 Sorry about that. Okay. So let's try it again. Hello, my name is Matthias Kirschner. I work for Free Software Foundation Europe and I'm here today to talk with you about the core values of software freedom. Before we start, I would like to get some feeling about the values here in this room of you. So I would like to ask you the question three. First, who here thinks that your government's military should not operate in other countries? Okay, thank you. Then the next question, who here thinks that it should be mandatory that you should be vaccinated? Okay. And now the last question, which is a religious question, and I was told I shouldn't do that, but well, I still do it. So who of you thinks that Emacs is the best editor or operating system? Okay. I think there are some tendencies, but beside that it was quite diverse from what I saw here. So when we talk about the values of a movement, it's good to look where this movement is coming from. So in the beginning of computing, when you got a computer, you also got the source code. You could do with the software whatever you wanted to do. Nobody was there and cared what you do with it. Then over the time, companies realized that they can make a profit by restricting the excess to the source code and by restricting who can do what or what not. So and this got established more and more until in the early 1980s. This restriction triggered the start of the GNU project and the creation of the Free Software Foundation and they defined again what software users should be allowed to do. And they came up with this definition here with those points. They said that every user of software should be allowed to use it for any purpose. That everybody should be allowed to study how it works and understand what those things are doing around us. And that you can share the software again with others, modified or not modified. And that you can always make improvements to the software, that you can change it. So they noted that down a little bit like defining what was the normal behavior before. Explaining that's what they want to do. And they started to write software and make sure that everybody gets software under those terms. Now some time later, there were also other organizations. They also explained what software, what users should be allowed to do. It's 10 points. I can't remember 10 points. I can remember four points. In the end, it's the same thing. When you think about it, what is this? Some people call it a car. Some people say it's a mini. Others say it's a BMW. Some people might call it a vehicle or a computer on four wheels. However they call it, it's the same thing. It highlights different aspects of it. Certain values which are connected are highlighted higher like the brand or what it does or how you would like to be seen by others. And the same is true for those other terms which are around free software. You can say free software, you can say open source, Libre software, combine them. In the end, it's the same software I'm talking about here. So when I say free software, in this talk it's the same as when someone else is saying open source software. Most other people say open source software. So now there was this movement and they started to write software to allow people to use, study, share and improve it. Now there were some people coming to this movement and they misunderstood some things. So one part was often that people understood that in this movement we care about that the software is available for everyone without any costs so that you can have greater software. And they thought that that's one of the values which is connected there. Everybody should get it without having to pay for it. So that's also why from time to time we get emails or people ask us, oh, there's someone violating the principles of free software. They ask for money when you want to download it so it can't be free software. Also in app stores, they say, well, if you have to pay for this app it cannot be free software. I have to check and find another app. The free software movement, it's not about money. You can make money with this software. You can share it with others. You can ask for money for that. You can also share with others. Not ask for money for it. Give it away at greatest. So the money part is nothing which defines the values of this movement. There are many people in here who make money with it. There are others who do it and don't want to have money for it. Now, other people thought that because some prominent examples in free software are handled by that that with free software everybody needs to be able to participate. And everybody needs to be able to become part of the group of people developing something so that you have an open development model. And that's something which is sometimes happening with free software but you are not forced to do that and there are many examples where this is not the case. So with free software, we don't tell people how they should develop the software and with whom they should do it. It's absolutely fine if you sit at home in your basement, you write software, you don't listen to anyone, don't pick up the phone. When someone wants to talk to you, you don't listen to them and you ship the software, sell it to someone else, give them all the rights associated with it, the source code. And yes, it's free software and it's absolutely fine to do that with free software. While on the other hand, it is also possible that there are 15 universities around the world which are developing software altogether and students can also participate, professors can participate, but the software says it's just for academic purposes. So it's violating one of the other values but it's an open development model. Also, in free software, we see that sometimes those development models, they change. So people, someone is violating the principles of the software freedom movement. They published the source code before and now we haven't heard from them for six months. It's possible that people who develop free software that they from time to time focus on other tasks and during that time they don't listen to others and they just make sure they can ship a new product and during that time they don't listen to any feedback and they don't want to have anyone else in their group and afterwards it might change again or they decide that maybe they can write better software if they don't ask for feedback by others. That's all possible with free software. Free software is not deciding about the development