GNU Soap

LibrePlanet can be hit or miss. Last year's didn't make enough of an impression on me that I felt like online-journaling about it. Nonetheless, the appeal of eight-plus uninterrupted hours with an Emacs window and the gentle rattle of the Acela was more than enough reason to wake up at 5 AM on a Saturday and lurch my way to Penn Station, creaking and dyspeptic, to board a 7 AM train. Out the window the landscape looked dead and wet, like it'd been frozen in an ice sheet that had only just retreated. But I was in good spirits. I snuggled into my seat, hooked up all my electrical bits and put on that Titus Andronicus album about wanting to leave Boston. Almost immediately I fixed a bug in one of my programs that had been driving me crazy for two weeks. For once, the Acela Wi-Fi was fast and reliable. What a nice morning!

The tunnel connecting the railyards at South Station to the T lines was closed. Outside on the street it was cold and a bit rainy. The sky was steely gray. The conference was back at the Stata Center this year, a few blocks from the Kendall Square stop on the T. I've made this journey so many times in such a similar way on so little sleep that at this point that I get the solipsistic feeling that the tiny part of Boston I pass through is a small extension to the local geography of my life (subway, office, home, Brooklyn) or maybe like a folded-up dimension within my personal universe.

I said my yearly hello to Jeanne when I got to the Stata Center and ducked into a classroom in time to catch Brad Kuhn's talk about the future of copyleft, which included a fairly dour assessment of the state of GPL adoption. Non-copyleft permissive licenses are gaining ground, both because of political apathy on the part of software developers, he claimed, but also because of enthusiasm for technology that is already non-copyleft. As an example, he pointed out that Clang is rapidly displacing GCC. He spoke to the general culture of expediency concommitant with the boom in startups, and cited a representative quote from Tom Preston-Werner of Github about how the GPL is inconvenient compared to the Apache license. Kuhn suggested that you have to do whatever you can to destroy your political enemies, and so pointed out the despicable shit that guy pulled on Julie Ann Horvath. I agree. Fuck that guy. The talk left me feeling bummed out but agitated. What to do!

Next, I went to a panel called "Beyond the Women In Tech Talk," which was both about going beyond outreach to women to draw in people who belong to more and different groups under-represented in the Free Software movement, and about getting beyond the tone of the typical women-in-tech panel ("How can we be more welcoming? We're already being as welcoming as we can possibly be!"). The moderators were ginger coons, who edits and publishes Libre Graphics Magazine; Sara Hendren, who researches assistive technologies; Marina Zhurakhinskaya, who does community outreach for the GNOME Foundation; and Kÿra, whom I'd met when we were both tabling for the FSF at HOPE. They opened things up with a well-observed comment by Kÿra that the focus on inclusiveness and joining isn't necessarily constructive. Communities of historically oppressed people don't want to be swept up in a political movement that looks like a lot of straight white guys doing straight white guy behaviors. You gotta let the Queer South Indian Student Computing Group have its own meetings and leave 'em alone. This seemed like a difficult point for the white dudes in the room to grasp; there were some polite attempts to renegotiate the point. A few people got up and left. But another audience member made what I thought was a very good point, which was that people from ethnic, economic, and cultural backgrounds other than your own are not going to be like you. And if you want them to usefully contribute their labor to your project, she said, you need to spend time with them and actually get to know them. She wondered whether the average white cis male Free Software project developer is actually prepared to do this. I thought about it. I don't know! I'll admit it: It's difficult to get out there and understand people.

I ate lunch alone at Clover, a vegan food co-op that looks like an Apple Store and which has a few locations around Cambridge.

Eben Moglen gave the afternoon keynote. He was wearing an uncharacteristically bold suit and tie combo, and seemed to be feeling pretty good. He was anticipating a satisfactory ruling in an upcoming Supreme Court case, Alice Corp. vs. CLS Bank. Like many of the other speakers, he made some observations about the rise of government surveillance, and how practically every mobile computing device can be subverted to spy on its user on behalf of state security agencies like the NSA. (At this, RMS piped up from the front row: "Perhaps we should make stickers that say 'Intel Inside.'") He ended with the somewhat perplexing assurance that "You have always had the finest legal representation in the world on the subjects of our mutual concern, and while I live, you always will." True, he's got a crack team, but they don't have a ton of competition doing what they do. Someone asked about the Freedom Box. Moglen estimated that the project had lost about a year's worth of progress because wildfires in Colorado had burned down the home of one of the lead engineers, taking some important prototypes and designs with it.

