Ok, I do not know how to cover a conference properly, so I’ll just say that this year I saw more social networking and people were more action focused. I also got the sense that more and more Romanian people want to get involved in the free software movement. Keywords for this conference would be ‘action oriented’ and ’social networking’, which is great.

A little about myself: I am interested in all things free culture, from software, to artwork, to data, but I am particularly interested in free as in freedom network services (FNS for short), from free cloud service to collaboration services between artists.

What I apprieciate most about this conference is that I had more time to socialize with people around: I had the opportunity to talk with Georg + Monty on patents, javascript AGPL, managed services and mostly stuff related to my trial at making a web/network service.

Now, I’d like to say a few words about the presentations:

Richard Stallman – What means Free Software and why matters – I found it interesting how the GNU project started and I did some comparisons with the current state of FNS and I thought we are just at the begining of FNS, where GNU was on 1983. I plan to cover this presentation in a further post on this blog.

Ismael Olea talked about the European Commission Open Source Observatory and Repository Project. Great progress has been done with respect to the process of aquiring software for governmental use and many governmental organisations use free implementable standards. But little was done to give away as much information as possible, that despite the transparency claims made by the public administration, much of the unclassified public data is still offline in a drawer… The US are much more advanced in publishing government data under licenses that allow reuse by their citizens.

Then, John Koetsier from the University of British Columbia made a presentation about the Master of Educational Technologies from his Uni. Well, his presentation lacked an important information: “How much of the technology they teach is actually free software?” – this is a free software conference, how was it related to our topic?

I was eager to find more Mozilla news so the presentation made by Zbigniew Branecki about Firefox and Mozilla Foundation stroke right on spot.

At the Xwiki presentation, made by Jerome Velociter, I got to know a good new wiki app. I liked most the feature-full online rich editor and the integration with Mozilla Bespin editor.

Danese Cooper helped us play a game in which we had to give flash-talks, like the Ignite talks:
each volunteer had to make a 3 minutes discourse on a chosen topic. Presenters had to use their time to the maximum, but had not to go over the time limit.

Presentations that I liked, but I do not remember enough to make a review:
True stories by Danese Cooper
OSI licensing by Monty
Free software 2009 by Georg Greve
Mozilla news & demo

Talks that I missed:
The opening ceremony
The presentation made by the rep. of the Ministry of Education
Free art by Tibi Turbureanu
Concept Aplication Server and GyroGears

Once the presentation materials become available I’ll review them.

No matter how many features we add to free software, when a user compares our products with a proprietary one she/he does not see any difference. It is still a buggy piece of crap, made by some folks far away, that does not work as expected. We are not any different from them. Free software will never differentiate from the proprietary products in our current proprietary culture. Real end users see us as programmers, not as different institutions, companies. There is no Microsoft to fight with in that world, only some programmers or IT support people. The IT people are generally some bad guys, scum, dirt lovers whose help everyone needs. To succeed in this world we need paint ourselves in a whole different color than proprietary vendors.

Features and feature sets are the tools of marketing the old proprietary software. In a free software world, when comparing two free software products features are irrelevant, as anybody can copy source code from everybody.
“XMMS got a new feature I don’t have in my music player software? Where is that XMMS’s source code? Hmm, no problem I’ll add it in two weeks!“

Features and feature-set comparisons with other software (proprietary or not) make us look the same as the old proprietary software. Features we have (and proprietary does not have) are hidden to new users, so we are not a bit different. Or even worse, we lack that feature X from their previous software. No matter what, we are lagging behind. This is no way forward.

Start advertising something no proprietary software has! That “something” is “Free Culture”. Since Free Software is a subset of “Free Culture”, no proprietary vendor in his right mind will advertise that.

What is this “Free Culture” I keep talking about? Here are a few definitions:
Free Cultural Works
Wikipedia page on Free Culture Movement

What means promoting Free Software through Free Culture? It means we need to start advertising the collaboration tools in our software. We have to enable and encourage artists to share their work with other artists and with the world – just as our programmers do. Go out there and tell student/young artists how they can work more efficient as a collective. Show them examples of “free cultural projects’ that are successful and which they can contribute to. Examples include:

1. Wikipedia
2. Students for Free Culture
3. Mutopia Project – sharing free music sheets
4. Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free electronic books

We have the motivation, the responsibility and the technical means to promote Free Culture. What stops us from doing this? Licensing?
That we will lose support of some people? That is unavoidable anyhow!
But look what we would gain!