model. Now another thing that happened over the time was that people said that they wanted to introduce other beliefs, other values for free software as well. So we saw before it was that you should be able to use study, share and improve the software and then there were others who said like, yeah, but there's one other thing we should add there to make sure that this is something which I value. So one prominent example of this is that there were people who said that free software should not allow military, used by the military because we don't want that the software we are writing that this is used to kill people. And I picked this example because there was a lot of discussion about this in the free software movement. So first of all one of the questions which came up was when there are people who want to kill other people will they care about what values we have defined in our software licenses? So if someone is violating some other principles of human behavior will they care about what we write down there? That was something which was a question there if that's a useful tool to achieve that. The other question which popped up there was what does it mean, military use? So a pickup truck, is it military use if you use free software in there? Can you use it when it says no military is allowed to use it? If you mount a machine gun on it you will see many conflicts around the world where this is used similar to a tank. So how far will you go there? How will you define this? It's a difficult question how far this is going. Does it also mean the company which is producing those cars is not allowed to use the software anymore? And so there are many challenges there to think about how to do this right if you want to accomplish it that this is not happening. And one other important thing which we realized in this debate was that depending on where you are coming from you have a different opinion about that. So there are countries where the military is mainly focused on firing guns, firing tanks and so on. There are countries where the military is responsible in case of catastrophes, floods, fires. I mean when you see big burning woods, forests the military might be responsible for that. In some countries the military is partly responsible for emergency first aid situations. So depending on where you are coming from what you experience your opinion will also be different there. And there are also other debates. Another example here is that people said like the question before that the software should just be used by people who are vaccinated or by companies who make sure that their employees are vaccinated. So someone thought that there is a health problem and maybe we can fix that inside free software as well. The question which came up with this example is then also mainly how much more power do we allow developers in comparison to users? How much of their value system are they allowed to transfer to the users of the software? And that's a tough one because there are way more examples like this. And there are examples which are very broad. You are not allowed to do evil, you are not allowed to harm people and many, many more things about labor laws, about environmental issues, about animal rights, about nuclear power, about genetic engineering and many, many things. So think about how this could develop in a world where you have so many different political beliefs, so many different religious beliefs, so many different cultures where people are growing up, different education. What can happen there? And so one thing to consider here is as free software programmers we often like our licenses and we also saw that by those licenses we accomplished a lot in our sphere to enable users to use study, share and improve software in the area. The question we should ask ourselves is if for other beliefs we have, for other values we have, if this is also the right tool. If we should use the same hammer we are using to fix our problem for other problems we have in our society. Or if maybe there are other solutions to this, how we can influence laws, how we can change social norms, how we can change markets or architecture in some areas. So that's something we should really consider if software licensing is the right tool for other beliefs we have. In the end till now the free software movement always came to the conclusion it's too tricky to add other things there. And over the time growing more and more it will not become easier because there are more beliefs in the free software community. So after 35 years it becomes difficult to find another joint value we have which brings us back to the four freedoms I mentioned at the beginning that they are at the moment the common base, the common values in the free software movement. So to explain it a bit more again that every person around the world can use the software for anything without asking for permission. Everybody is allowed to do whatever they want to do with the software. And that's a big thing when you think about this because everybody here in the room even if you're not lawyers when someone asks you can I use the software? You can say yes absolutely sure yes. If someone asks you can I do this with the software? You can say yes I'm absolutely sure. So everybody is allowed there to use it for whatever they want to do. That's not a common thing before and for a lot of other areas that's not common that everybody is treated equally. And it makes sure that the users of software they have some balance between them and the developers of the software. On the other hand there is still the value that you should be allowed to study how this works. So everybody around the world is allowed to understand what the software is actually doing nobody is prevented from that nobody is forbidden to get education how this important technology is working. We don't keep stuff secret we enable everyone here to learn this and we also allow everyone to share the software with others again. So when you fix the problem for yourself you're not limited how to help others around you. You can ask for money for that but you can also give it to someone else who doesn't have money so you can help someone who is in the need of also fixing the problem but wouldn't be able to afford it like you were able to afford it. So that's something which is deep in there in free software that you are always allowed to help others and to work together with others in solving problems. And you are always able to improve software. So every individual, every