Keynote: Lock it Open: What FLOSS Taught Us about Being Our Best Selves by Cory Doctorow
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 26/10/2016

Keynote: Lock it Open: What FLOSS Taught Us about Being Our Best Selves - Cory Doctorow, Journalist, Activist, Blogger & Science Fiction Author

There are many FLOSS licenses, but one stands out: the GPL, which has the curious property of "locking code open," so that we are protected from our own human frailty, desperation, and poor judgment. Your FLOSS company will probably fail (because most companies fail, and they all fail eventually), but no matter how dark things get, your CEO will never be able to put the GPLed code back in the bottle.

Economists call this a "Ulysses pact," and it's a bargain you make with yourself when you are strong to protect yourself when you're weak -- it's why we throw out the Oreos when we go on a diet, and why we draft constitutions when we found new nations.

The web is at a turning point. There is a concerted effort underway to make a new, decentralized web that undoes the concentration of the past 20 years. If this succeeds, we must learn from the GPL and devise instruments that allow our principled present-day selves to protect the world from the people we might someday become.

About Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of the YA graphic novel IN REAL LIFE, the nonfiction business book INFORMATION DOESN’T WANT TO BE FREE and young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER and novels for adults like RAPTURE OF THE NERDS and MAKERS. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.