forthcoming with our information. We have proven that you can do it and be healthy, right? We've proven that we can take those metrics. We can take that information and bring it elsewhere to other spaces. And that's really important. Another key area. So I realized that that was a really important thing that we were doing. Another thing that was clear to me that Conservancy is working on is in the diversity area. I think looking at a lot of the things that have happened in the current political climate has been heartbreaking, I would say. And the way that, especially hearing about individuals who feel so targeted, who live in fear, making sure that we have opportunities for the people who are most marginalized now is extremely important. We run Outreachy, which is a, it's an internship program for women non-binary people and within the United States, people of color who are underrepresented in US tech. And we hook up these participants with mentors and they spend three months working on free and open source software and it gives them a leg up, it gives them an opportunity. The truth is we just haven't had a lot of participation from the groups that are included in Outreachy and sort of giving opportunities for people to come in and to learn has been really amazing. We have about 80 interns per year and we've had hundreds of people come through the program around 30 just in the Linux kernel alone. So there are around 30 women who are now kernel developers through Outreachy. And that's just one of the organizations that participates in Outreachy. The application period is actually open right now. So if you know of a person who is talented and might be interested in the program who's part of these groups, you should totally encourage them to apply because it really can make a difference. And some of the people who came through our program are now on the boards of directors or organizations. Some of them are our core developers of major projects. Some of them, many of them have found employment through the program, but many of them have also become mentors. So we even have one participant who became a mentor and then her mentee became a mentor. So she became a grand mentor. And actually we have had more than one of people like that. So not everybody who comes through the program but many of the people who come through the program become really invested in free and open source software and have helped us sort of change our overall, sort of just the overall composition of our space. I mean, SCAL is a great conference for diversity relatively and it's still pretty unbalanced. So another thing that Conservancy has done recently is to take a stand against the executive order on immigration. Thanks. We had to, right? Like there was no way we could stay silent. And when we made our statement, we didn't just make it about the fact that this is wrong. We also tied it into how it's wrong for the values of software freedom, right? How it's particularly problematic for our culture where we're inclusive, where we work with people all over the world, right? Our routine turns in particular. There was one round where we had one participant from every habitable continent, right? Like we are a geographically diverse group of people and we will be stronger if we improve our diversity further. The more perspectives we get in developing our software, the better our software is going to be. And so stating the fact that diversity inclusion are our core values is really important to us and is a clear part of where software freedom fits in the overall tapestry in our society. And further, making sure that we are inclusive is it not only helps our software itself, but also having software that's in the hands of so many people democratizes technology, right? We don't even know what technology we need and what places and having software freedom available, putting the tools in so many people's hands can radically change our future. So while I thought about this in some serious soul searching, right? Of whether I'm doing the right thing, how do we fit in the overall construct? One thing became really, really clear to me. Together all of us get it, right? I can't tell you how many times I've given my heart device speech to non-technical people and I've gotten people to get that that's an issue. Talking about my heart condition is the only way I have been able to get people who are not interested in software fundamentally to understand that there could be a problem with our technology and that software freedom could be a thing. But it's so hard to explain, right? So hard to explain to people that software is embedded in their lives. It's so hard to explain to people how much we rely on software personally and together, right? But everyone in this room gets it, right? Everyone here understands that these issues are important and you are special and we as a community are special because we have that special skills and knowledge and it takes me back to the order of the engineer, right? With great power comes great responsibility. We are a small group of people who understand fundamentally why software freedom matters, why it's important and why in the long term we're gonna have real problems if we don't look after the ethics of our technology. We're gonna have real problems if we don't have software freedom, if we can't fix problems when they arise, if we are not certain that our software, we don't have the ways to determine whether our software is surveilling us, if we don't have the ability to replace our software, if it's doing the various things, things that we don't want it to do, we are going to enable dangerous regimes over and over again and we will be defenseless. And so together we understand that software freedom is important and other people don't. So while it is so tempting to run and work on other urgent issues of the day, it just means that we, and that work needs to be done. It's very valuable work and we need to support it. It's the extent we can be and instead of or, we should, but while we have few resources, little time and little money, we need to make sure that we look after these issues because nobody else