organization, every company, every government they are not forced to use software like someone else intended them to do. Following the assumptions someone else decided, following the rules someone else decided for them they are always able to change the software to fit their own needs. So my argument is that at the moment those four freedoms those define the values we have in the free software movement. And software freedom it's one piece in the puzzle. So we have many problems in our society or many of you see several different problems and free software in a lot of those issues is an important part in there. But it's not enough. So you have all those different things free software is fixing one part of it and is fixing this I think pretty good. So we always should think about if you want to enlarge that or if you should stick also to some of our history to the UNIX principle have one thing which solves one problem and find other tools to fix other problems. So when we look where we are with software freedom nowadays there is still a long way ahead of us. There are many areas in our world many regions many tasks where software freedom is not a default. There's a long way there for us to achieve it that all humankind can benefit from this. And if you compare that to other freedoms in our society we are at the very early beginning. So think about the freedom of the press. How long were people fighting for the freedom of the press? It's hundreds of years now. And what is the situation? There are people, a lot of people think it's a good thing to have that. Well let's ask about that the general population about software freedom. Then there are many countries where you have freedom of the press but you are still struggling to exercise it in practice. And there are countries where you had it but then it was removed again. And there are many countries where they never ever had the freedom of the press. And you have people who are actively working against it and removing it from people. So if you compare this with software freedom I'm pretty sure that the next decades we will have to work on this because we will need more people to work on this like other freedoms where people work for and which are other important parts in this puzzle. So freedom of the press is also one piece of the puzzle. It doesn't fix all the problems people see. It fixes one thing and you need other pieces in the puzzle to lift the life you envision to live. So I think it's important that when we work on software freedom we focus that we get not distracted too much about other issues around us. It's easy nowadays to be distracted about all other things. So there are so many problems everywhere around us but again the same as with the freedom of the press like if you stop working for this because you also want to fix this and you want to fix another problem and you want to fix another problem you will never achieve any progress with the core part of what you are working on. So we need to focus on those values which we have and to give you an example here I also have other beliefs besides free software. So and one strong belief I have is that I'm active in the Wilderness First Aid group and we are helping people to understand how to behave in emergencies and I believe that people should not civil sleep be insured or die because of the lack of proper training in this area. And I join a group which also values this and which wants to make a progress there and I'm active there. Also lots of them they don't care about software freedom. They don't agree with me on my other values. So that's sometimes hard. You can imagine, I mean you notice from other areas as well when you are then forced to work a little bit differently because people don't agree with you on other beliefs but it's something which I think is important that when you are working in one group that you focus on the goals and the values of this group and in the other groups you focus on those other ones. So when we are in the free software movement we should think about how many values do people have to agree with to be part of the movement and to help us to accomplish it that software freedom is the default. So how many things do you have to agree with? When we see the three questions at the beginning and those three circles here we have a smaller group here than we have now here in this room if we all have to agree on those. So that's a challenge to think about what are those values for us and how will they develop in the future. Will it be those four ones? Might we find others where we agree with? I don't know maybe. But one thing which is also important here is that there is a difference between the free software movement and groups active in software freedom in the software freedom movement. So there are groups which have more values than those four values I mentioned that use, study, share and improve. So we as FSFE we have other values as well and they define how we work but they are not deducted from that we are free software organizations they are mainly coming from that we are European we are used to certain laws we grow up with social norms around us with a certain education the people who founded the organization they had certain values and talked about that a lot so that's something which is then also of course something which is inside an organization also it might not be written down some part is written down in a constitution other parts they are not written down so that's true for all the other organizations working there some they value other things besides those the core values of software freedom the thing which I think is important there is to think hard about when to split up so when are there beliefs that you don't agree with when do you have to split and so that's a tough question because some values they are very deep inside us and it's tough to say like I still work with those other groups with these other people also they are completely different from myself and completely different from how I think we should live but yeah I would like to encourage you to before you say like let's split to think about if this is really something where we have to split for and or if we can agree that those are our core principles there are other values which we also believe in which we fulfill in other areas which we work for in other areas and which are not a block of us to still work together with many others to make sure that free software becomes a default so I think that in the free software movement we