RMS was up next. "I'm a pessimist by nature," was the first thing he said. There were some knowing chuckles from the audience. "I've been expecting defeat since I started this movement in 1983. But surrender isn't an option, because that means immediate defeat. So the only thing I can do is fight." It was maybe the most inspiring thing I think I've ever heard him say. He went on to suggest that the Free Software folks had better get started preparing for an inevitable Political Action Committee assault in the event of a victory on patents; and to suggest that there should be laws preventing the sale of mobile computing devices that can't be jail-broken. "We used to think that people who were willing to make sacrifices for their freedom were heroes," he said as he was wrapping up. But now we're unwilling to sacrifice the smallest amount of comfort. "I don't know if I could sacrifice my life," he said. "But I can give up some convenience. Any adult can do that." He announced the Free Software awards: One to Matthew Garrett, for his work on implementing UEFI SecureBoot for Free operating systems; the other to the GNOME Foundation's Outreach Program for Women. Garrett spoke movingly of his experience growing up in an isolated town in Northern Ireland and learning to write software by reading code off a burned CD of Free Software programs.

The "social event" for the evening was nearby, at The Asgard. Outside of a handful of staff and old-timers, I don't really know anybody at these events, so I had to pound a few beers before I felt comfortable talking to anybody. Deb paired me up with Alex Oliva, the head of the FSF Latin America, and I assaulted him with questions about GCC development and the difficulties of launching an activist group in a market saturated with activist groups. I spoke to Emily Lippold Cheney, who's interested in the intersection of Free Software and co-operatives of various kinds. I spent a good 45 minutes talking to a trio of developers from Tiki, who were not offended at all when I confused their project with TWiki. "Happens all the time," said the main dude. After that I lurched back to Kendall Sq. and my hotel room, singing songs to myself. I walked past Building 41, bits of large machines visible through its dirty windows. At the hotel, after changing into my jammies, I stood for a minute in the part of the room where the two floor-to-ceiling windows form a seamless corner. It felt a little like I was hovering over the muddy construction site below. (If I'd shelled out an extra hondo for a room on the other side of the building, it would have been the Charles River.) Then I called Nina and bellowed drunkenly at her for an hour, sprawled over the unnecessary upholstered couch next to the enormous bed. I slept fitfully, having dreams of missing trains and conference sessions.

I got up at 8:30 or so, washed and dressed while listening to MSNBC's coverage of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, and then checked out of my room. When I got to the Stata Center, Jacob Applebaum was well into his morning keynote address, delivered via a gstreamer video feed from his base of operations in Berlin, where he remains in self-imposed exile. His talk focused naturally on the tactics of the surveillance state uncovered by Edward Snowden, and he made an argument for the importance of making anonymizing services and personal security software more usable for non-technical users. He showed off some of the aparatus that he uses to ensure his privacy (mostly network communication pipelines based on Tor) and described the acid test that he uses to decide whether he can trust a reporter (no NSA secrets for you if you can't figure out how to use GnuPG). He ended his talk with, "And I hope to meet some of you again someday in real life, but if not, remember... it was murder!" He hung up the video connection, but his face stayed frozen on the big projector screen in front of all of us.

I sat in on an assortment of talks for the rest of the day. The speakers were engaging. I liked hearing Máirín Duffy's explanation of how she redesigned GNU Mailman; Matthew Garrett described the architecture of SecureBoot and showed how secure firmware implementations conflate physical presence with ownership. Nothing really riled me up like the talks from the day before, but I got some good programming done. I had to leave in the middle of Karen Sandler's closing keynote, in which she stressed the importance of making Free Software ideals personal. "We can't all be cyborg lawyers," she said. (She is one.)

It was time to go. I took the T back to South Station and got myself onto the 6:40 train right as they were closing the doors. I found myself a seat in the quiet car. A woman got on at Providence and sat down next to me, fiddling with her phone. Out the window, the sun set, turning the western sky a bright pink color. I thought about getting the woman's attention so she could see it as well, but instead I just hunkered down with my devices and typed.