We've made it to the end of our legal and policy death room. If you're here, you really like, I think most of you that are here have been here for most of the day. We've had so many amazing discussions, and it's really run the gamut. So what we normally do at the end is we just take a moment for us as the

organizers to react to some of the talks that happened today, talk about what we think are some of the important issues that maybe weren't covered during the talks, and then to like address topics that any of you may have. So where should we start? Hot topics or reactions to talks?

Whatever you like. Alright, well I will... Dive through the day a bit first, or then, I don't know. Shall we? Yeah, sure. Okay, then... It's very boring to hear us have to figure out our logistics. Yeah, a bit.

I mean, maybe what... So to sum up the day, this is what we've done the last times as well. For me it was super interesting that there are more positive vibes than we had like two years ago, I'd say. And this is very good to see that there is like a mixture of activism,

but also lobbyism, that there are legal activities, and that people are trying to get active, and that they are successful with this. And in this regard, I think we should also talk about your honorably doctorate you just got a few days ago

from the university in Leuven, and I think that's also something we should applaud to for your amazing work you've done on free software in the last... And so that's why I think that's also something that we should be more positive in all of these questions. And Bradley wants to jump in, so normally the pessimistic one.

Well, I think daring to embarrass Karen a little bit further, I think one of the interesting connections with why she got the honorary doctorate was because the students of the university in Leuven are able to vote for who gets the honorary doctorate, one of the honorary doctorates each year,

and the students, some of whom are in this room, helped organize for many years to really get her on the ballot, which she finally was elected on the ballot and was given this honor. And that kind of connects up with something that I was trying to say in my talk, which is, I think, I'm very hopeful, Alexander's right,

I'm the most pessimistic person in free software, generally speaking, but I'm very optimistic about this generation who are just coming of age in university right now. I think they're much more interested in building a life that's not merely just doing some tech job or just being part of some corporate machine.

And my generation wasn't like that, I was the weird one who didn't want to do that, but it seems like the weird ones in your generation are the ones who actually want to get some corporate job, so that's really good to see. Yeah, I just wanted to say something that echoed, for those of you who are Conservancy sustainers,

you will have gotten an email from me at the end of the year just reflecting on how much has changed, and I really think that we are in this very, very different time. I would say, as recently as five years ago, it was hard to explain to people about why they should care about their software, that having control over your technology was something that nobody really considered very much,

and when we gave talks, we had to talk about all of the vulnerabilities that had been exposed, things that most people hadn't heard about, and we're living in a very different world now. We're living in a world where everybody understands that these issues are important, and I think that the world is so ready to dig deeply into the ideas of software freedom

in a way that they haven't before, and that's affecting a lot of the policy work. When I spoke to officials at that university, and when I go speak generally, I find that people in positions of power are much more ready to listen, and it's in part because of young people being motivated by this,

and for everyday people realizing that their phones have been surveilling them, that all the technology that they rely on is in fact behaving in ways that they had never expected, and so there's so much opportunity now, and there's so much potential to make policy. I think it's really exciting to consider this challenge of making users more sensitive

and care more about free software, and the talks we heard today about app stores, I think, were really promising that perhaps we can imagine a future where smartphone users that use applications

can know about the apps that they're installing before they install them, much in the same way you might look at nutrition facts on some food at the supermarket before you actually purchase it.

Does it contain healthy ingredients? Does it have fat? Does it have sugar? Well, is your software free software? Can it be reproducibly built? Is there a link to the source code?

So I think that those are really interesting questions, and perhaps these alternative app stores can give an opportunity to do that, where we can take software with these features that we care about. Yeah, but while food comes with a list of ingredients, it doesn't come with the food bill of materials,

and I've been told that unless something has a bill of materials, it's completely useless. So does that mean food is useless, like software is? Well, that's an interesting analogy. Maybe we don't have an exact bill of materials for food, do we? And we seem to get by okay.

We're doing okay. We're doing okay. Such a surprise. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how we ended up with food now, but to be honest... Because everything is a free software issue. Yeah, that's probably true. And I mean, also besides what we discussed here in the deaf room today,

I also think that we see in legislation, and there was, unfortunately, during we had our deaf room here, discussion as well in the big main room on the Cyber Resilience Act and the question of liability, and for liability and free software, there are some issues. And we also discussed here, is there something like commercial

or non-commercial free software. And these are also topics that keep us thinking about all of this and how can we put it in writing and how can we explain this to decision makers, what's happening, what's the ecosystem of free software, how all of this works. And I think we made a lot of progress here in the last months.

