 I know that the very worst thing you can do is to assign yourself the speech between the end and drinks. The only sensible use for this is thank yous, which I will, of course, get to in just a moment. I am going to trench upon your patience just for a little while for some substantive thoughts that this afternoon raised for me. As you can see, I have had a plan for today which was a plan about how the law of free software interacts with the technical future and there was a particular point in that which was to discuss not just blockchain in itself but the nature of the enterprise into which we are now moving in which we change how we think about data that we share and I wanted to point to the software engineering consequences of that for free software. But the other thing that we have been talking about today which I think is crucial is the particular form in which discussion about copyright compliance and license violation has now entered. I wanted to talk to you about this even before some events I referred to this morning which have brought it into yet sharper relief for me. We are not and we never were copyright maximalists. We did not do what we have been doing for the past 30 years to build free software on the basis of the assumption that freedom required us to chase down and punish everybody who ever made a mistake or who even deliberately misused copyrighted software made for sharing. When I began to work with Richard Stallman in 1993, GPL2 was 18 months old and although I had been thinking about what all of this meant for some little while I was working on making the world safe for public key encryption. And in the course of doing that Richard Stallman contacted me and he said he had a problem and could I help him with it? And I said yes, I use Emacs every single day and it will be a very long time until you exhaust your entitlement to free legal help from me. And so I went and did what he needed done and then I thought to myself this is the most important place for a lawyer to work right now if I could just sit on Richard Stallman's email stream and he would send me what he thought needed a lawyer because anybody in the world who had a problem that involved freedom and computers knew one email address and it was rmsatgonu.org pretty soon I could figure out what it was that actually needed doing. And very rapidly I realized that what it was that needed doing was getting people to spontaneously comply with law instead of having to fight them each and every time. Spontaneous compliance is the only conceivable way to run a legal system I must tell you. The United States is a country with an extraordinary amount apparently of complaining about taxes every four years or every two, but every year Americans pay their taxes and they don't do it because they get a lot of people sent to jail. They do it because spontaneous compliance is the way law really works. The problem of legal engineering which presented itself to me in 1993 and the problem we are still talking about this afternoon from my point of view is how to ensure spontaneous legal compliance not how to figure out an adequate degree of coercion which will make an adequate degree of compliance at the other end. The fundamental problem as it presented itself to me in 1993 is the problem that it still presents itself to me now. Coercion does not work if you have to do so much of it that you can't afford it and coercion only works so long as you never lose any fight anywhere which is why you have to keep equipping your police with bigger and bigger guns and there is always the risk that they will use them. I did not want then and I do not want now to pretend that the way that we secure compliance with copyright law with respective free software is by chasing down people and making them comply. It is important every once in a while to set an example and therefore it is important every once in a while to declare that you are in a last resort situation and there's nothing else that you can do. I understand why at the present time there are a large number of people who are living in that expanding boundary that we have all been talking about and given where they work, the particular software they work on and the particular forms of downstream use that are most important to them, they run into situations in which they are working in those outer boundaries and they believe that everybody in the world doesn't get it and everybody in the world is a crook and everybody in the world is trying to steal free software and make bad use of it and what I thought was so important about Greg and Ted and the point that they came here to make today was to say that if you are sitting in the middle of the single most commercially valuable free software project in the world and you have thousands of people helping you to make it, fighting with every single person is not the way to win. Converting every single person is the way to win and fighting can only conceivably be valuable if it is on the way to converting people. It cannot possibly stand on its own. I have some fine clients and wonderful friends in this movement who have been getting rather angry recently. There is a lot of anger in the world in fact, in politics. Our political movement is not the only one suffering from anger at the moment but some of my angry friends, dear friends, friends I really care for have come to the conclusion that they're on a jihad for free software and I will say this after decades of work, whatever else may be the drawbacks in other areas of life, the problem in our neighborhood is that jihad does not scale. What we have been hearing from the lawyers, I have been friends and colleagues and occasional professional adversaries with over these decades is that in the industrial use of free software, scale is what matters. And we on our side in the community of free software makers have to understand that scale is what matters too. The problem with jihad is that it's not virtuous or that making people obey the rules is somehow wrong. I like policemen and police