239 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
239 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
# FOSDEM 2025 Keynote
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Handed off by bkuhn to Karen and Denver due to someone (very possibly Henry
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Poole) giving bkuhn COVID-19.
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## Title: Slide 0
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Put it up as people are arriving so they know I'm not there. My name is
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striked out with apologies.
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## Kant: Slide 1
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Kant slide, (First slide (after title slide). Please read this prepared
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statement from me:
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> Bradley is heartbroken to not speak today — he last keynoted six
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> years ago, and was excited to keynote again. FOSDEM is a unique event in
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> the world, as its organizers focus on community, and never for-profit interests.
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> Those who saw Bradley yesterday know that he wore a tight fitting N-95 mask
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> the entire day, as he did nearly the entire time since leaving his home for
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> the trip to FOSDEM — he took his mask off only to eat, drink, and speak on
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> stage. Nevertheless, he tested positive for COVID-19 this morning for the
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> first time in his life. He actually feels reasonably good and since he has
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> received absolutely every recommend vaccine, his symptoms are just those of
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> a difficult influenza.
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> Bradley asks the entire FOSDEM community to reconsider their safety
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> protocols. Bradley believes deeply in the moral imperatives of Kantian
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> ethics: that, as this quote says more formally, humans have a moral
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> imperative to voluntarily take every action so that it maximize the rights
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> and welfare of all humanity. As such, he has quarantined today for our
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> safety, and while he does not call for a return to mask mandates, he would
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> like FOSDEM to return to “masks strongly recommended” policy indefinitely
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> for the years to come, and for all of you to wear masks voluntarily —
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> especially when in the audience of crowded DevRooms.
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> The science shows that masking works best in disease prevention if everyone
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> participates. Bradley estimates anecdotally that fewer then 2% of
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> attendees wore masks yesterday (an at earlier fringe events). We should
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> all commit to voluntarily to making that 98% because it's the right thing
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> to do.
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> Furthermore, we *just* heard about a COVID-19 contact tracing app that was
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> excitingly released as FOSS. Bradley is desperately trying to contact
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> everyone who he came in contact with (which is a lot of people — it's
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> FOSDEM). He realizes that FOSDEM is 100% volunteer conference, and makes a
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> “request for volunteers” right now for someone to deploy that app in
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> F-Droid for FOSDEM 2025 next year and make it an official app of FOSDEM.
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I do ask that you read the statement above exactly as written it. What
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continues is just what I would probably say.
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The rest I hand off to you. I'm going to ask you all in chat if you want me
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to try to (a) make the last few wordy slides less wordy and make notes for
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you instead (b) if you want a (0) gratis CI credits slide, (1) GiveUpGitHub
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slide or (2) a CoPilot slide.
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## Clemens: Slide 2
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Does anyone, for a FOSS project they contribute to, use any of the following
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systems as a substantial part of their contributions on that project. Please
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keep your hands up after we say each one. Please don't be shy to raise your
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hand; we aren't judging you and we don't blame you for using these products
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we're about to list.
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* Microsoft Teams.
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* Zoom.
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* Sourceforge.
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* Jira.
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* Confluence.
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* BitBucket.
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* Any of the many non-FOSS continuous integration systems.
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* Slack — after hands go up, say: which, BTW, is now a Salesforce product.
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* GitHub — after hands go up, say: which, BTW, is now a Microsoft product.
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* gitlab.com's proprietary GitLab instance (i.e., the gitlab instance of
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your project not self hosted).
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Of course, once we said GitHub, the most hands went up, but now at least N%
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of the room has their hands up.
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Note that early on, we said Sourceforge. This is an interesting piece of
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history that most don't know: [ switch slides ]
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## VA Linux / Sourceforge Debacle: Slide 3
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Sourceforge is a very interesting case. Most younger developers may not
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know that in the late 1990s, Sourceforge (and forge software in general) was
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a revolution in FOSS development. Until that time, there were no
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websites that provided integrated version control, bug tracking, developer
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discussion, and continuing integration. It was a patchwork of systems
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before that, and Sourceforge was extremely exiting to lifelong FOSS
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developers precisely because the need for better solutions was so great.
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VA Linux initially was a good community actor: they released the entire
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codebase of Sourceforge under GPL, and many contributors began to work
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upstream on Sourceforge itself.
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During the dot.com boom, VA Linux IPOed under the ticket symbol LNUX. Like
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airline scams of the 1920s, where companies named themselves with ticker
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symbols that sounded like airlines, many people thought that they were
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buying stock in this new operating system they were just hearing about, not
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one of many service companies in the space.
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By late 2001, the dot.com boom was over, LNUX stock had tanked, and, as most
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FOSS companies do when times are tough, VA Linux ran to the oldest
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scam in the software industry: licensing all their software that they could
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as proprietary.
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There's a link in the slides to an excellent article at the FSF Europe from
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October 2001 (written by Loïc Dachary), that describes VA Linux's behavior.
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As Loïc points out in his article, VA Linux did underhanded tactics to
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pressure developers to assign copyrights so that VA Linux could relicense
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Sourceforge wholly proprietary.
