Free Software/Utopia

Track: Social context & community

Type: Long talk (45 minutes)

Room: Auditório

Time: Jul 26 (Fri), 10:00

Duration: 0:45

Free software will not win by “merely” replacing proprietary software. We need to lead with a vision of how the world could be. A voluntary community, one where people participate by choice, does not have to replicate the power structures, gate-keeping or casual cruelty of the systems it seeks to replace. We could make free software the most empowering place to build software. Free software tools could enable new ways of crafting user experiences that proprietary software providers seem unwilling to offer. Free software could tranform the relationship between users and developers, so that users feel like partners instead of sales metrics. Free software communities should be seeking to outdo proprietary software’s methods and social norms in every possible way. This talk will focus on:

The people we’re building free software for
The people we’re building free software with
The people who aren’t here yet

We’ve made a great start by empowering many technical and semi-technical users, but we can’t stop there. (What kind of utopia only has coders in it?) Let’s build a kinder and more practical free software movement to empower all kinds of people!

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