will. If we who have been involved with free and open source software don't stay focused on the long term goals of software freedom, we will be lost because nobody else is mining the store. And we can't just be reactive. We have to actually build that better world. We have to build the tools that we're going to need. We have to work on software freedom. And so just as I had gone from someone who thought that open source was cool to realizing that software freedom was essential, in this soul searching phase of, oh, we should all like drop what we're doing and go work on the urgent issues of today to make sure that we're safe. We need to think about the long term because with software freedom, when we get to a place that looks like an end, we have a potential new beginning which we don't have with proprietary technology. With proprietary technology, which is what the current default is, right? That's what the current regime is built on. We have limited options. And with software freedom, we can do it. We can actually build that better world. So I guess I shouldn't need, I don't need to say now that software freedom conservancy is a charity because I already belabor that so much. But I ask you to join into all of the software freedom charitable work and the software freedom, the non-profit space, all of the free and open source software organizations and help support the cause. This is the time to double down, not the time to turn our backs. So thank you so much. I think we have time for questions. So thank you very much, Karen, for the enlightening presentation today. We do have an audience mic, Philip, if you could stand up with the mic on there. And I'm over on this side and we will take turns taking some questions here. Jim. Hi, Jim St. Ledger. Great talk. I think probably everybody in this room probably buys into it, but what do we do? And I mean by that. So there's the March on Washington, the Women's March. There's even the March for Life. There's an upcoming Science March on April 22nd. Do we need a software march? Do we need a technology march? Do we go and write our congressman and show up at the White House door? What are the tangible things we go and do that can and will make a difference and how might they make a difference? Okay, I'm gonna be a shill for just a second and say you need to open your wallets to the software freedom organizations. Like not just the Software Freedom Conservancy, but also the Free Software Foundation and all the small organizations. Thank you. Because we've gotten notes from people saying I so care about what you do in the Software Freedom Conservancy. But this time I have donated, this year I'm taking my money and I'm donating to the ACLU instead. And I think the ACLU is an awesome organization and needs to be supported. And I'm not gonna say but, I'm gonna say. And there are, our Software Freedom Organizations are struggling and the donations to our Free Software Organizations have declined. I think pretty much across the board, and I see people nodding who are involved with other organizations because people are distracted by other issues right now which are valuable issues. But the organizations that we have in the Free Software Space are on the edge, right? Where organizations, Conservancy has no reserve, right? Very little reserve. We have, we struggle to pay our staff. We wonder if we're gonna, you know, if we're gonna make it through the next couple of years and getting the small decline in donations is so painful and we feel it more acutely. And the problem is is that it's not having that decline means that some of our organizations might crumble and we won't have them and we'll have to build up a lot of that infrastructure again. We're gonna lose key people who are, who understand. What we need to do is we need to make that connection. So you need to support those organizations but also volunteer for them, promote the cause, get a little bit more involved. Like Conservancy has no PR staff. If you've heard of us, it's probably because, well, I mean we have a website and we have a blog but it's mostly because people who are our supporters who get what we do talk about it as volunteers. And we need that because we're, we can't afford to spend any money on somebody writing about our work and we have to, we move a mountain of work with only four people, we just won't be able to do it. So I would say that what we need to do is focus on these special skills that we have as a community and try to explain them as best we can. And to look inward and support the people who are doing the work to create that corporately independent infrastructure. The second thing that we need to do is we need to make sure that we are looking after the balance between companies and the community. Copy Left did that sort of a little bit more by default. Like with Copy Left, we knew that we had a different, a certain kind of balance between companies and corporations with permissive or if John Sullivan's here, I'm not sure, dismissive licensing, we lose some of that power. And companies have been very insistent to move towards more permissive licensing because they have more control over our technology. And we as a society start to lose out. With Copy Left, with the GPL, baked into it is your right to get not only the source code but the scripts to control installation. If we're worried about replacing our software so we can be safe, we need to make sure we have the ability to do that. So it doesn't necessarily need to be under Copy Left licensing, but we need to be more assertive about that. And when we start projects, we need to think about the licensing situation and try to prepare for the future. Conservancy has launched an initiative called Contract Patched, which is to help developers better understand their employment agreements and to negotiate them better. And so for example, asking to keep your copyrights is one good way to sort of help keep that balance tipped in the right direction. So looking after these long-term things, these projects are really important. I think I would be open to, I definitely would be open to things like, like show ways that we can show our