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As a side note, this was one of the catalysts for the creation of the Affero
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GPL. In this case, since all the HTML and Javascript files were also GPL'd,
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VA Linux needed universal copyright assignment to proceed with a wholly
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proprietary product. Ultimately only a few developers like Loïc refused to
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assign copyright, but VA Linux as the overwhelming majority copyright holder
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simply wrote their changes out of the software, and relicensed.
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We definitely encourage you to read Loïc's essay on FSF Europe's site,
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because he makes a truly excellent point: that the Free Software community
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could “Fork and ignore”: IOW, take the last GPL'd version that was released
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as a gift to the community, and proceed development from there — ignoring
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sourceforge entirely.
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There was a somewhat golden period after that from 2001 until about
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mid-2004. Sourcforge, quite unsurprisingly, rather quickly switch to an
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ad-based system whereby they would show you an add if you wanted to download
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a tar.gz file of a project. Developers were truly stuck: SFC's own Inkscape
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project spent *years* well into the 2010s trying to fully divorce from
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Sourceforge, and ironically, the successor in interest, Sourceforce, Inc.,
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realized Inkscape downloads were one of their largest downloaded projects,
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and constantly pitched us toxic revenue-sharing schemes until Inkscape
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finally escaped Sourceforge. [ next slide ]
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## Sourceforge Diaspora: Slide 4
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The reason some projects had such trouble with getting away from Sourceforge
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was because there wasn't a primary fork, but dozens. Here's a list of the
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ones that Bradley could remember, but he recalls at the time there were at
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least four or five more that split the attention of the community so badly
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that, by the time AJAX and Web 2.0 came along, there was not enough
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leadership to move an old PHP+HTML application to the more interactive and
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modern looks that users were demanding by the late 2000s. [ switch slides ]
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## Preston-Warner: Slide 5
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Enter GitHub, founded in October 2007. GitHub from its very founding learned
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the VA Linux lesson: don't ever give anyone code, and in fact, take great
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efforts to convince the FOSS community that copyleft, particularly the Affero
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GPL are terrible.
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Enter GitHub, founded in October 2007. GitHub from its very founding learned
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the VA Linux lesson: don't ever give anyone any code: keep it all
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proprietary — and if you must release FOSS, do it in a way that doesn't allow
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people to make their own system.
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This is an old slide of Bradley's, which he insisted we include even though
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he's shown a slide like this on the main stage at FOSDEM at least once
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before, simply to point out that convincing users of a fully GPL'd VCS
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(namely, Git) to switch to a forge that locked them into proprietary
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services.
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While Preston-Warner was pushed out of GitHub due to an unrelated HR
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scandal, his vision, warped morality, and aggressive hatred of copyleft was
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baked into GitHub culture.
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In fact, GitHub took great political and advocacy efforts to convince the
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FOSS community that copyleft (particularly the Affero GPL) are terrible
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license beyond this OSCON keynote of Preston-Warner's. We have seen cases,
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BTW, of GitHub employees, proudly sporting their “GitHub employee”
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achievement badge right next to their user icon, go into AGPL'd projects that
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they aren't even **contributing** to with rants about how the AGPL is a bad
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license.
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We've also heard reliable intelligence (confirmed by multiple sources) that
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GitHub has an **internal fork of Git itself**. Now, the GPL of course allows
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internal forks, since its copyleft requirements (in most cases — there are a
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few exceptions) trigger only on distribution. Obviously convincing our own
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Git member project to switch to the AGPL is *way beyond* politically viable
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and we haven't even asked. But, this situation shows that if GitHub has a
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legally viable choice between liberating code on their own accord and
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proprietarizing it, they chose proprietarization *every* *single* *time*.
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[ next slide ]
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## Microsoft Acquired GitHub: Slide 6
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Ultimately, Microsoft was a perfect match for GitHub. [ Karen should say: ]
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I once spoke at Microsoft and asked them publicly apologize for calling the
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GPL a cancer back in 2002. The main feedback I got from high-ranking
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Microsoft employees was a “How Dare You Even Ask!?!?” kind of response.
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Microsoft, and indeed most proprietary software companies, are not our
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friends. They don't want to help us make more FOSS (not copylefted, anyway).
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GitHub is much smarter than SourceForge. Instead of pushing advertising into
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FOSS (as SourceForge did and failed), Microsoft offers GitHub as a
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loss-leader product for FOSS developers, so that they are trained.
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Bradley mentioned that he presented his capstone undergrad project at an ACM
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conference in 1995. Every single attendee was given a gratis copy of
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Windows 95. (Bradley confirms that this is the only Microsoft license of any
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kind that he's ever agreed to.) The point of Microsoft's methods are clear —
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going back decades: get people addicted to our proprietary stuff by offering
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it gratis at first, and then finding ways to sell add-ons.
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While we don't like the term, Bradley calls this “free as in cocaine”.
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[comment]: <> Denver: you can edit above all you want
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[comment]: <> bkuhn promises to not work above here
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[comment]: <> NO ONE BUT BKUHN EDIT BELOW YET:
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[comment]: <> Next Slide.
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## Final Slides
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The remain slides are very wordy. I did start to feel my symptoms works
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around 13:45 local, so while I'd sped up, I then slowed down. The slides
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should probably be edited, the text of what's there placed here, and the
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words on the slide should be less.
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