FOSDEM-2025-keynote/what-bkuhn-was-going-to-say.md

# FOSDEM 2025 Keynote

Handed off by bkuhn to Karen and Denver due to someone (very possibly Henry
Poole) giving bkuhn COVID-19.

## Title: Slide 0

Put it up as people are arriving so they know I'm not there.  My name is
striked out with apologies.

## Kant: Slide 1

Kant slide, (First slide (after title slide).  Please read this prepared
statement from me:

> Bradley is heartbroken to not speak today — he last keynoted about five
> years ago, and was excited to keynote again.  FOSDEM is a unique event in
> the world, as its organizers focus on community, not for-profit interests.
> Those who saw Bradley yesterday know that he work a tight fitting N-95 mask
> the entire day, as he did nearly the entire time since leaving his home for
> the trip to FOSDEM — he took his mask off only to eat, drink, and speak on
> stage.  Nevertheless, he tested positive for COVID-19 this morning for the
> first time in his life.  He actually feels reasonably good and since he has
> received absolutely every recommend vaccine, his symptoms are quite mild.

> Bradley asks the entire FOSDEM community to reconsider their safety
> protocols.  Bradley believes deeply in the moral imperatives of Kantian
> ethics: that, as this quote says more formally, humans have a moral
> imperative to voluntarily take every action so that it maximize the rights
> and welfare of all humanity.  As such, he has quarantined today for our
> safety, and while he does not call for a return to mask mandates, he would
> like FOSDEM to return to “masks strongly recommended” policy indefinitely
> for the years to come, and for all of you to wear masks voluntarily,
> especially when in the audience of crowded DevRooms.

> The science shows that masking works best in disease prevention if everyone
> participates.  Bradley noticed anecdotally that less then approximately 2%
> of attendees wore masks yesterday and and at earlier fringe events.  We
> should all commit to voluntarily to making that 98% because it's the right
> thing to do.

I do ask that you read the statement above exactly as written it.  What
continues is just what I would probably say.  Once I hand this off to you
(probably around 13:10 local on 2025-02-02), please feel free to turn it as
much into “your talk” as you'd like.  I just wrote all this out to help you
understand where I was going to go.


## Clemens: Slide 2

Does anyone, for a FOSS project they contribute to, use any of the following
systems as a substantial part of their contributions on that project.  Please
keep your hands up after we say each one.  Please don't be shy to raise your
hand; we aren't judging you and we don't blame you for using these products
we're about to list.

 * Microsoft Teams.

 * Zoom.

 * Sourceforge.

 * Jira.

 * Confluence.

 * BitBucket.

 * Any of the many non-FOSS continuous integration systems. 

 * Slack — after hands go up, say: which, BTW, is now a Salesforce product.

 * GitHub — after hands go up, say: which, BTW, is now a Microsoft product.

 * gitlab.com's proprietary GitLab instance (i.e., the gitlab instance of
   your project not self hosted).


Of course, once we said GitHub, the most hands went up, but now at least N%
of the room has their hands up.

Note that early on, we said Sourceforge.  This is an interesting piece of
history that most don't know: [ switch slides ]

## Sourceforge History: Slide 3

Sourceforge is a very interesting case.  Most younger developers may not
know that in the late 1990s, Sourceforge (and forge software in general) was
a revolution in FOSS development.  Until that time, there were no 
websites that provided integrated version control, bug tracking, developer
discussion, and continuing integration.  It was a patchwork of systems
before that, and Sourceforge was extremely exiting to lifelong FOSS
developers precisely because the need for better solutions was so great.

VA Linux initially was a good community actor: they released the entire
codebase of Sourceforge under GPL, and many contributors began to work
upstream on Sourceforge itself.

During the dot.com boom, VA Linux IPOed under the ticket symbol LNUX.  Like
airline scams of the 1920s, where companies named themselves with ticker
symbols that sounded like airlines, many people thought that they were
buying stock in this new operating system they were just hearing about, not
one of many service companies in the space. 

By late 2001, the dot.com boom was over, LNUX stock had tanked, and, as most
FOSS companies do when times are tough, VA Linux ran to the oldest
scam in the software industry: licensing all their software that they could
as proprietary.

There's a link in the slides to an excellent article at the FSF Europe from
October 2001 (written by Loïc Dachary), that describes VA Linux's behavior.
As Loïc points out in his article, VA Linux did underhanded tactics to
pressure developers to assign copyrights so that VA Linux could relicense 
Sourceforge wholly proprietary.

As a side note, this was one of the catalysts for the creation of the Affero
GPL.  In this case, since all the HTML and Javascript files were also GPL'd,
VA Linux needed universal copyright assignment to proceed with a wholly
proprietary product.  Ultimately only a few developers like Loïc refused to
assign copyright, but VA Linux as the overwhelming majority copyright holder
simply wrote their changes out of the software, and relicensed.

We definitely encourage you to read Loïc's essay on FSF Europe's site,
because he makes a truly excellent point: that the Free Software community
could “Fork and ignore”: IOW, take the last GPL'd version that was released
as a gift to the community, and proceed development from there — ignoring
sourceforge entirely.

There was a somewhat golden period after that from 2001 until about
mid-2004.  Sourcforge, quite unsurprisingly, rather quickly switch to an
ad-based system whereby they would show you an add if you wanted to download
a tar.gz file of a project.  Developers were truly stuck: SFC's own Inkscape
project spent *years* well into the 2010s trying to fully divorce from
Sourceforge, and ironically, the successor in interest, Sourceforce, Inc.,
realized Inkscape downloads were one of their largest downloaded projects,
and constantly pitched us toxic revenue-sharing schemes until Inkscape
finally escaped Sourceforge.