Program

I made a movie called "Moria's Race" ( an action film about racing-obsessed little children ). It took me 3 and a half years for only about 28 minutes of stuff. But I did it using free software only ( avoided the temptation of rendering on the GPU even ). And the film is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
I can talk about how I made it and what I had to do to manage the project.

Taler is a project that develops free software infrastructure for payments. It respects the privacy of buyers while making the income of merchants transparent. Taler does not use the blockchain and it is not a new currency. Instead, it is a building block to deploy bearer-based electronic payments that share some of the properties of traditional cash.

This workshop will cover the design details and talk about the current implementation using GNU Taler: a free software, privacy focused and online payment which is built with some properties of cash.
https://taler.net/en/

Nowadays, proprietary/non-free software has become nearly synonymous with educational establishments. Using software that is "the norm" or "industry standard" forces students to submit to proprietary applications "for the good of their future." Tools for textbook access and homework assignment/submission force students to submit to subscription-based DRM models and forfeit any opportunity to own the knowledge contained within the textbooks. Big name companies, some of which are the biggest proponents of proprietary software, are considered the best on resumes, and students are encouraged to search for jobs at such conglomerates. GNU@NU, Northeastern's free software organization is here to help! We will be holding a discussion on student experiences with free software, as they pertain to anything remotely educational. Come join us to help and learn more!

My love for freedom brought me to free software. Free software came with free licenses, like the GPL, that was used for the RepRap project. I have assimilated a lot from that project, and modifying a 3D printer I realized a coreXY meditation table.

Let's see what the Debian Brazil Community has been doing for Debian and free software in Brazil, meet our group and I will show the events and activities organized by us.

Today, the market embraces "open source" as a pragmatic working model, but does not have libre software as an ethical imperative.

The companies that produce the most libre works are companies with proprietary business models, while many useful libre projects struggle to find funding, up to the point of ending up with no maintenance, bought by proprietary producers or transitioning to proprietary licensing models.

If the long-term maintenance of libre projects is only sustainable for those who produce proprietary works, how will we be ever able to overcome the proprietary model?

On this panel, we will discuss strategies to overcome the proprietary model for good, and make libre works an achievable moral imperative for most authors.

Pollyanna is a web framework that makes it easy to create your own libre social space, such as a social network or blog. With Pollyanna, you can achieve full transparency, including software, content, and voting record. You can also deploy your own community space in less than an hour.

In this workshop, we will learn about the Pollyanna framework and how to use it to create our own libre social spaces. We will also discuss public-private key infrastructure (PKI), hashes, and chains, and how those can be used to build a data structure that allows for a completely portable user profile.

This workshop is for anyone who is interested in learning more about Pollyanna and how to use it to create their own libre social space. No prior experience with Pollyanna or web development is required.

Various distinguished and international newspapers are announcing that AI will have a disruptive impact on employment, various governments seem to be partly aware of the impact for better or worse of this technology on society. The Center for AI Safety which aims to "ensure the safe development and use of AI" publishes "Mitigating the risk of extinction caused by AI should be a global priority, along with other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." We will connect the dots between investments in AI and previous investments made by Silicon Valley and try to decipher the trends and risks. Above all, we will reflect on how this relates to those of us who are passionate about sharing, the commons, and free software.

Your data are essential to your life, your agency, and your future. Come learn how to save, serve, and safely share your data at home with a smorgasbord of free software. I'll cover rapid setup and basic use of tools such as Traefik, Nextcloud, Wallabag, Jellyfin, and more. With these powerful and private services at your disposal, you can collaboratively edit documents in realtime online, stream music and video, and future-proof your digital assets.

This talk pairs well with a soon-to-be released book of the same topic and title. Both the book and talk are about self-hosting free software, were created with free software, and are free software themselves.

Nonfree software subjugates users. That's wrong enough, but such power is now used to wrong users even harder. The easier it is for third parties to impose on a user their choice of software version the more they can twiddle the software's behavior to best serve themselves and enshittify the user's computing. This holds for dominant (nonfree) operating systems for workstations and mobiles, with their mandatory updates, but users become even more vulnerable to enshittification by using web apps downloaded at every use from somebody else's servers, by doing their computing through somebody else's services, and by using remotely controlled and remotely mediated smartIoT devices and appliances. Even when using software that's not updated automatically on their own computers, users (and their upstream distributors) may be persuaded to adopt enshittif(ied/ying?) versions, including CPU microcode and firmware for system initialization and for peripheral devices. Is using free software enough to escape?

It is well known that Valve distributes non-free DRMed games via their Steam Platform, including many VR games. As a gamer who cares about freedom, I avoid those games. Since my computer is based on the FSF certified Talos II Mainboard and POWER9 CPU, I'm technically unable to install those non-free games and the Steam Client Software. Instead I go for Freedom-To-Play games, included in many GNU/Linux distributions. (in some cases even SteamOS without having to use Steam). I'll also improve existing "open source" games and make them truly freedom respecting. This does not mean that those games have to be gratis, I think of a way to enable users to pay for Freedom-To-Play games using Taler.

The primary computer for over half of humanity is the smartphone. Nearly all of these devices run some proprietary locked-down derivations of free operating systems that restrict, in various ways, the software that can be run. The resulting "walled garden" app stores that dominate these platforms are naturally biased against free software in favor of profit-making app ventures. Does this mean that free software is impossible to create – and sustain – in this environment? The premise of this talk is that the answer must be no. But it is an uphill battle. I will outline a model of an oasis of free software that can grow and thrive within these walled-garden environments, and how a small global community can sustain a collection of digital public goods that may benefit billions of people, with minimal ongoing cost, for generations to come.

Using OpenProject as an example, this talk explores how to delve into a completely alien codebase written in a language that you've never used to make changes that you want. This is a practical use of software freedom.

We will walk through all the steps from "I just installed this software" all the way through becoming familiar with the codebase and developing an understanding of the language. On the way we will discuss when it makes sense to take shortcuts and when it makes sense to actually do the hard work. We'll end with a live demo.

This presentation starts with a brief introduction of how I became a Savannah user in 2014 and began my road to contribute to GNU website translations in 2017. The whole experience is an interesting journey. I think many people can do this because GNU has forty years of history already. All the tools are good enough for you to contribute.