will become larger way larger and we that also means that we will be more diverse more diverse than we are now we will need way more people around the world to get active in this and it will happen I'm sure about that that also means that we will be challenged and we need to continue to be respectful and we might sometimes be even more challenged on this regard to be respectful to someone else who has a complete other background than we have and while doing that I think it's important to focus and not get distracted with all those other beliefs around us but focus on software freedom in this movement and focus on the other beliefs in our other work so that's my part thank you very much thank you any questions up here I'll start there hello so thank you for your talk it was great so no system is perfect right from the beginning every system needs to change and the same holds true for the free software let's call it like this rules that you showed the ten ones as the time goes by we see that the free software is threatened by some companies by some licenses and so on and so forth let's not be specific here I agree with you that do one thing and do that well as an engineer I think that's so but we also need to think that we need to adapt the rules that we have for what we want to achieve as the time goes by so do you see that those ten rules are sufficient and will be sufficient or do you think that at some point once the attack patterns on the free software change we will have to adapt also thank you I think we already adopted over the time so there were some challenges where there was some change there like with how to translate these values to other technology and there will be challenges with that for I mean there are already challenges like with network services where you have to think about how do you translate this in this area and there are some some dry standard could we maybe also add something to our licenses to make that easier to counter attacks in this area there are also other technologies when they are coming up like artificial intelligence the question is like what role is free software playing there and it's possible that I mean you need to translate that and what it means I also mean that that people have the same possibility as they had before with the other technology people you need other freedoms as well so for example you might additionally to exercise the same things you were able to do in the past alone with software freedom you might need other freedoms or other other tools there as well like with data, access to data and how data is handled I think that the situation like it was 20 years ago is also on a regulator level completely different for the government what people could ask for or not there if it's necessary because of technological change that in some areas government might also have to regulate to make sure that people can still exercise rights which were before given by software freedom but I think that a lot of that will not mean that the software freedom part will be enlarged but it's that we see that as a society to achieve certain goals we need to add other parts in the puzzle as well again so thank you up here hi thanks for your talk so I know since day one that free software is free as in freedom and not as in free beer everybody that has spent some time has heard this at some point but very recently I had a problem because so there is an add-on for Thunderbird which is called send later and it's free software and his developer recently put up a kickstarter because he said that since there is the change of APIs in Thunderbird he needs to rewrite the add-on from scratch and the problem that he was facing is that this needs time and the commitment that he can support only if he gets these donations and he was thinking about basically making this software non free anymore because he wanted to put a license to use free software and as a supporter of free software well this was disappointing but at the same time I see the problem that this guy has because he says I maintain 10 plugins that are free software for Thunderbird I need to do a lot of work and only a very small fraction of the people that are using these plugins actually support me through donations and I have asked him if this campaign is successful are you going to still make your source code available and he said I would like to do that but I fear that if I do that somebody else will take the code and remove the license in part and publish it again with another name and so this doesn't work because then at this point I will not have an income and I cannot continue doing this so what should I tell to this guy to try to give him an answer because I want that this software remains free but I also understand that this is just a guy and it needs to buy food and that's it I mean it's coming back to the general question there are lots of the things I explained here I can understand this and I can see where this is coming from I mean if someone if you are a pacifist and you write software and then afterwards you see that other people are killed with your software that's a problem for you and there might be the situation but it's more important for you the values of software freedom or the value of pacifism and that you say I stop writing software which might be used for this and you might decide that you write proprietary software if you believe that with this you could rather accomplish that the same thing like when you had a business model and it worked at a certain time then times are changing this issue that large corporations are threatening some business model of smaller software companies and they try to to balance that and by adding clauses to software licenses which make them proprietary I can fully understand those companies I mean when you see that well if that continues like that the company will cease to exist or my employees will be looking for some of the other big companies or not then that's a tough decision and it's never that there are absolute values in our society you always have to balance it what is more important now for you is it now in your situation is it software freedom or is it maybe at the moment more on making sure that your family gets enough food on the table or that you can pay your employees and that's for a lot of the cases that's something you need to balance and we have that in many many other areas you can be in favor of one value you can be in favor of the other value and then you see oh they are conflicting so