Still we see that there are still issues and that we have to work on that, but decision makers are open to that, we get these meetings, they want to listen to us, they want to understand, and this is something which helps us and which we should make use of.

We also discussed the question of resources, so how many resources do we as a free software community have to jump into these discussions. And I mean, the opposite is well financed and they send dozens of lobbyists. And in this regard, it's also very good to see that there are people here

for the very first time and that they care about topics of policy and that this hostel is not only about code, but it's also about legal question, policy question, and that's really good to see. Going back to the food analogy, there's actually a...

Going back to the food analogy, there's a class of ingredients that do not have to be declared on the label, and this is a source of controversy, they're called processing aids. This, I would say, relates to software insofar as if you have an app store

that tells you just kind of yes, no about free software or this is the overall license, there is still the possibility, as has been discussed, and there are talks about this on the track, that there is code washing that has happened underneath. So that really, I think, emphasizes the importance of code washing if you're just giving someone one little piece of information

about the underlying software. One of the problems with the food analogy, of course, I've always hated it with free software because if you wanted to make the full analogy with food, you would say, well, everything you buy at the store needs to come with a recipe and a full list of ingredients,

which we've never demanded. Somebody should probably start the free recipe movement, I suppose. Isn't it the scripts to control compilation and installation? Well, yeah, that's right. That's the thing, that's the equivalent. We need the full, like, how do you do each step?

I mean, I think that's the equivalent, yeah. We're taking it too far. A joke turned into a quasi-serious discussion that wasn't that useful. Hello. I'm Benjamin from FFI. I networked with Ciarán yesterday on the unified patent court.

I worked on that for, after the software patent directive from 2005, we continued to work on because the lobbyists went to the European Commission and asked to continue to push for a patent system for Europe.

So this, actually, the actual lobbyist is the guy behind Uber Files, Mark McGann, who worked for now Digital Europe, but basically the large software companies from Europe, but also from US and Japan.

So the push was, in 2005, was to, the large companies basically were fed up with us, and they asked the European Parliament to reject this directive and to push for a patent court for Europe. And their problem is how do you do a patent court in Europe

in the EU system where you have the European Court of Justice and national courts. So we went to, we challenged the unified patent court ratification in Germany, but the thing we didn't see was that basically what the construction they have done, which is to make an international court for patents and removing the national courts

and putting a link to the European Court of Justice, is actually not following what the European Court of Justice has been saying for the last 12 years, and if not 15 years, 50 years since the EU was created, which is if you create a court inside the EU system that has to interpret EU law,

they have to talk to the guardian of EU law, which are national courts, and that's why they have dissolved investment courts in 2017, and they have been dissolving these investment courts for big oil

called the Energy Charter, which has the same problem. They are international courts where they have to interpret EU law, and they, when they look, so they look at previous design in 2011, where they tried to do this system with non-EU countries like Turkey and Iceland and Switzerland,

and basically they said you can't do this court system because first of all you do it with non-EU countries, but also you deprive national courts from interpreting EU law in this field. And what happened with UPC is that politicians kept on trying, trying to remove national courts, so they called that common court,

and the only common court that exists in Europe is the Benelux Court for Trademarks, where national courts of Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg are involved, and at some point in the history, because it's a system from the 60s, in the history of this court came the question whether this Benelux Court for Trademark

can ask also a question on trademark law because there's EU law on trademarks stood up in Court of Justice, and the Court of Justice said yes, you can do it, but in their decision they didn't say yes because national courts are involved, so the whole construction, and we didn't see this,

but the other guy who complained to the constitutional court saw that he had all the arguments, but the court said, oh no, we're not going to ask the European Court of Justice because it doesn't involve financial rights and we are not used to it, but the entire question is there. So now we are talking to politicians, we raise the case,

and the guy ignores, while strictly speaking the commission is the guardian of the treaties, and there's like three articles, the 19.1 where Poland, where the EU law is the European Court of Justice, and the national member states have to provide independent tribulus, which caused problems with Poland because they didn't have independent tribulus,

but this article was clarifying to Saloni, I have to say. Could you quickly skip to the point? I'd like to invite you to submit a talk for next year's Dev Room.