forces a lot but I know that the amount of policing necessary to produce perfect compliance is an amount of policing we can neither afford nor tolerate in the society where we live. So regrettably I have to draw some factual conclusions about that. First, if at any time in our long association over the past 23 years, this century, last century, it doesn't matter. If Richard Stallman and I had gone to court and sued a major global public company on a claim of copyright infringement that was weak enough to be thrown out of court on a motion to dismiss, we would have destroyed the GPL straight away. If we had shown that we were prepared to risk large on coercion, even against a bad actor in our own judgment, if we had done that without adequate preparation to be sure that we won, we would have lost an example of coercion and nobody would have trusted us again. I did sue people, it's true. Greg referred to the way in which when the busy box guys thought they wanted to start doing that and I did it for them, the results may not have been the ones that they most wanted. That happens with clients all the time, particularly clients who go to court, they get something which is not quite what they wanted. But I thought it was important then because busy box was being embedded in everything and the moment at which we were then living in which the frontier was expanding so rapidly seemed to me to indicate that it was necessary to get people's attention. And I thought then as I think now that the people whose attention you need to get are the people who don't pick up the phone when you call them. We thought people you can't contact, people you can't get to answer the phone, people who will never spontaneously comply, they won't even answer your mail, may be the right people to make an example of. But on the night before we filed the busy box cases in 2009, I chased down in Japan at two in the morning the general counsel of one of the organizations we were gonna sue the next day, a very large and very powerful and very reputable company. And I said to him, if you give me your personal assurance, Mr. So-and-So, that you're gonna fix this problem, tomorrow you will not be sued. I will take your word for it, nothing more. And he said yes and I said yes and they were not sued the following day because all we wanted was people to pay attention and bring their engagement to the party. And even at that level, too much coercion, and we are still arguing about whether that was enough or too much, too much coercion was surely not what I wanted to apply. Point number two, if when Scott and Terry and their colleagues in IBM and Hewlett Packard first began to come to free software, when they first wanted to recommend it and use it and maybe even distribute it themselves or encourage other people to distribute it for them, if we had criticized them for not being nonprofit virtuous enough, if we had said we were suspicious of you, let alone if we had threatened to say, one step over the line Buster and we will sue you, everything else that we wanted to do would have become impossible immediately. If we had not acted as Greg and Ted say that they must act on behalf of the great project that we all love, if we had not welcomed everybody with open arms and made clear that the commercial exploitation of the software was our hope, not our fear, we would have achieved absolutely nothing that really mattered to us about freedom. Point number three, we spent years scrupulously getting work for hire disclaimers from every business and every university that employed or worked with a contributor to GNU. Every time we took a right, we took a disclaimer to be sure if there was any question that anybody needed to be contacted and we negotiated those disclaimers as long and as carefully as it took, the people who gave us work for hire disclaimers, they didn't get free software, I assure you. They were simply being asked to say that it wasn't work for hire, that some guy who worked for them was working on a project in her or his spare time. But if we hadn't gotten those disclaimers, if we hadn't proved to everybody that we were not trying to solicit rights on which they had a claim, if we had, for example, gone around and asked people to give us rights in software they had written while working at other companies without ever talking to those company's lawyers, not only would we have destroyed all trust, not only would we have made it absolutely impossible to achieve what we really wanted, I'd have put my law license in danger. Now, I think all three of those are uncontroversial propositions. But in case you're inclined to doubt any of those propositions, I have to tell you that people in my world, people in my neighborhood, people in my movement, people in many cases whom I trained have conducted those same experiments over the last two years, and the results have not been any different than I would have expected. We have created for ourselves some troubles. And there are other people out there creating troubles for us. This is a current NSF funding solicitation for a free software intended project. That is to say, NSF is soliciting research funding applications from a client of mine which makes free software. And this solicitation is designed to support them, except it isn't because they're a GPL project. All projects agree to distribute all source code under an NSF big corp award under a BSD Apache or other equivalent open source license, but no evil viral licenses like GPL, LGPL, artistic or Mozilla public license. Don't even think of applying for research funding if you're gonna make copy left free software. Now, if you think that that's a little much, how about this? So as it turns out, not only can you patent some software here, but all your intellectual property rights, that is including your copyright, since it's all works of authorship, will be a non-exclusively licensed to big corp. I have changed big corp's name to protect the theoretically innocent. This is a current DARPA funding solicitation, also for a project