fsf30-eben.txt

fsf30-eben.txt

We're honored to have Founder/pres/ed of SFLC Eben Moglen.


*applause*


I hope you feel as happy about the 30th as I do. After only 22 years of this,
I'm getting a discount on the 30th. If you've been working for 22, it may feel
like 30...


It is true that it is a pleasure to see us at 30. I'm sure there'll be
opportunities to get all sentimental and look back at the wonderful stuff we
went through, bu I saw this as a chance to see where next we would go.


I've been flogging FreedomBox along for 5 years, with help from people in this
room.  Not having a roadmap, though fun, is not clear.


Hopefully I can provide some terrain notes, and not ruin the fun.

I want to present the "best we have" in our crystal ball. The past 4 decades
with Richard, what we've been doing is far from hiding the Palantir. It wasn't
we couldn't see it, but we could taste it. We were giving our lives to it. We
were navigating upstream like Salmon, tasting the water, and knowing the place
we had to be--not like all-seeing wizards with a marauder's map.

You get "the feeling of the organism" *McClintock" and you can be told what is
happening.


What is happening to the movement is a thing that we would see from a physical
chemistry view as phase transition. We've morphing form the first movement,
into the second.


The first, the one that we've put our time into, had an audience, people who
knew how software was made. The philosophy and social was about User's
Rights, as per today's name. user's rights were the center of the thing. The
users being talked about, were substantially Prosumers. A substantial portion
of that portion, made the kinds that many users relied on. In the first
phase, we were talking to people who could appreciate the freedom of making
things with your hands. Those were the people we had to talk to. They made
Free Software. The first movement did a lot of that. First phase created Free
Software for other purposes, which didn't mean violating freedom, but
violating privacy of humans.


<blockquote>
A big exoskeleton that never forgets, without justice or prudence.
</blockquote>

We found ourselves at the end of the first phase, as we succeeded in doing what
we meant to do: Put freedom in everything, turn freedom on. In 3 decades, we
were busy doing, and we did. We changed how it was made around the world, and
the values of the people who made it, to spread the philosophy far.


RMS, always worried, that the software would not carry th politics well. The
essence of Open Source v.s. Freedom. A vehicle that Couldn't hold tightly to
idea, while capitalism could shake philosophy loose. This is a real worry,
though not the thing you may worry about all 24 hours of a day.


<blockquote>
At the end of the first phase, write once, run everywhere, worked. We were
busy creating. We did it and produced jobs, and did wonderful things. We were
creating some social byproducts, ecological diffuses. 

<em><strong>What happens when you offer services that aren't good for freedom?</strong></em>
</blockquote>


When historians will look back, they'll see this today we spend together as a
convenient narrative point to talk about inflection. This will be seen in
retrospect will be turning point. The symbol of that is Edward Snowden.


He changed it form users, to mass movement of th human race. He put up a
billboard the width of society, why the freedom of that software was crucial
to their freedom. A point we've been teaching of years. And now, lots of
people can understand that.


Polling data shows that roughly 2/3rds of people who use internet are aware of
what Snowden is, and what he represents. Of the 2/3rds of the internet, +/-
controversy, a 1/3rd of them are trying to protect their
privacy/liberty/freedom in some way.


<blockquote>
About 1/5th of the internet, are aware they have freedom issues, and want
something they can do something about it.

About 1/5th of the internet is looking for Morpheus. We had better show up.
</blockquote>




That broad swath, is looking for use now. You can feel it trying to find it in
popular culture. You've watched Mr. Robot? We're the people not quite cool
enough to get the girl, but we're getting there. People are seeing the
position in the culture as necessary. On the other side, a faceless entity
commoditizes selling it.

Power cannot be trusted, and it has way more access to you than you know, and
what you do know, is barely the beginning.

We're going to be able, at least invited to be able, to address a scale of
humanity that has not been available to us before. We're doing that in part
with Software, and it is welded to the face that can't be undone.


We had to disambiguate, with "Free as in beer v.s. Free as in Freedom."

In phase 2, we're talking to people, users of what they now understand as a
vast structure of digital tech that USES them. They understand they are the
product, but don't know what they can do about it.


They are looking for Morpheus, and they need a red pill. We have it. It is
free software. 

Free as in "protects your freedom"

We're talking to a mass who is afraid their freedom is leaking into a tech
that they need, but they know isn't good for them.

We have a generation coming. If you savor public opinion date, what you don't
but if you do, you know that that reading you love tails off early.
Tweens/Teens have little buying power, but can't be studied like the slightly
older.

If you look at the scanty data, you find in every society where there is data,
you find they are more positive about Snowden than other sections.

Elsewhere, no matter how enthusiastic the adults are, they are more.

I got a note, from an 8th grade essay contest daughter, and 3 kids wrote about
Snowden, and no other hero was written about more than once.