Hello, I'm Arshad Malmov from Denmark. What's been the most interesting things you've learned today? I loved hearing about the Windows tax suits. I thought that was so interesting what Luca's been doing, and I think it really fits into that theme we were saying before

about how people are starting to realize the impact that their technology is having and they're getting involved, and I think that what we're seeing is a lot of the approach for this is from a consumer perspective, which is unlike how we've approached this in the past. It ties into some of the themes about the Visio suit that we've been working on, which we can cover later because it's still a hot topic and is progressing through the courts,

but I think that the way that we're thinking about leveraging legal mechanisms from a consumer perspective really connects those dots, and I like seeing how that happened. What did you learn today? Well, what I learned today was from Marcel about the EU pilot project process.

I was not aware of that, and I find it fascinating that maybe connection with your MEP and the ability to support or create such projects can really make a difference, so I thought that that was really interesting to learn about.

Maybe to add to this budget question, these pilot projects are commonly known in the EU. We had this FOSA project, FOSA 2 project, where we had bug bounties and hackathons for VLC, for example, and free software used by the Commission.

However, I think especially the budget question is very interesting because if we amend to the budget, we can allocate money to projects but also to institutions. For example, if you think about the Open Source Program Office of the European Commission, which was introduced two or three years ago, then if you look for this in the budget, there is none.

It would be a good idea to go to MEPs or Commission and Council to ask them to add budget lines and to say we want to have, first of all, a budget to do projects, activities, but also to hire staff, because what happened is that they, among the people who already worked there,

gave somebody the head on top and said, now you are the OSPO manager. This is also something we should think about, that we work on budget files and that we talk about money and that it's not about just procurement, which was also a topic today, so how do we procure free software,

but that we also make sure that there are reasonable funds, that there are people working within the Commission or the institutions on these topics, and not just like they are doing it half-time for one person the full year or something like this, so that we also think about how can you become part of the community,

that means you need to invest a bit, and that this investment also will lead to benefits in a few years. Well, that makes me want to ask you both a question. You've mentioned budgets. One of the great messages from Europe has been this idea of public money, public code,

and I'm wondering what your thoughts are about the budget for that marketing and initiative here in Europe, and then for Karen, how do you think that message could be crafted in the U.S. context?

I mean, with our public money, public code campaign, we pretty much ask them to introduce laws to say whenever you procure or especially also when you code software by yourself, then it should be released on a free and open source software license, and what happened since we started this campaign is that we got many, many papers,

and most of these papers go kind of like in this direction, but it's always like coming with loopholes, and that's one issue, so there are no concrete goals, there are no concrete numbers, it's always like if it's possible, then it would be good if you saw something like this.

However, we see progress and we see that there's kind of a will to go more in this direction, and now I think for us it's important to turn more like into a watchdog, so we got our papers, we won it, and now we need to make sure that these papers are filled with reality,

so this is for us important in the moment, and now we have it in the U.S. Yeah, well, I would say that a hot topic in the U.S. over the last year is that it seems like coming out of the pandemic one of the first things that has been happening is organized conversations that involve the U.S. government in various levels.

There have been several invitation-only meetings that have happened. Some of them have been publicized as sort of there was a White House initiative which involved a lot of corporations having part in that conversation, and there have been other conversations that have been happening where different agencies in the U.S. federal government,

and also we're seeing more interest on more local-level politics, again, I think reflecting this general cognizance of the importance of the ethics of our software and the technology we rely on, which I guess if I – I can't mention that without also noting that Matthias isn't here

because he's reading his book, which is a kid's book about software freedom, which my kid truly loved and read three times in a row and was like, this explains it so much better, Mommy. So if you have kids, I do recommend it.

Yeah, so I don't know if that answers your question, but there have been a lot of conversations, and I think we're just seeing the beginning. There's a question from the chat, which I'll read here. A question to the panel. Do you think that the free software and AI application for the public administration is important

because it's an issue related to democracy, and my opinion, citizens shall have the opportunity to scrutinize what a software does and how it works? What do you think about it? I mean, we didn't hear what Bradley learned. The main thing that I learned is the same thing I learn every year at FOSM, is that if I'm speaking, I have to write my talk before the day of endeavor.

So I did learn that again. So if I get the question right, the question is if it's AI in government and public bodies. Yeah, sure, definitely.