that makes copy left free software. Once again, you are strongly urged to make wonderful open source software under this award. Don't think of using copy left, we don't want you to. So you have to put a special explanation in the grant request, which is of course equivalent to thanks, but no thanks. This, I must tell you, if you wanna talk about cure and cancer, cure this for me. This is more dangerous than all the copyright infringement by accident or deliberation occurring out there in the free software world right now. This will make copy left wither away. Because throughout the research infrastructure in this wonderful great country of ours, if copy left is not allowed, then a whole generation of the most talented people we work with will come to the conclusion before they get their BA, or before they get their doctorate, or before they decide to go and do something in industry, they will already have concluded that there's something wrong with copy left and you shouldn't use it. I don't know any way to sue this out of existence. I don't know any way to deal with this militarily. This is a diplomatic challenge. This is a diplomatic challenge that requires lawyers who know how to do this, which is not about lawyers who know how to sue people. It is not about coercion. It is not even about encouraging people to convert. It's about reversing a problem that we have partially brought on ourselves and which other people are taking advantage of bigly, if you ask me, okay? This is where the limits of counseling meet the limits of coercion and the real answer is you have to have a great big ecosystem and everybody has to believe in it or else you have to have as many lobbyists as big corp and they have to be spread all over the research infrastructure as shoring copy lefts future. So what I wanna say about all this is that we are now at a turning point. The good news of today is that that turning point should carry us all from the stages of fear and compliance to the stages of engagement and leadership. We are now actually ready. I don't mean ready plus or minus three or ready plus or minus the regulators of FinTech. I mean, we are ready now with SPDX and Open Chain and better tooling and Debian machine readable copyright on everything that everybody really uses. We are ready to begin to reduce the costs of non-compliance and lowering the costs of finding how to comply to a level which really will allow us to do what Greg and Ted were talking about which is country by country and commercial environment by commercial environment all around the world making things just work. I remember how much Nokia admired Apple for the just works thing of it all and I agree with you that it is awfully good that we got that stuff off the floor and into things because it was wonderful stuff. And I'm not going to tell stories now about how hard it was to try and get Nokia not to fly into the side of the mountain with that stuff back in 2010. It was a sad experience. But what we have now is the opportunity to avoid all the evolutionary dead ends that ever beset us. We have an opportunity to put this stuff where we want it which is everywhere and to make it do what we want which is to spread freedom. We're not in a place where the difficulty is how do we get enough ammunition to force everybody to comply. We don't need ammunition. We need diplomacy. We need skill. We need to work together better and we need to understand how that working together proposively brings us to the point where we are not afraid of FOS anymore and we are not worried about complying anymore. We are just all engaging and leading the task of making free software. But I have to convince a lot of people of that and not all of them are on the so-called other side. And that process is going to be a complicated one. It's gonna take a couple of years. We have some backing up to do and some moving forward to do at the same time. And although anarchism is good at moving in many directions simultaneously, it is not always good at understanding where it has to back up and where it has to move forward. But this, this will make us because the long-term threats to copy left are not to be found in people who aren't doing it quite right. The long-term threats to copy left are not to be found in the idea that too many people are getting away with too much and we have to go and get on our motorcycles and run them down and pull them over to the side of the road and give them a ticket. That's simply not the model that is relevant right now. And not everybody fully understands that. So from my point of view, the purpose of today, the purpose of today with blockchain and the purpose of the day with where we are really entering into a whole new zone of frontier, and the purpose of thinking about what the lawyering we've all done for decades means and the purpose of talking to the clients about what they really need is to make the point that we are not going to war to save the GPL. That's not where we are right now. We're not even going to war to save copy left right now. We are certainly not going to war to save any projects right now. That's just destroying the village in order to save it. And we've never been that kind of lawyers and we're not going to become that kind of lawyers. What we do have is a real problem in deciding how to make copy left relevant forever. There are a lot of smart people in this room who in their quiet moments face to face with me or other people here have been known to say, you know, I think copy left might become and you're relevant now. It was good. It put some principles deep in everybody's minds. It gave everybody a real sense about what our aspirations are. But from an operational point of view, we don't need it anymore. I fear that copy left's most powerful supporters have helped to bring people to that conclusion. The purpose of today, even before news reached me from the outer world, the purpose of today is to say, that's not where we are. Where we are is copy left is a great idea that changed the world and it needs refreshment