Chicano Highshool in Chicago.

Laura Poitrus(sp) says he has an uncanny resemblance to Harry Potter ;)

That is itself, a sign of how Legendry has come around this. Culture coming to
reflect the idea that the hidden dark powers, we need a magic that is our
own.

When I say we need Morpheus, the only one surprised was Richard.

We need a choice.

<blockquote>
This is the last generation in which the human race gets a choice...
</blockquote>


These young people., who have a strong set of mind already, get into a period
where they express themselves. They take on attributes that helps them take on
what is wrong in the world. They will be looking for us, and they will be here
soon.


We need tech, political organization, ideology, for them.

2004, I said "We were keeping dinner warm til the kids came home."

I thought since this started. Snowden is 62 days away from turning 30.

The big bunch is coming. "what do I do about the bit that worries me?"

We're about to get a flood of people who are going to attach to an important
movement of their lives. Comprehensibly. About their technology, and what they
say and do.


For this reason, we need to make it clear that this about software that
protects freedom. I tried to keep it running even when the house burdened down,
and some people here who helped.

Oct 30th, we'll be demonstrating this free bits and hardware--to make
encrypted calls between any 2 places, protecting from malware, and a virtuous
router. We have a lot of tricks to play,a nd we're going to start being able
to play them.

We're hoping that the stack, the Debian config, can be installed wherever we
need to put freedom--the android powered dishwashers, or wherever.

Federated social sharing with diaspora too. I really want us to go after the
dark star of Facebook. We've been tyring to invent our way there for a
half-a-decade.


There are 12 year olds looking and saying "this isn't the way we want to live,
is it?"

That is very important. We're going to need to have the blue and red pill.


That means taking Replicant in. Taking GNUplicant in. You take the mobile
operating system, and re-engineer it. We need a thing that inhabits the
midpoints in the net, and has appliances that can do the things you wan to do.
Then inverting the cloud, processing and storing at home, and clustering where
electrons are cheap.

We'll have a little interlude in Iceland where electrons are cheap, like any
good James bond movie. We have freedom, not bit-rot, and it protects freedom
better and better. We're the people on your side, and we're in it together.


<blockquote>
We have to keep the network neutral, as they say, offering services to
eachother without discrimination. We'll see business deals cut out network
operators.

We have a politics. Just as the patent war winds down, and the other things
get better, that thing will get worse. Government and regulatory agenda will
be big in our next 15 years.

North of the Himalayas, there is an autocracy planning despotism forever. 1.3
billion people, controlled by the net and digital tech, on it's own 5th or 6th
of the human population.

South of the Himalayas, that PM wants to be PM forever too...

On the outcome of that experiment, 1/3rd of the human race isn't just the
experiment, but the other 2/3rds too. The national digital sovereignty being
controlled.
</blockquote>


We have to listen to Mr. Snowden. We have an enormous challenge. We can't just
think of the FSF as a thing in a country. We're building an exoskeleton that
makes a collection of human kind. It will not be separated based on
boundaries. We have to think globally. Speak Chinese. Write Korean. Build
bridges to the Islamic world.

We need to build a home where everyone is welcome, of course, that is assuming
that we want to take the phonecall.

How can we not take that call. That is why we exist. This is what we have to
do.

Tech opportunities, political opportunities, and very large, and very
dangerous to not show up.

We did 30 years of great work. We are a tech and legal powerhouse in the world.

Now we need to figure out how to turn outside respect into leadership of a
global mass movement. It isn't easy. I've spent a lot of time thinking about
what happens sociologically, when small movements get an opportunity to move
into the mainstream of social political and cultural life.

It isn't so simple as wining the lottery.

Human societies respond in understandable, but not always rational ways, for
that scale of success. The adherence to hold ways, and old metaphors, is
adaptive, until disruptive growth is necessary. The agility of movement in a
small entity turns out to not be there.


We're going to face the beauties, as well as the terrors of immense success.
30-45 will be about growth in ourselves. And immigrants too. When loads of
strangers, who want to live and work and be a part of everything, and have
strength show up, communities behave badly. They should be delighted, bu they
behave in short-sighted ways.

A lot of new people are coming, and they are not exactly like us, and they want
to be a part of it. We need to be more inviting, and less geekish.

We'll just go and do it. We've had this happen at at tech level. There were
projects with 2-3 people, who now have lots more. There are plenty of folks
who maybe feel that way in OpenStack?

We're going to have a terrific 15 years. We're not going to fit in a room this
size for the 45th, if we do it right. If we do it wrong, I will be much less
happy to be there at the 45th.

