1. Some advice:

• • Do what you can, confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, nor your confession silenced for fear of shame.

• John Ruskin

2. Connections: 3. Technology Technological 4. Ethical: Technological Philosophical ethical 5. Legal Technological Philosophical ethical Legal 6. Socio-political Technological Philosophical ethical Legal Socio-political 7. Open Source Technological Philosophical ethical Legal Socio-political 8. The Locus of Control

• Little control

Full control 9. The Locus of Control

• Little control

Full control 10. The Locus of Control

• Little control

Full control Greater Responsibility Little Responsibility 11. The Locus of Control

• Little control

Full control Greater Responsibility Little Responsibility (Freedom) 12. Richard M. Stallman

Born 1953 New York

Harvard BA Physics

Real Interest:

• Computer programming

1974 MIT AI Lab.

The Hacker Culture:

• Code is poetry

13. The End of an Era

Early '80s

• New commercial outlook.

• What do we own?

• What can we sell?

An end to the sharing Hacker culture.

• Non-disclosure agreements.

14. A Stark Moral Choice I could have made money this way and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people and feel that I had spent my life making the world a worse place. 15. A Stark Moral Choice

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?

The decision to start the GNU project was based on a similar spirit.

The name GNU was chosen following a hacker tradition, as a recursive acronym GNU is Not Unix.

16. Build it and they will come.

First make the tools.

• GNU C Compiler

• Emacs

Then get help.

• 1984 the Internet was used by academics to communicate through:

• • News Groups

• • Bulletin Boards

17. On Freedom

Free as inFreedom -Not as in Beer!

• The principal goal of GNU was to be free software, Even if GNU had no technical advantage over UNIX, it would have asocialadvantage, allowing users toco-operateand anethicaladvantage respecting the user's freedom.

But...

• How can the continued freedom of the software be assured?

18. Copyleft: All Rights Reversed

Flip over the copyright laws:

• Instead of a means of privatising the software it becomes a means of keeping software free.

You can:

• Run the program

• Copy the program

• Modify the program

• Distribute modified versions of the program

But you cannot:

• Add any copyright restrictions

• Subsume the program into restricted software.

19. GNU General Public Licence (GPL)

In order for software to advance, it must have the four freedoms.

• Run the program

• Copy the program

• Modify the program

• Distribute modified versions of the program

In order to learn improve and extend the program, the source code must be freely available.

20. On Openess

Prose is like hair; the more you comb it, the more it shines.

Gustave Flaubert (1821 1880)

In proprietory,closed softwaredevelopment, there is a rush to market. Few eyes see the underlying code. The result is bug filled code. If you buy a car you wouldn't expect your first journey to be to the garage to have seat belts fitted! (no, not Flaubert) Inopen source softwaredevelopment, thousands of eyes can see the code and comb out the bugs. You can become part of the process if you have the desire and the ability. 21. A Network of Development

By the beginning of the nineties, much of the underlying structure was in place. The central hub or kernel was proving difficult to complete.

Linus Torvalds was anxious to fill the gap. His kernel completed the structure that could now be called a integrated operating system.

GNU/Linux

Linus Torvalds 22. The Growth of a Community

Contributors were world wide.

Communication was via the Internet.

Organisation was not heirarchical.

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar

• Concurrent Version Systems (CVS).

• Development was much faster than the closed systems of Microsoft and Apple.

• GNU/Linux became the operating system of the web.

23. The Growth of a Community

Who make up the community?

• Programers

• Lawyers

• Graphic designers

• Document writers

• Musicians

• Publicists

• Linguists

• Users- just people who like freedom!

24. Unintended Consequences

Serendipity

• 1995 Ward Cunningham realised that CVS could be used by non-programmers to communicate and build up bodies of information.

The creation of Wikis

• Wikepedia

• Wikileaks

• Wikiworld

• OpenStreetMap.

25. Unintended Consequences

Blogging

• WordPress, Joomla, Moodle

• FaceBook, Twitter etc.

Growth of Citizen sites: MySociety

• TheyWorkForYou

• No. 10 Petitions

• WriteToThem

• FixMyStreet

• HearFromYourMP

• GroupsNearYou

26. A spur to co-operation

WolvesFreeCycle.

WolvesGreenZoneCafe

27. Opportunities & Dangers

• Little control

Full control Greater Responsibility Little Responsibility (Freedom) Open Source opportunities Proprietry closed systems (and minds). Security. 28. And finally..

The question:-

How much does technology enslave us?

It is not how much [information] technology influences us, but how much we influence [information] technology.

• Do what you can, confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, nor your confession silenced for fear of shame.