And I think a very good example is from a few years ago when in France they had an algorithm to decide who can go to university or not. And due to our work, this became transparent then, and then we've seen that there's discrimination in it. And I think this is something why we need transparent software

to see if there is potentially discrimination in this so that we can have public discussions around it. And I think especially when we handle the data of our citizens, then it's really becoming an issue. And we have this also in law enforcement where we try to rumble the data

and then find the terrorists and stuff like that. And here I think it's really, really helpful to have transparency. So if we decide to go in this direction, which happens from time to time, then the red line should be the code must be transparent that we can see and have a discussion and check if human rights are protected or not.

Right, and that can't exist without the data set so that it doesn't – we can't have the algorithms in a vacuum if we can't reproduce the – if we don't have the data, we're basically just as much in the dark. And so we need to worry about that too.

Okay. Any other question here? We already have one, so I'm going to go back. It's a really quick question. Could you give the name of the children's book?

Yeah, Ada and Zangeman. And we put it in the matrix chat. Yeah. Hello, I'm Federico. So by the way, if you think that food labeling is easy and solved,

check out the current discussion in Brussels about Nutri-score. You will be amazed. I have a question. In a recent CopyleftConf we had this, I think, question, which was whether we should do more copyleft enforcement.

And of course we – Conservancy has done a lot in the last year about this. But I'd like to hear an updated answer. What is your current thinking? Should we see more copyleft enforcement according, of course, the copyleft enforcing guidelines by others as well?

Is that something we want to see? What is your – or what is the current vibe? Karen, do you want to answer or do you want me to answer? There are so many questions in the question, which is also not just for us, but it's also for does everybody want to see more enforcement and enforcement by others?

I mean, I guess we'll start just by saying that we'll give a quick update on where we are at Software Freedom Conservancy. And for those of you who are not very familiar with what has happened so far, what this person is referring to is that Software Freedom Conservancy, along with other organizations, published a Principles of Community-Oriented Enforcement.

And it was a statement that said we want to enforce copyleft, but we want to do so in ways that encourage adoption and that are fair and that prioritize compliance over any kind of monetary gain. And so their principles are listed out on – you can look on Software Freedom Conservancy's website for one

and see what they say. And we consult them regularly to make sure that we're doing the right thing and following – abiding by our principles. So that's like the backdrop. We filed a lawsuit last – no, two years ago now, right?

It was November of 2021. Yeah, it's about 15 months. Yeah, 15 months ago against Vizio, the television manufacturer. They're a very large U.S. TV manufacturer. If you go into like a big box store, you'll see a big logo. And so we filed a consumer rights-based lawsuit where we filed as a purchaser of television.

So we at Software Freedom Conservancy bought televisions that we wanted to use and replace the software. But when we asked for the source code and on old products

and after talking with Vizio for some time, they stopped communicating with us. And when we bought new TVs, there was no source or offer for source on those televisions. So we had no choice but to bring a legal action. And so that is – proceeding is like on several unique legal theories.

There's – it's a contract action, not a copyright action. We asked for a specific performance, which means that we've asked for the completed corresponding source code, not for any money consistent with the principles. And we filed as a third-party beneficiary, which is interesting because the licenses say that third parties have rights.

And so we're exercising those, which means that if we're successful, it stands for the proposition that the folks that receive – that are the consumers, people who are buying the products are the ones who actually know if a product is out of compliance, but also they're the people who actually do something with the software that they're getting. Anyway, so not to rehash that whole thing, but what happened over the last year is that we –

when we – the action started in the court, Vizio filed to remove the case to federal court. Basically, in the United States, you have the ability to say that the action is preempted, meaning that it is – they said – Vizio said that actually it's not about contract law,

it's about copyright law, and copyright cases belong in federal court, not state court, where we'd filed it. And so it actually automatically got removed to federal court, and then we had to file a motion to remand it back down to state court,

and then Vizio – once it was removed to federal court, Vizio filed and said, ah, well, you know, you're in federal court now, and it's copyright, and oh, by the way, you didn't assert copyright, so therefore, motion to dismiss. But when it was – so there was a federal judge who ruled to send the case back,

so he won that remand, basically saying that there was an appropriate cause of action for the state court. And so it was a really initial stage of the case, but a really exciting, successful initial action.

And for the last part of your question, one of the reasons we brought this as an action under contract, as a third-party beneficiary into the GPL, is to break what I consider a logjam of – almost a bug in the copy lift system that we had, which was it requires copyright holders,

who have chosen the GPL – I mean, at least if you do copyright enforcement, those copyright holders have to basically be watchdogs themselves or be coordinated with an agency like Conservancy to watchdog for them to enforce their rights under the copyright rules.