you are in favor of freedom of movement on the other hand you are in favor of better environmental regulations and then you see oh I cannot drive into the city because they say with my diesel I'm not allowed to do this so there's always this balance you have to see and in the end I mean what you can help some people is to see if they can still make it work with free software in the situation if it's possible to do this sometimes there might be cases where it's not for some time then it might balance again there is another development and it's possible again to do it in a similar way that's something which is something which is changing all the time and you know a person is that you understand it you can try to see what solutions there are that you tell the users well I would like to do it with software but if you don't give me money I can't so I can either make it proprietary or I can make it you can give me, you can pay money for this it could also happen the person makes a software proprietary and all the users say well I used the software because it was for software so I will not pay software when it's not proprietary so you might also not get any money so that's all tough decisions I think we're doing quite okay on time we'll do a few more one more here first thank you Matias for a really compelling talk I have a comment and a related question the comment is again thank you for telling us that values can be in conflict with each other as proponents of software sometimes we as a community can be accused of being too idealistic and be too strident in our values so when they are in conflict as the examples you said we need to be humble and always look for opportunities that some of our own values might be in conflict with other values my specific question which is related to that is you said in the use category everyone for any purpose restriction not read or agree with any terms as somebody who contributes occasionally to free software less so than you I'm very concerned from a personal liability standpoint and I like the liability part of MIT or Apache or all these licenses that say you may use it but you may not sue me what is your response if somebody takes my software disagrees with that term I'm going to sue you at me with a lot of corporate money which I cannot match and say well I disagree with your no liability clause I'm going to sue you anyways because your software caused me billions of dollars in loss I need to make sure that the no liability clause if anything is enforced so what do you say in response to your not read or agree with any term part I mean that's something which courts already also had to deal with from what I heard the cases I heard the question there is what have you done there I mean you wrote a software with good intention and others are using it for something completely different maybe even but you don't have any business relationship you put the software out there you are able to use it so it's a present and with present usually it works differently about liabilities so if they use it for one purpose and you did not do something intentionally wrong then I would say that most same judges should say well that's okay you are not responsible for that which will happen in any other cases as well if you do something like you write an article and you think we have freedom of the press and then someone comes like I sue you because you violated another law or another value we have so that's something which in the end it's if you want to be in the safe side don't write software because the same thing could also happen partly with proprietary software with some proprietary software so yes it's something which again it's not isolated the values we have here it's embedded in whole society with laws, with norms where there are challenges over the time those are changing different different level of how important certain values are for the society and I think at the moment you would be pretty safe in most countries I know of but yes you can never be sure well thank you very much for this very elaborate and well argued argument of the perfect is the enemy of the good now following your argument which is basically by limiting the set of values that we require others to share with us we can include more people in our group which makes us larger and stronger now following this to the logical conclusion is I arrive at okay that's limited to the very very core set which in terms of licenses let's me arrive at some BSD or MIT kind of license which I don't really like to arrive at so how do I resolve this and still arrive at more like a copy left license like GPL which does put more restrictions and requires more shared values than the other ones so everything I said here can be accomplished with every free software license we have so that's not about copy left or non copy left and I would also when we think about this and sometimes brought forward as an argument that copy left is not a restriction to those freedoms or those values I think it's the other examples I talked about they are all outside of the software area there so they are about other values what was accomplished with copy left is that we try to protect those values over the time and that's something which in some cases might work and others might not work but all of what I said it's not connected to copy left or non copy left to a license which also includes some patent clauses or not that should all be possible with that so did that answer your question or I think it's one of the challenges before when there was the question about will we adapt over the time yeah copy left is one of those things where people thought about like how do we protect those values over the time what can we do about this and they are already some kind of going towards some corner cases so if you add way more it's getting problematic with those other values but with this as they were also very early in the movement I would say that the general acceptance of those is still quite okay one more up there was that a finger for a question yes no yeah any more so in that case I would like to thank you all for being here we have a booth the FSE booth is in the building K on level 2 I would like to thank all the supporters and donors of the FSE who enable our work please also support our work for software freedom and big applause to the organizers of the FOSSTEM team and the volunteers here for making sure that we can all come here and share those ideas and have those discussions so thank you very much