unity. I'm not sure that marches are necessarily the right thing right now, although there have been some successes, especially against patents and some jurisdictions by having marches. I just wanna make sure that we're sensitive as a community to the needs of the day. Like we're not saying that software freedom, certainly not, is more important than the issues that are going on right now. What we're saying is that software freedom is in the service of those issues. And that without software freedom, we won't be able to form an ethical society. I like your shirt. Yeah, thanks. So I'm a software developer and I have worked on proprietary software. So actually I have a question for the audience at this point. Who here is a software developer that is currently being paid to write proprietary software? It's like a quarter of the audience. And so who here also cares deeply about free software? Sorry. So yeah, I think that's really telling there. And what I think when you were saying the thing for negotiating contracts, I guess my big question is how as a developer that cares about software freedom, can that be something that works into a company? Is it something where you would just look for positions where that is less against throughout the company is going or are we gonna end up falling into the Volkswagen problem all the time? I guess that's as specific as I can get with the question. Yeah, I don't wanna mislead everyone. I think that software freedom, free and open source software has been fascinating and interesting in that we have done some really extraordinary things with partnering with companies. There's a lot of good that comes out of the work that companies do in free and open source software. And it's critical that companies work in free and open source software. It's critical that companies feel safe over time, migrating to more and more and ultimately all free and open source software. And the fact that there has been a business advantage to using free and open source software is critical and what we also need to highlight. So I don't wanna make it sound like I'm saying it's us versus them, we're them as the companies. It's just that companies, our interests and corporate interests will not always be aligned and we need to make sure that we look out for those situations where they're not aligned. With contract patch, what we acknowledge is that a single employee, a single developer doesn't necessarily have a lot of negotiating power. You're worried about getting this job, right? You're worried about what your next step is. And so the reason why we think contract practice is so important is that if you, so first of all, everyone should negotiate their employment agreements. Companies expect you to. And usually whenever you're served with an agreement of any kind, most people expect there to be some negotiation. So built into the contract are some terms that are less favorable to you that are giveaways, right? The things that the company knows or the other party knows that they're comfortable giving you so that when you come to them asking them for whatever it is that's important to you, they can say, oh, we can't go do that, but how about this other thing, right? And it's something we learned in law school. It's like a basic negotiation strategy and it's built into every contract. So most of the time, if you're not asking for something, you're already giving it away. And so the idea is that letting developers know that they can ask in friendly ways and not jeopardize their negotiation is one critical thing. But the idea is if it's not just one developer asking to keep their copyrights, because you can say, can I keep my copyrights? And they'll say, no, and that'll be over, right? Or maybe they'll say yes, you don't even know. Yesterday or Friday at the CLE session, I asked the lawyers in the room to raise their hand if they'd ever worked on a contract where they granted an employee to keep their own copyrights in the course of their employment and more than half of the lawyers raised their hand. So this is something that actually happens even though we think that it doesn't, right? But if 40, 50, 100 developers ask that same question, some companies will get the idea that, hey, I can attract better talent if I let them. Really, if I'm using free and open from hiring them to do free and open source software, what am I really giving away? Very little, right? So in this way, if more people ask, we're gonna wind up in a better situation. And I think that that's sort of where we need to go towards and not put any necessarily one person on the line. And if all of us ask, the industry will move. There are a bunch of questions over there, okay. Could you tell us what the four employees of the Software Freedom Conservancy do? Yeah, so I should have said we have four and a quarter employees. So I'm one employee and I'm also was a co-founder of Conservancy with Bradley Kuhn, who's here as well. So I'm the executive director. I run the organization and I report to the board. But I also, by default, because I'm the top employee, I'm also by default the bottom employee. So if I can't delegate the work that I have, I have to so I often book developer travel, do all kinds of, literally at an event, I took out the trash once. Like I think which is a funny thing that often happens. So I'm the most senior and by default, the most junior employee. Bradley is president of the organization, but as an employee he's a distinguished technologist. And so he's also our default bookkeeper. And he spends, I'd say he works harder than anyone I've ever met and works all the time. He's probably now embarrassed in looking at his computer and also doing bookkeeping. Oh, he's live tweeting, that's nice. We are also, so we're also the spokespeople for the organization and we do, and we're also the primary writers for the organization. We rate when things get included in copyleft.org. And then we have Tony Sebro, who's our general counsel, who's a fantastic lawyer. So when we do GPL compliance stuff and we do support our member projects, when they have conferences, he's the one who negotiates the contract for those