And by looking at it in terms of a third-party beneficiary issue, I do believe it expands the class of people that can go forward and bring actions. And I personally, speaking for myself, not necessarily the organization, would like to see more people in other jurisdictions making an effort when you see violations to see if there is some sort of consumer action that you can take in your jurisdiction

to chase your rights under the GPL. I want to just follow up with Karen. How new or novel is this action working on behalf of users? Yeah, I mean, it's totally novel. I think I'm unaware of anybody taking this legal theory before.

Well, not in a GPL case, but it's a pretty common theory. Oh, third-party beneficiary is not a novel – right, that's right, I'm sorry. But in a free software context. Oh, in a free software context it's totally novel, but the legal theories are well-trod law in the United States.

Applying it to this particular instance is novel, but third-party beneficiary is not – as a legal theory is not something that's new. It's something that's been around for a long time and is quite established. And similarly specific performance – is that what you're going to say? Right, that's what I was going to say. Nor is not on the part. It's very common, and specific performance under many legal systems,

including in the US and the UK, is designed to chase things that can't be gotten, that can't be replaced with money. And it is our view, which we think is the correct view, that the specific source code and its scripts used to control compilation and installation for a given firmware are generally quite unique for that firmware,

and therefore it's basically impossible for a third party who doesn't have that and is not being given that as the license requires to create that again with any amount of money, really, because they have to basically reverse engineer the product to do it, which is just so cost-prohibitive.

And this type of legal theory is widely used for things like family heirlooms. Well, it's for real property, for land. It's quite common. And I think one of the points of this suit is really to empower folks to ask for the source code

and to be taken seriously by companies. So I would encourage everybody to make source code requests for the products that you already own. And when you buy them, just ask. See if you get complete and corresponding source code.

You probably won't, unfortunately. But just by asking, you tell those companies that it's important, right? And it means that when somebody does want to do something, they'll be taken a lot more seriously and they'll be able to make software that we're all about and from. We were recently told by a large company that we're the only one who cares about these source requests,

so therefore they don't need to worry so much about them. So we hope you'll care too and ask these companies. Maybe, Bradley, while you're on the way, I'll just add that you can also do information requests towards governments and ask them for the source code of whatever they release. But that's also make it an issue. And for example, in the Netherlands, it's quite successful.

So they released with these information requests. Yeah, folks are over there. They released the source code of a couple of apps, for example. So this is also a way on matching on this case. How do we know they're using carbilefta software?

I thought Bradley would enjoy answering this. I've answered it so many times in my life. So the GPL, all of the different various variants of the GPL require them to tell you. So if it's present and they didn't tell you, that's an even worse GPL violation

because they also didn't tell you. So if you look in the manual and there's an offer you can request, if you can't do that, if you can extract the firmware in any sort of way, if you run binwalk and then strings on the binary, it will be very obvious. It's not as hard as you think to find out that Linux is in a lot of products.

And odds are Linux is in almost all of your embedded products. While I'm getting over there, can the panel say something useful? We should say something here. Here, Tom, say something useful.

What topics didn't you hear about today that you would like to hear more about that relate to free software and legal issues? So to answer the question partly how to know if there is copylefted software in it, for example, with Rautus you can attach a serial console

and you'll usually see Linux boot locks. You could use nmap and network scanner if the device is connected to the network and it will make a guess which operating system the device runs. And if it's Android, then it's also obvious that it has the GPIO to call Linux in it.

I have another topic that we could talk about which is sort of like going on and echoing from some of the themes from earlier but also another topic that we haven't discussed which is, and I haven't pre-discussed this with anybody up here actually, but Open Collective's announcement that they were going to transition

the ownership of Open Collective to the community, that was a very interesting development over the last year. I think it's in very preliminary stages so I've read the materials and I don't have a clear idea of what they're thinking of yet, but that dialogue is very, very interesting

and it dovetails to some of the things that I felt was coming out of Mark's discussion earlier today about these governance questions, right? I mean, Open Collective is a for-profit entity that is a steward for the resources for quite a lot of free and open source software projects

and it's millions of dollars that go through it. So it's interesting to have on the table the fact that it is privately owned and what it would look like to transition to the community and how that infrastructure could exist that could make it be successful. So I don't know, it just raises so many fascinating questions about the structures that we've put in place around these important projects

and then to sort of have these fundamental shifts and question marks about how we're going to handle them going forward.