They have reason to worry. They have reason to be concerned. The more we know,
and the more we understand that if they go up the creek further wit the
"iThis" and the "CloudThat"... we understand what happens when you have tag
clouds the size of Jupiter. Freedom can get really badly hurt. If you live in
the communist China, you can get *real* concerned about the incidence of
public forums. We are going to be growing by leaps and bounds.

If by chance I'm not here, or RMS isn't here when we get to 45--which could
happen--it won't happen. Humanity is about to be where we work. It is a big
place, and there are good people in it. Let's make sure we make a place for
them, and feel welcome.

Q&A:

Q: How would a political part of our movement, thinking about problems in the
US, deal with the broadband monopolies and cell phone monopolies?
A: One question you're asking, about the oligopolists. We'll find that us and
Lessig have come back together again. Isn't politics everywhere unclean?
Bandwidth generates money, and money influences. That is how Larry got where
he is. A little box of freedom sitting on a pole can provide VOIP to villages.

At the village level, I can be a telephone company for 40 dollars on a
telephone poll. Add WI-Max, and now it more than one village.

Then we add more to it for the things that aren't working.

I spent a week in LA last week with Universities to keep GPL3 in their
core stacks, even as telecommunications sniff around the 5G tech they don't
have yet.

<blockquote>
We're going to have some last-mile disruption from the bottom. The core of the
politics is th "ceaseless inventing" that they are doing. The usual power
games where we make our running, we have terrific intelligence services, and
collide people across fields of fracture. We've always been the
balance-in-power-politics-people. We didn't have the money or power, but we
proved that we can make capital equipment without capital investments, which
made money look less important.
</blockquote>

Even power was limited by some extent by the power of ideas. We used that as
dynamite to collide larger objects. That was our legal/regulatory strategy.

I'll talk more about that at the end of October our our annual conference...
...where I can talk about the "old magic tricks" in case I ever go under a
bus.

We're going to play them against eachother. Mr. Zuckerberg is still busy
explaining what a philanthropist he is for giving bandwidth to the poor. We're
getting our own traction, explaining he's just buying de-anonymized packets
from the poor, at value. "No HTTPS for the poor" is just another MiTM. He went
from internet.org, to "free basics by Facebook." He'll soon find out
non-profit law may be something of a hurdle.

It isn't always elegant, but it works.

Q: I think you did a good job explaining we needed to accommodate the masses
when they get here. It goes beyond accommodating, but absorbing. When they
come, we should allow them to help us with the things we are not good at. I'd
like to see more of that. I want to make sure that we let in the folks who
wants to.

A: The good news is, you're right--but bad news is it is harder than you
think. It is hard because you don't absorb <em>them</em>, they absorb
<em>you</em>. When the stuff you didn't know was in you. It is fine having a
boom when the boom is babies... but when they vote... it gets harder.

We need to be effective. They are coming because they want something. The idea
is part of what they want, but we have to be there to be effective. Every time
I say Raspberry Pi, I hear RMS shouting, and that is his job. If there is a
$30 thing out there, to give $30 privacy, and they wanna do that, I want it to
work.

Part of the beauty is that the ARM9 world has blobs that are free. We're going
to have nice competition, but I do want it to run on android-powered
coffeepots. If you are person with one, and you want secure comms, I want it
to work when you're in China. It is important that it works. 

<blockquote>
"We knew you were coming, we had your back." That is where political power
comes from. Not that we were more, or smarter. Our power is coming from us
being there for you, before you knew you needed us."

Authenticity is the place where it comes from now. 
</blockquote>

<!--
You can boil down the politics today to, "I'm doing a better job simulating
(Authenticity) than she is"
-->

We did this for generations, before you were a glint in your parent's eye.


Q: I'm part of the folks in this room who have kids. 3, 6, 9, 12. My 12 year
old understands why she doesn't have an iPad, but she still wants one. It is
powerful when you say "this is the last opportunity." If I give her one, her
brothers and sisters will follow. I would encourage anyone who doesn't have
kids, to go to the committees and School Boards, and other people with kids.
I'm leaving almost all my work in FOSS completely, to join in the EDU
advocacy. I'm not talking about myself, but the impact of people discovering
this is amazing. So much information is missing, not being ignored.

A:  Those are the people we need to be best at reaching. Those of us, who are
working in that part of the EDU system, are the people we need to listen to
most carefully. I have this feeling. The mayor of NYC, says he's going to get
CS instruction to all kids in the next 10 years. That could be terrible if you
believe him. Joe Klein, who signs up with Murdoch, to monitor every child
through every iPad... that is not us. We have to do that very well. That is
why I do all the edX support I can. Keep this in mind. Purity is hard in this
world. If you allow yourself to get excluded, you are gone.

My nephew went off to college, and I gave him a de-chromed Chromebook. "it's
disposable computing." He started his life at Colby, and within hours, he's the
kid running Free Software. He is something now, and he is staggering under the
unwanted identity. 

