John Sullivan

Debian and the Free Software Foundation, along with its GNU Project, share many goals and ideals. They are two of the most mature and dedicated organizations working in the free software movement. This is a great opportunity to talk in person about how they can better work together and learn from each other.

FSF members (and potential members) will meet to talk about the FSF's work, and relationship with Debian:

• A very brief update by the FSF's executive director on highlights of the FSF's work since the last DebConf
• Feedback (positive and negative) from members, and a little brainstorming about what the FSF should and shouldn't be doing
• A review of the current relationship between the FSF and Debian
• A discussion of areas for collaboration, focused on projects that could be completed or significantly advanced before the next DebConf

Past sessions at DebConf have led to concrete positive results like collaboration on the hardware database at https://h-node.org. Let's have another productive one!

"Open source" split from "free software" to be more pragmatic, to gain entry to the business world, partly by being more accepting of proprietary software. This led to descriptions of free software as "vegan" and open source as "vegetarian." Let's question this analogy, and in the process explore how the Tofurky is made, looking at underlying motivations, ethics, communication, and collaboration.

In Debian, we don't just want to write and package free software or open source code. We want others to understand why we do it. We want to get along with each other. We want other people to join us in envisioning a world where our kind of collaborative production is the norm. At the very least, we want them to think we're not crazy.

The challenges for those committed to our cause can be similar to those choosing to be vegetarians or vegans -- having to explain why we won't eat what seems to others to be perfectly good software/food, why we can only frequent certain restaurants/websites, why we refuse to serve meat/proprietary software to others. We can be similarly accused of being judgmental, impractical, idealistic, or "in a phase." Because many more people are familiar with the concept of dietary restrictions motivated by concern for animal rights, environmental ethics, sustainability, and health, this can be fertile ground for analogies to explain our choices in software and technology.

As we chew the fat, we'll learn more about the diverse motivations within our movement, leading to both better collaborative potential among current practitioners and improved recipes for communicating about what we do to brand new audiences.

A friendly introduction to free software, open source, and Debian, with an opportunity for the audience to ask questions.