I want to take a question that came in from the chat. How should we, as the free software and open movement approach new fields like synthetic biology, which has some similarities to both software and hardware? I'd say I have no clue, but this is an example of where we as free software people

have been to Insular, that we don't have connections to people. Like, I hear that question and I don't have a name of who I should talk to, and I should. And that proves, in some sense, that we've been to Insular. Does somebody in this room have a name in that field that we should be talking to? I know a couple of people we should start asking about.

I think we've actually been starting to do a much better job at that because I think that we were sort of, going back to Bradley's talk, we were sort of like when we were in our early years, I guess I wasn't around for the early part of that, but we were kind of trying to prove our point. We had a very specific mission, and we were really focused on our four freedoms

and very narrowly defining that because we felt like we needed to fight for that legitimacy or fight for that space, and we made a lot of allies maybe possibly in the wrong direction

to sort of what you said, these corporate allies, rather than talking to the academics and the nonprofits. And I do think that we're starting to develop those bridges in ways that we haven't before. I think those conversations are happening. I always talk about my medical device advocacy and how weird it was.

There was a person who was just a couple years older than me with my very same heart condition who was advocating for patient access to medical device data. He had the same device as me. We both had interviews on the same day on major news outlets, and that's how we found out about each other after we'd both been advocating for years.

And it was only five years after I'd been advocating for access to source code and control of the source code on these devices that I met a number of other medical device researchers that had a variety of different interests, and now I know who they are, and so we can work together.

I feel like we're having that same process in all of our other fields too, and so the main thing is for us to reach out and have these dialogues in inclusive ways that bridge that gap. It's also my experience from Lobbyism that these open debates not only happen in software,

they also happen around data, they also happen around hardware. I figured out it's way easier to go to folks that have good experience with open data, for example, and then to convince them to go also in the direction of free software, open source. This helps a lot, and my feeling is that there are a few years to go until we talk about open hardware,

but I think we will also manage this if we manage to open data, open source, open hardware debate to follow these lines, and to also, again, talking about resources,

we should also think about low-hanging fruits and start with that, and not start with the most hardest topics maybe, and losing motivation, and also resources and disregard, I think. We should also have an eye on the general openness debate, whatever this means. I'll be a pessimist again and say open hardware is a great example

where I think that the free software community did not listen early on very well to the concerns the open hardware community had. We had a lot of expertise that we could have shared, but I remember many people, possibly even myself, saying, well, just use the GPL for open hardware. It would be fine, and open hardware people would be like, wait a minute, but this thing and that thing,

and we just didn't listen, and I think we have had to rebuild those connections at great pain because we're so poor in our cross-community collaboration. Counterpoint optimism. There's so much energy around right to repair,

and what is software freedom if not the software right to repair? We're seeing those collaborations already happening, like the work that Denver, who works at Software Freedom Conservancy, did with us where he participated in a coalition of groups that were involved in the energy guide and labeling with the FTC.

I didn't attend all day, so maybe I'm asking something which is covered earlier today, but I work with Kubernetes and the products of the CNCF, and I have sort of the feeling that they are completely missing in this discussion. They have really nice tiering with sandbox and then levels up,

have nice ways they organize and how do you get into the next tier of quality. They don't use GPL for most of the things, I think MIT and Apache, so I wonder why are they missing from this conference. Of course Red Hat is here, but not from that perspective.

Am I missing something or I just, it's like two different worlds. Do you want to take it? I don't know. Well, I'll respond to part of it. I think that a lot of what's happening with Kubernetes is,

it's a very popular framework for cloud orchestration, which is really based on the emergence of containers, and we've had in the dev room in prior years discussions about licensing complexity with containers, and I think that it's maybe bad,

but I'm going to make it sort of a similar analogy to the AI discussion we had earlier, that I think that once you put software in a container, it's really easy to ignore the licensing that's in the inside, and so I think that maybe there's been such enthusiasm and excitement around cloud orchestration and Kubernetes in particular,

that the commercial forces that are pushing that willfully are ignoring the complexities of software licensing. I think more to the answer of why aren't there CNCF people here and folks from other corporate trade associations,

I think the answer is relatively simple. FOSM has done such a good job making this a non-commercial conference, and those entities are so focused on the commercial world that they don't really need to come here, because they have their own conferences that they built around corporations paying large amounts of money to get a seat at the table.