The reach we have to reach down there, should feel like fun to us, because
they aren't our kids. It is easier to do other people's dishes, and we have
to. We can assume Coca-cola and FIFA are the folks who have to market to these
people, but we have to be in touch, and know how to make it better for them.

I'm hopeful we'll show up.

Q: Do you make a distinction between AWS and Google Cloud?
A: What I would say about this, you could try and measure this for us, or you
can measure what scares everyone in the industry. Amazon has a franchise that
people understand, but that isn't why people are running scared. Google cloud
is eating their customer base too fast, and they don't know what to do about
it. We do. We say "that is why you must be hybrid cloud builders." You need to
offer "not being able to lose their entire destiny." Of course they're going
to buy utility computing from Google and Amazon. They aren't doing it because
it is "cheaper." The M$ cloud is unique, because it is breaking windows
server, and making people use it. Breaking things, then forcing people to use
Office 365.

Everyone who has enterprise email, there is on a software checklist with your
CIO/CSO with "Two-factor Authentication (2FA), yes/no." if no, go to the
compliance office to get whacked. You buy from phone-factor, "sms" factors. So
Microsoft buys phone factor, and then "for tech reasons, you can't do 2FA for
your own exchange server BUT if you upgrade to cloud, you can!"

This is part of the reason that the patent wars are over. Microsoft and Google
agreed this week to stop.

<blockquote>
Peace is breaking out everywhere. We have to go win it before other's win it
for us. Leaving out the Microsoft cloud, they are not selling cheaper
computing, but expensive utility computing, but you get to remove IT jobs. You
don't need a single throat to choke anymore. The execs are having a morose
year, but it will balance back. Even if people want to get rid of IT
staff--revenge against revenge of the nerds--if they need to spin up 10K
images an hour, they'll buy it at 1.5x and get rid of jobs. A bit later in the
cycle, the CIOs and Boards will decided they've given up too much destiny, and
take some back.
</blockquote>

The really smart people will realize they're in the datamining business, and
the databrokerage will help they get through the next cycle. Martin Fink's
announcement let other semi-conductor announcements come forth. But that is
another talk.


Q:  What is opinion of Apple pushing a BSD stack to replace GPL?
A:  One thing we need to understand, we have to do two things to keep our tech
vital: prevent bit-rot, and keep people from becoming allergic to Copyleft.
Making sure the PH didn't get too high or low, is something that we do that is
valuable. If we allow allergies to GPL, we'll stimulate more such activity.
Keeping GCC ahead of LLVM becomes a very difficult technical job. RMS's
designs carried us for an entire generation. Solving a nuance in Copyleft to
do Inter Process Communication (IPC) in a clever way. When we went from GPLv2
to GPLv3, we protected large-scale IPC optimization. That would mean writing
out more data, and more room for proprietary optimization. When we moved to
GPLv3, we changed gcc linking exceptions, and gave our selves more room for
not rewriting the frontends, which worked for a while. What has happened as a
consequence of Android, and Java overdependency, and hotspot, we've found a
place where Jobs can screw us from the dead. Are we going to face more
non-Copyleft alternatives? Yes. Do we need to be careful how to keep demand
growing for Copyleft? I'm busy worrying about embedding. Rocking and rolling
with the bylaws of the OpenStack foundation by making GPL'd contributions?
Yea, I'm hoping to buy more scotch to make that happen.

Is Samba going to turn out to be more than it was? That is like every release.
Will Samba not be as important when no one is running Windows? Yes, and we'll
have a party then. :P

We should not think about this oppositionally. This problem is not our fault.
Oppositional thinking is cheap/easy. Ecological thinking is harder, more
expensive. Ecologically, we need to get the idea of Copyleft "born Free, stays
Free, no Bullshit, no patents" cores, with other exploring going on around it.
Then there'll be commercial feed zones, where people can eat eachother's
customers.

RMS would say "Eben's job is companies and intrigue." Intrigue isn't the word
he always uses, but I won't repeat it here.

Sometimes the companies are parsecs away, and we don't care. But the
overdifferentiation for no good reason. I'm telling them "if you don't have
enough Copyleft in this vertical, you'll lose money differentiating for no
good reason."

<!-- TIL: Overdifferentiation is a crucial aspect of Ecological thinking in
the enterprise realm.-->

"You're going to have too many orchestration layers. You need AGPL in the
middle of OpenStack." Imagine if NASA understood as clearly as we do now...

A certain billionaire said to me "We should have just put OpenStack under
AGPLv3."

People waste a lot of money on this stuff. Differentiating stuff is more
important to them.

If we keep our mind on the ecology. If we concentrate on "why is everything
under the Apache license? Look at what the consequences will be?"

We have to talk the language they understand, which isn't "it's evil.' it is
"it's expensive."

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