conferences. But he's also our default designer. I think he did a pretty good job with that graphic. And he also is our default HR person and does a ton of other things. And then Brett Smith is our director of strategic initiatives. You notice we all have kind of fancy top heavy titles because we, I think I'm so proud of the staff at Conservancy because they're such amazing people and the fact that they are willing to do so many crummy jobs in addition to their top jobs is really just amazing. So he has been working on a non-profit accounting project to improve our bookkeeping so that it takes up a little bit less of Bradley's time and that it's more exportable to other organizations because we do everything in a software freedom kind of way. And if we're solving a problem, we should solve it for everyone. And then we've got Denver Gengrich, who is our compliance engineer and he helps us one day a week on our compliance actions. And we've got a lot of volunteers. No. Are you familiar with the right to repair movement and can you comment on how that relates to what you're doing? Yeah, I think the right to repair movement is really, really awesome. And Alison Shaken is here. She's right there, just talk to her. Just amazing. So we are completely aligned with the right to repair movement. I love the right to repair movement because it is a slightly different way of explaining software freedom and our particular values. And a lot of the things that we do interface in the same kinds of ways. So for example, we applied for an exemption with the DMCA, with the Library of Congress for the DMCA so that for smart TVs, which now surveil us constantly, that we can circumvent the technological protection measures on those televisions. So we had current developers who were purchasing TVs that were running with Linux who basically couldn't modify their own television without potentially having criminal liability under the DMCA. And so we applied and successfully got an exception to the DMCA so that you can now circumvent those protection measures in order to modify your own stuff. So a lot of the stuff we do is, and then personally I was part of a medical device coalition that also did the same successfully for medical devices because we should be able to circumvent these measures to test these devices for safety and for TVs and for everything else that we own. We should be able to make sure that our devices aren't surveilling us. We should be able to, if we want, we should be able to do things to improve our closed captioning or our other assistive works. So I think that there's a huge affinity between the right to repair movement and software freedom and servicing. We're only limited by our resources to just keep ourselves afloat that we can't do more. So you mentioned in order of the engineer, I was also, the other ethical, I guess requirements on engineering would be a professional engineering licensure. I was curious to have your thoughts on professional engineering for software engineers and the effect of that on free software. So can you just give me a tiny bit more? So there's a lot of issues with, let's say we had PEs that were software engineers. Texas, for instance, allows that. If we had a project that was, let's say we made break software, we could only allow PEs to contribute to that software. Oh, I see. And so then if we effectively reduced the diversity, we couldn't take a contribution from India because they wouldn't have professional licensure in Texas. So there's a lot of issues with that, but yet it would solve some of the ethical issues. It seems like a mixed bag. Yeah, I mean, I think being able to take contributions from a wide variety of people and then being able to certify that software to regulatory entities is something different, right? If you have, if you have, and I'm not familiar with the particular legislation that your regulations that you're talking about, but I'm familiar with some that are similar. And for many of them, you can just put in place the top, the main, the primary committers are people who meet those qualifications and then you can take contributions from anywhere provided that you have the right review and reporting. And that's basically sort of the answer to many of these issues is that if you have some kind of auditing process which software freedom is perfectly amenable to, it works perfectly then and makes a lot of sense then that really benefits things. So I think I think that it's dangerous if we say that certain people have certain, especially with software freedom, right? Like we've had so many extraordinary things done by people who sometimes didn't even have a high school diploma, right? And so making sure that that stays a fundamental part of what we are like. Sugar Labs, which is a member project of Conservancy. One of the core developers, it was a kid that got Sugar Labs, a one laptop per child and is now really actively involved. And so making sure that we have that balance between making sure that we are inclusive and encouraging people at a young age to participate while also responding to some of these concerns and regulations is important. And one of the things that Conservancy has set up to do is to basically, we can, for our member projects and as public statements of our opinion for the public, we can do these legal analyses and make statements about what is right for our society, what isn't what's right for software freedom. I think you're cutting me off, Elon. So I imagine Karen will be more than happy to make herself available to answer more questions. Oh yeah, as executive director of Conservancy, of course my job is to be at the booth all day. So I'll be there if anybody wants to talk. Thank you. So thanks again, Karen. And as I mentioned, I imagine Karen will be at the booth and here to answer any questions you might have. So one of our traditions is to offer a scale team jersey to our keynote speakers. And so we wanted to welcome, thank you for all your participation at scale over the years and welcome you as a member of the team. As I said, scale is just one of my favorites and this means so much to me. Thank you. Thank you, Karen.