I think that's the real difference when you ask, why aren't they here at FOSM? Because FOSM is a non-commercial free software community conference, and a CNCF conference or other of the Linux Foundation entities is going to be a primarily corporate conference that most of the people here could not possibly afford to attend. I mean, some are here, and some were here in this room earlier today,

and some are at other events as well. But I agree generally. What is interesting is that when the first talk by Ian,

he is still on the board, when is SAS not a problem? One of the examples he gave is, well, if they let you run a VM or container that you control,

then they provide the service where you have your... So it is interesting because these people are kind of solving the SAS problem by making it easy to create all these containers.

Okay, you still want that container to be completely free software, but we probably should talk more to them. This was a statement, not a...

Actually, there's a very simple reason why the Kubernetes people aren't here. We're talking about copyleft and software that's written by engineers for engineers, and you also make a distinction, at least you did, Bradley, in your talk, about excluding or trying to reduce the power of corporations. Kubernetes is very much software written by corporations for corporations.

It is not anything that any one of us in this room would ever run on any of our devices. It's cloud orchestration software, and very few of us run scale clouds. Mark kind of does, that's part of the... There's many kyukyuken. Yeah.

Can the panel discuss something while I get the mic up to the steps? Do you have anything to discuss? So if you had Bradley's time machine, would you have done something different in the past?

For example, would you have started the Visio lawsuit earlier? The answer to that question is always, like, Bitcoin, right? But then I would have known exactly what...

More seriously, I always think that too, like, what if I could go back in time? And the answer is, it's just a question you can't answer, right? You know, I want to just... You know, when I was at university, I installed a Linux lab and I thought,

what a great idea, it's really too bad it's just not going to go anywhere. Like, you know, so I don't really have... Do you have an answer to that question? Well, it's my kind of... I guess, you know, my first answer is, oh, let's go back and write the licenses to be network aware.

But I think that's a little naive. And the challenge, even now, even in the present time is, okay, we now have composable network services and we see the emergence of AI coming on. What is authoring software going to look like in the next 10 years, the next 20 years?

Are humans going to be significantly involved in creating software? And, you know, what will that look... What does collaboration and sharing mean in that? And I don't... I think that that's some thinking we need to do right now. I think I would go into the places in the multiverse where there's all of us and most of the software is all free software, like 90 to 95% of it's free software.

And I'd say, your problems are solved here, you're coming over to our universe where 90 to 95% of the software is proprietary and help us fix the problem. Because we need to get everybody that files them like duplicated from various places in the multiverse. That's what we should do. That's not the time machine answer. Well, it depends on whose theory of time travel you're lying about.

So, as it's a time machine, I'd go to the future and see what needs to be fixed today. Do we have time for one more question that's in the handout? Yeah, a quick one. This hand was up before you, sorry.

I want the source code to the time machine. Oh, that's a good source code. I'm sorry I'm beating a dead horse here. I guess the Kubernetes question and the Cloud Native question,

it's corporations making software for corporations in the same way that Unix providers were corporations providing software for corporations. We don't know where this is going. So, kind of tying together with the time machine,

if we ignore or if we let this happen that we just say it's making software for corporations, where will we be a couple of years down the line?

We're all looking at each other. Yeah, I mean, it's a good question.

Yeah, I mean, it's this classic balance we've always done. Like, how can we deploy our software widely if we don't use the system that currently widely deploys software? And so, we're in this interesting situation where we, as activists, have to balance our public actions and trying to engage corporations on our own terms

so that we can figure out how to find that balance where we take the power structures that we have and we use every single lever that we can in order to get the right result of more software freedom and less proprietary software.

I'm going to just wrap it up because we're over time. Is that okay? Yeah, I think we're over time. I was going to say, like, it was so amazing to be in this room with all of you today in person. I loved it. Do you want to probably wrap it up? Yeah. Merci beaucoup de tout nous. Thank you for coming. And since it's a volunteer-oriented conference, if there's anything in your aisle that's not supposed to be there,

like bottles, stuff like that, please bring it up and put it in one of the cans for us. We'd appreciate it. And I think we have to close the room down so if you could move relatively quickly out because they want us out by seven, I think. And thanks for being so awesome.