now in order to appeal to a younger generation of people who write programs for sharing. And in order to make it appeal to those people who write programs for sharing, we need to make it simpler to use and quicker to have and better at doing all the jobs it's supposed to do. And we need to refrain from going unnecessarily to war. The lessons that we learned over the last quarter century are still good. That way won't work. I agree with the people who have suggested that carry just a moment too far. Willingness to use copy left among the rational businesses of the world will decline to a point which is dangerous to freedom because I do believe the copy left is important to freedom. Indeed, I think it's crucial to freedom. Indeed, that's what I was taught by the greatest computer programmer I've ever known. So my point here, if it's okay just to have a point when people should already be drinking and dancing, my point is let's not get confused. This is not war time. This is diplomacy time. Skill counts, agility counts, discretion counts, long credibility counts, ammunition? Ammunition is worthless because wherever we fire it, we work everywhere and it's only gonna hit us. So I don't have to keep us much longer because what is left is thanks. My thanks, of course, begin with the people I work with without whom all of this would not be possible. I've trained a lot of lawyers and I choose carefully whom I work with or at least I like to believe I do which means I'm right about half the time. But with Mishie I am right 100% of the time. I have a legal director and a law partner and a partner in policy making around the world who teaches me every single day and who I deeply believe will be here when I have fallen under the bus and there's no kind of gratitude like the gratitude of knowing that you've got a partner who's got your back. Daniel Gnuchiev who has spent all day long making everything work. Daniel's job is running our network and keeping our firewall up and keeping the NSA out and easy stuff like that. And when I say to him, so you're a multimedia guy and you're running a conference and everything will work and the stream will be perfect and we will do free software video streaming and live audio and we will, and he says, okay, well, that's true. You understand why I need to thank him particularly. I saw him leave our internal IRC channel this morning at 1.25 a.m. and I thought, and he's gonna be back at 8.15. Thank you. To Tanisha Madrid who keeps our money and our time and who had to go to get her two kids after she had to go and drop them off this morning on the way in order to be here at 8.15 too, she won't be on the stream, but my deep thanks. To my associate Daniel Burns who is now learning the trade with us and who is still a really good front end HTML5 programmer and therefore helps me with what we need to do in that respect to Alice Wang and our other apprentices and hangers on and people who have helped today. I can't tell you how important it is that we can just do a thing and people will turn up and help. All of that is part of what I need to say. Now, one last thing, I am a guy who needs a personal assistant. I have gotten to the stage where I am really quite incompetent in the world and Michael Weholt came to me earlier this fall and I think he thought that he could probably do the job and then we said, oh, and by the way, you're putting on a conference. And he said, well, I'll never put on any conferences but as long as it's not the Academy Awards and of course it isn't the Academy Awards although here I am talking at midnight. Michael deserves a special round of thanks because he was worried as hell about it and he's made everything work. So once again, to Keith Burgelt and OIN and to David Marr and Guacom Technology Industries, I'm grateful for particular support in making sure that there was sufficient free food and will be sufficient free beer. But I do have one more thing to say. I do have one more kind of thanks to offer and they are to me the deepest and today at least the most moving thanks of all. I cannot stand here before you without ending with my thanks to Richard Matthew Stalman. He invented the world I live in. Years ago, Larry Lessig said that Richard Stalman had invented the 21st century and I said, well, that may or may not be true but any 21st century Richard Stalman did not invent is a 21st century I won't consider it safe to live in and that's still true. To my comrade, to my client, to my friend, Richard Stalman, my deepest and most determined thanks, there is nothing, nothing in the world that could ever divide us as much as we have been brought together by the dream that we have shared and that we continue to give our lives to. It could not have happened without one man's thinking. At Red Hat, there used to be back in the old days before the Progress Energy Tower and all the wonderful things that have followed from Red Hat's commercial success, back when it was just barely not Bob Young's and fully Matthew Zulik's. There used to be up in the wall in the reception area painted motto and it said every revolution begins as an idea in one man's mind, which is a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson. And deep in the American grain, as deep in the American grain as Ralph Waldo Emerson himself is Richard Stalman, whose dream it was that made the revolution I'm still trying to kick down the road towards some finish line or other I won't live to see. To him, to you, to all of us, to the people who have made the stuff, to the people who have shared the stuff, to the people who have rolled up the barbed wire and carried it away so we could all just do the work and not have to worry about it, to my friends, to my clients, to the lawyers who have inspired me to teach them my deepest and most unending gratitude. Thank you all for coming. Thank you for being here. Thank you for considering coming back when as next year, as Greg Crow Hartman says, we'll talk about free software licensing and machine learning. Till then, happy hacking.